Sunday Snippets #2
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.
Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
You Don't Need Permission - The Book of Life, Alain De Botton:
We are dealing with a finite currency of time. Our wants don’t miraculously get better by being put off. It might be more than sensible to want this immediately: to decide we can write a book at 24, or own a business at 17 or walk out on a relationship at 52. We don’t have forever. We could try to do this before sundown.
We need, in short, a new philosophy of wanting – wanting as an overall concept rather than in relation to wanting anything in particular. We need to take a highly surprising message to the sensible eleven year old boy or girl who is inside us, still monitoring our impulsive selves with strictness but little imagination: that the time for permission is over.
Life Is Short, Paul Graham:
If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed.
The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did.
(The slug for this post is ‘vb’ – vita brevis, perhaps.)