1. I re-read “A Room of One’s Own” this week and found so many good Virginia Woolf quotes. Today’s resonates because it’s fall:
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

2. Speaking of fall, the autumnal equinox is Saturday. Druids and other pagan types celebrate with various harvest festivals; Christians celebrate with Michaelmas (well, British Christians, at least).

3. This is a long but fascinating article from the New Yorker about a man with nearly total amnesia–his recall is limited to just seconds–but who can remember his wife and how to play music (he was a musicologist before his brain was injured). It discusses the nature of music and emotion and memory, and makes one feel really, really grateful for one’s own brain function.

4. With the weather getting colder, I’ve decided I need to learn how to sew pants. So that odyssey starts tomorrow. It may not be pretty.