God created life in His own image; His congregations are the microbes.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman 11:45am on August 19, 2018Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:31pm on August 18, 2018Why is it so horrible to see certain professionalized child actors on stage? Is it because they are in a state of premature work rather than in a state of play?
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:31pm on August 18, 2018Perhaps we have lost the guiding force of form; we live in the age of prose. Everything is goop.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:30pm on August 18, 2018I do believe that thinking is an overrated medium for achieving thought.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:30pm on August 18, 2018Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:30pm on August 18, 2018The world is a comedy made up of lots of individual tragedies.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl 5:29pm on August 18, 2018She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:28pm on August 18, 2018Mrs. Richardson, who had always been so kind to her, who had said so many nice things about her. Whose shining, polished surface had entranced Pearl with her own reflection.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:28pm on August 18, 2018[She] had — even before the nurses had wiped the baby clean, even before they had cut the cord — touched every part of her child, her tiny flaring nostrils and the faint shadows of her eyebrows and the womb-slicked soles of her feet, making certain she was wholly present, learning her by heart.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:28pm on August 18, 2018It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:27pm on August 18, 2018Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:26pm on August 18, 2018Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new?
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:26pm on August 18, 2018You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:26pm on August 18, 2018To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:25pm on August 18, 2018“You ready for this party, Pearl?” The answer, of course, was no.
Little Fires Everywhere — CELESTE NG 5:25pm on August 18, 2018I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:24pm on August 18, 2018Merleau-Ponty, in his pro-Soviet phase, asked him what he would do if he had to choose between two events, one of which would kill 300 people and the other 3,000. What difference was there, philosophically speaking? Sartre replied that there was a mathematical difference, of course, but not a philosophical one, for each individual is an infinite universe in his or her own eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:24pm on August 18, 2018All of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:23pm on August 18, 2018I am a psychological and historical structure.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:23pm on August 18, 2018