[Image: “Whole in the Wall,” by Alan Davey. (I found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!) This abandoned storefront was found by the photographer in Mitchell, Oregon, about which Davey offers some information from Wikipedia. While not related specifically (as far as I know) to the building, the last paragraph cited is particularly haunting. I’ve reproduced it in a note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls different from that of old; the moment of importance came not here but there… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

(Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction [source])

…and (in oft-cited but slightly different and, well, not quite right form — below, with ellipses added, is the correct one):

[Wollman said to me,] “…you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem.

“If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire—then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy.

“Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And you will not annoy people so much…”

I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One should learn the difference.

(Robert Fulghum [source])

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