wanderlust

Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really.

haruki Murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle

Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, through slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor. It is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.

mary ruefle, my private property

Note: the author shares, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.

All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. But the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.

daniel kahneman

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

https://random.jamesbridle.com

The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There is as much below ground as above. They tell her: do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid and expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

richard powers, the overstory