[Image: “Mini Hoop / Toss (Santa Monica, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
(Nick Cave [source])
…and:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
(D. H. Lawrence [source])
Not from whiskey river:
#80: You’d like to believe people are good and charitable. You’d like to believe in what they used to call the Progress of Man. You’d like to believe you yourself matter in some lasting way, even to people you have never met — people you never could have met. You’d like to believe you’ll get through today without a single disappointment, without a single near-miss heart-stopping scare, without a single perversion of your intentions, without a single interruption even…
And then the evening comes, and you look back. And you realize, the one feature of your everyday life which never ever annoys you in the slightest, the one saving grace, the one scrap of flotsam to which you always and ever happily cling, is this: not any of the things you believe in, but belief itself.
The more you think about this odd assertion, the truer it seems. Finally you smile, and you drift off to sleep, believing anew.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
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