A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit

"Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times."

A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Rebecca Solnit, Viking Penguin, New York, 2009

The Trauma of Everyday Life, Mark Epstein

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.


We’re all traumatized by life, by its unpredictability, its randomness, its lack of regard for our feelings, and the losses it brings. Each in our own way, we suffer. Even if nothing else goes wrong -- and it’s rare that this is the case, old age, illness and death loom just over the horizon like the monsters our children need us to protect them from in the night.


Ajahn Chah met with us after we share the monastery lunch. We asked him to explain the Buddhist view. What he had learned …. What could we bring back and share with the West?

Before saying a word, he motioned to glass by his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

What was he referring to exactly? The glass, the body, this life, the self? …

Ajahn Chah was modelling a different way of relating. We could use, appreciate, value, and respect the glass without expecting it to last. In fact, we could use it more freely, with more abandon, with more care …

-- Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life 

from: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

“Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.'
'But the other is better.'
'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.” 

  -- Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Echo's Bone, Samuel Beckett

Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities.... An almanac of his inconsistencies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages as they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods.




Sometimes he feels as though this old wound of his life had no intention of healing.



 -- Samuel Beckett, Echo's Bones

Many excerpts from: A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Excerpts from: Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami

Excerpts from Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon

"People pay money to see others believe in themselves." Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do.

...

I've always felt there's something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians -- that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don't realize deep down they're actually afraid of what they want. It's new, and they're escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It's a variation of what Freud called the "death instinct."

...

...I've always believed -- still do -- that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

...

The most heightened state of being female is watching people watch you.... Loud dissonance and blurred melody create their own ambiguity -- are we really that violent? -- a context that allows me to be anonymous. For many purposes, being obsessed with boys playing guitars, being as ordinary as possible, being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.
  -- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

excerpts from Henry and June, by Anaïs Nin

At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love. p 50

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? p 65

What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. p 113

I have a mischievous awareness that he expects me to become interested in him, and I don't like playing the game while knowing it is a game. Yet my interest is sincere. I also tell him I don't mind any more whether he admires me or not. And that is a victory over myself.  p 134

"Of course," he said, "you are a narcissist. That is the raison d'être of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting." p 136-7 (Henry as related by Anaïs)

  -- Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932)

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell

"Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."


"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all."


"Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us."

 -- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Héctor Tobar, from Deep Down Dark

"Yonni Barrios places his ear to the stone. 'It was like listening to the inside of a seashell,' he will say later. You hear nothing and you hear everything, you can imagine an ocean roiling inside that shell, and then you take away your ear and realize it's all an illusion." p. 92

 - Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, Héctor Tobar

From: Naked, David Sedaris

"I don't know why I felt the need to present any excuse at all. Except for the original owner of my pink jacket, my leaving affected no one. I'd spent several months there and they had added up to nothing. Seeing as I was not the type of person to make things happen, my only option was the let things happen.... Things wouldn't be any different in North Carolina than they'd been in Oregon. I thought of those people on the bus, going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I'd be sitting beside them, sharing my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd."

  -- David Sedaris, Naked

M.R. Carey, excerpts from: The Girl with All the Gifts

“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”

 ...

“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”

 ...

 “you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.”

  -- M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts 

excerpted from Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

"It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there." p. 27

"As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true." p. 99

from: The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we get from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio winding down."


“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

  -- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Excerpted from: Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

'Why do I do anything?" she says. "I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream."


 -- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

"Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."


"This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark."


"For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity—Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure. But this is what the commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color. The entropy of a closed system never decreases."


"What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible."


"The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?"


"'Your problem, Werner,' says Frederick, 'is that you still believe you own your life.'"


"The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness."


"Don’t you want to be alive before you die?"

  --  Excerpts from  All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande

"What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile?

"The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves. This was, for him, an intrinsic human need. The cause could be large (family, country, principle) or small (a building, project, the care of a pet). The important thing was that, in ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give lives meaning.

"Royce called this dedication to a cause beyond oneself loyalty. He regarded it as the opposite of individualism. The individualist puts self-interest first, seeing his own pain, pleasure, and existence as his greatest concern. For an individualist, loyalty to causes that have nothing to do with self-interest is strange When such loyalty encourages self-sacrifice, it can even be alarming -- a mistaken and irrational tendency that leaves people open to the exploitation of tyrants. Nothing could matter more than self-interest, and because when you die you are gone, self sacrifice makes no sense.

"Royce had no sympathy for the individualist view. 'The selfish we had always with us,' he wrote. 'But the divine right to be selfish was never more ingeniously defended.' In fact, he argued, human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable. They provide, ultimately, only torment. 'By nature, I am a sort of meeting place of countless streams of ancestral tendency. From moment to moment... I am a collection of impulses,' Royce observed. 'We cannot see the inner light. Let us try the outer one.'

 "And we do. Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die. If self-interest were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn't matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from the face of the earth. Yet it matters greatly to most people. We feel that such an occurrence would make our lives meaningless." p. 126-7


 "...those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives -- and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it." p.178


"In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves." p. 238


"We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?"

  -- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

The Telling Room, Michael Paterniti

“We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren't exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next.”

― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

H.P. Lovecraft. "The Call of Cthulhu."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

H.P. Lovecraft. "The Call of Cthulhu."

from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

...

“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”

...

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.” 

― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves