[Image: “Diagonal Crossing OK (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 (italicized lines):
Mrs. Cavendish and the General Malaise
Like a boxer at a pre-fight weigh-in, defiant,
no sign of acceptance, Mrs. Cavendish began
to stare meaninglessness in the eye.
The difference: no one, nothing, stared back.
Mrs. Cavendish, I said, it’s impossible to win.
As we consider today, it’s already tomorrow.
As we admire the flowers, how easily they’re ravaged
by wind and rain. The best we can hope for
is a big, fat novel, slowing down the course of time.
Several tomorrows always linger in the margins,
which means until the very last page
you’ll choose to live with the raw evidence
of how someone else sees and makes a world.
Mrs. Cavendish, I’m also sorry to report
the maps are missing from the office of
How to Get Where You Want to Go —
just one more symptom of the general malaise.
I have little hope that they can be found,
at least not in our lifetime. At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
…and:
Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
(Robert Anton Wilson [source: cited everywhere on the Internet, but apparently never ascribed to a particular work])
Not from whiskey river:
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
(Jenny Offill [source])
…and:
When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are?
(Amitav Ghosh [source])
…and:
#7: The notion of “the past” deranges us all. It makes us believe the world was ever thus; it makes us believe the world was never at all like this; it makes us cling stubbornly to both beliefs at the same time. If you stop to consider it, you may come to wonder — given such obvious and obviously contradictory truths — if what we call “the past” ever really existed at all. Maybe we just grab onto whatever we can as we float along — nearby flotsam, leaves and twigs, emails printed out for safekeeping, plastic shopping bags full of tin cans, whatever — and, like desperate hoarders of the recognizable, toss it all into a file drawer labeled Memory so our hands will be free to grab the next thing which catches our lonely attention. It all just sits in there, composting. We’ll never sort it all out. If it’s a problem, let it be somebody else’s, right?
Or so I used to think.
JES, Maxims for Nostalgists
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