The past, now.
- The Velveteen Rabbit
[This passage from Margery Williams'The Velveteen Rabbit has been a favorite since my mother read it to me as a child, and the older I get, the more impossible it becomes to read through it without sobbing. I'm both proud (because it further confirms how wonderful they are) and annoyed (because I didn't think of [...]
- E. E. Cummings
(A favorite from about age 15, this poem was one with which I particularly identified. I registered intensefragility.com ages ago, and still own it, though I’ve never really done anything with it. When I was around 18, I paid a calligrapher to draw the Chinese characters for “intense fragility” for me, with an eye toward [...]
- Entering through suffering
Slightly edited from an email to my friend Ken today:
“I’m glad you liked [my writings].
You know, I used to talk to one of the priests at [a church in Lower Manhattan] for a while, right after I entered the Church and I was going to daily Mass there all the time. He was a [...]
- Less
Mitsu and I were discussing my previous post:
Mitsu: [Drummond] seems to think (and perhaps this is a Christian tendency in general, also observable in that passage [from 1 Corinthians]) that love is more than the sum of its parts, i.e., that it is its parts, plus. But, I don’t think it’s a sum of parts, [...]
- St. Paul
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not [...]
- Virginia Woolf
On making art:
“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in her hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge or [...]
- Love
I wonder if I am ever going to cease being astonished at the fact that I walk through my life feeling real, palpable love — for my friends, for people I do not even know, for [ ] — and, even more than that, that I lived for twenty years feeling so [...]
- Thomas Merton
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking [...]
- Giving up
Sometimes everything seems so beautiful I don’t know how I, or anyone else, ever fails to be awed be it. There’s something incredibly sad about being incredibly happy. The enormity of love which is so obvious it’s incomprehensible? All there is to do is to give. All there is to do is to give up. [...]
- Lost in Translation
One night, my boyfriend dreamt he kissed Scarlett Johansson.
That made him happy for the entire next day. It was, he said,
extremely hot. He doesn’t know it yet, but that dream was all
about me. Let me tell you the reasons. First of all, Scarlett
Johansson and I have the same exact birthday, except hers
is in November and [...]
