By Karen in quotes No Comments
From Harold Kushner’s introduction to Man’s Search For Meaning:
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation.”
(Quoted in this long piece about a writer’s health issues and recovery, found over at Kottke this week.)
From The London Review of Books, an essay by Rosemary Hill about “frock consciousness” in Virginia Woolf. I think the essay really wants to be a book, as it’s a little rambling, but it’s a fun (scholarly) read:
The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? […] The effect on other people is…one end of an arc, the point where it comes to earth in the outside world. The other end, the spring of the vault, is in the interior world of the wearer and it is somewhere between the two that frock consciousness happens.
There’s even a quote from Virginia, which is pretty much how I feel planning sewing projects or ordering something online:
‘Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it made – that is the string, which as if dipped loosely into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it.’
How about some Surprisingly Deep Life Advice From A Cookbook for today?
On grey January days we must make our own fun. Today is a flat day that only seems to come to life when I go shopping, returning with bags of Italian lemons complete with their bottle-green leaves [and] craggy lumps of Crockhamdale and snow-white Ticklemore cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy…People get down this time of year, but even today there were clementines heavy with juice and bunches of narcissi to cheer us up. There is good stuff if you are prepared to go and find it.
-Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries
Maybe this will help me face the scrimmage at Trader Joe’s tonight. Maybe I’ll even buy lemons!
This is a wonderful quote from Agatha Christie’s autobiography (via the always-interesting Swiss Miss). I’m still reading what I now refer to as The Book and the final chapters boil down to making your time your own again. Like this:
“There is nothing more wonderful to have in one’s life, than time…You wake up in the morning, and even before you are properly awake you are saying to yourself: ‘Now, what shall I do with today?’ You have the choice, it is there, in front of you, and you can plan as you please. I don’t mean that there were not a lot of things (duties, we called them) I had to do–of course there were […] but they were all things that lay in my choice, to arrange as I pleased. I could plan my day, I could say, ‘I think I’ll leave my stockings until this afternoon; I will go down town in the morning and I will come back by the other road and see whether that tree had come into blossom yet.’
Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy in being alive. I don’t say you feel it consciously–you don’t–but there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes, and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life. Not that it is necessarily going to be exciting as a life, but it will be exciting to you because it is your life. That is one of the great secrets of existence, enjoying the gift of life that has been given to you.”
By Karen in birthdays, quotes, Virginia Woolf
It’s Virginia Woolf’s birthday today (she even gets a Google doodle!). She’s one of my favorites and I always think what a tragedy it was that she lived before there was real help for her mental illness.
This is from To The Lighthouse, one of my top five, and I think of it all the time. (The whole dinner party scene is in Google Books, and is amazing.)
Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself lying dark in the mist of his flesh–that thin mist that convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, ‘can’t paint, can’t write,’ why should I help him to relieve himself?
There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.
By Karen in quotes 2 Comments
Ursula K. Le Guin died Monday at the age of 88. Her books didn’t inspire a passionate fandom in me as a teen (unlike, say, Dune or Tolkein) but the more I read of her non-fiction the more impressed I am. It’s probably time to pick up the Earthsea trilogy again.
Margaret Atwood has a short piece in The Guardian in honor of her; I’d been saving this quote on aging and beauty (via Brainpickings, from her essay collection The Wave in The Mind) for a while, so here it is for today:
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-Dr. King
By Karen in make something every day, quotes
Since 2018 is the year of “make something every day,” here’s some good advice about that and your career. (This essay, “How To Do What You Love,” gives you a lot to think about.)
Always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
From my friend Jason’s blog, some encouraging words:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
— Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
(Also encouraging: Doug Jones’ win in Alabama!)
I told a friend recently that “suddenly Eileen Fisher clothing stopped looking frumpy and started looking really cool.” I joked that it meant I was getting old, but there was more to it than that, and new-to-me printmaker and artist Jen Hewitt summed it up pretty well:
“Someone recently remarked on Twitter that she felt that she’d inadvertently slipped into the Eileen Fisher years, and I knew exactly what she meant. I’m so there. Give me unfussy, comfortable, well-made clothes in flattering styles. Make those clothes out of natural fibers. Let me pair them with flats and clogs. I spent my twenties and much of my thirties in uncomfortable clothes and shoes, believing that torturing myself was the key to beauty. I’m so over that.”