“Whenever I am alone, I sit with books. If someone behaves badly with me I go home and sit with books.” – Martha Nussbaum, A Velocity of Being There is nothing quite like the physical presence of books. I enjoy the welcomed ease with which an audiobook can speak to …
“Book…are immutable…We like books because they stay the same ” – David Byrne, The Velocity of Being Nothing can be relied upon as concrete. Nothing is immune to that all-pervasive ephemerality inherent to existence itself. Nothing except books that is. Books are the only true unmoved movers I know of. …
If what Cormac McCarthy says is true, that “Books are made out of books”, then Grayson Perry is equally as accurate when he says that “work comes out of work”. He says that “Work makes ideas”, and those ideas feed back into the work. Like an eternal karmic return of …
The only way to learn is to live, and the only way to live is to learn. To truly learn means that one’s hands must be constantly dirty with the work of being alive. To be alive means that one’s heels must be steadfastly dug into the lessons that our …
Elena Ferrante says that “We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours.” She says that “We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own”. We never achieve excellence out of nowhere. Never all at …
In one of my favorite passages from Thomas Merton’s book, No Man is an Island, he writes that “We ought to be alive enough to reality to see beauty all around us”. He says that “Beauty is simply reality itself, perceived in a special way that gives it a resplendent …
Robin Wall Kimmerer says that “writing is an act of reciprocity with the world.” She says that “It’s what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me.” This is how I relate to writing as well; as a grateful returning, a show of thanks …
John Green writes that “Language shapes our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.” He says in one of the footnotes of The Anthropocene Reviewed that “Nothing lies like memory”. Memory is inaccurate and unreliable. Memory decays and degrades. But, perhaps, if it is a ‘lie’, it is …
I don’t know a lot about Space, or astrophysics, or science in general really, but that’s never stopped me from trying to think about it or trying to write about it, at least in small fragments anyway. Black holes are really interesting. Figuratively we often use Black Holes as way …
It’s up to you to push back. To expect more. To expect better. It’s easy to pander. To give up. To cave in. To do what’s expected. To give the people what they want. True, there may be a wisdom available in crowds, in the collectivized base of knowledge that …
