Whoa

Oyler then gave us the following exercise: “Think about something that you've read or watched recently, and try to describe it objectively to someone who's never heard of it.” We did it twice: first with something we loved, and then with something we hated. The point of the exercise, Oyler stressed, was to not reveal our subjective impression of it... See more

“Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other—there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.”

People fall out of love when they lose faith in the story the other person is writing. You wake up one day and think: why am I trapped inside this narrative? I don’t even like your prose.

I wanted to read a poem that had recently moved me. I had been trying to read it every night, as a prelude to dinner or a coda to dinner, but things kept getting in the way. The mood, for instance. It wasn’t a very poem-y poem, but it was a poem, and I guess it had that against it. Still, it was funny and affecting, and I saw it as a moral Trojan h... See more

“The reason to get married,” Christman writes,

is because you have met a person interesting enough that, death being inevitable, you’d prefer to experience it with them…

Marrying…was the best choice I’d ever make and that was part of the problem. A good marriage is a eucatastrophe: it ends a phase of your life well but decisively. Things are not the ... See more

Only if you are thankful and you bless the position you're in, do you become a higher being, do you lift yourself up, and finally you find liberation. But it begins and ends with you. Never pray to God for release of your problems. Never pray to God to change your life, and to give you something better. This is wrong prayer. If you have to pray to ... See more

History is the vast store of human consciousness adrift in the gulf of time, the present living in the past and the past living in the present. So when I read Shakespeare, Jefferson, Twain, or Machiavelli, I’m with them in time present. It’s why we still read Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Flaubert—what survives the wreck of time... See more