bittersweet daydreams

The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.

Ursula Le Guin

Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

from letters to a young poet, rainer maria rilke

— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Selected Books of the Beloved, Gregory Orr

— Angela Carter, from Saints & Strangers

“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”

— Bill Watterson

— Rubin Naiman, “In exile from the dreamscape” in Aeon Magazine (via exhaled-spirals)

« Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed. And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think. […]

Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted. Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it. […]

I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested. »

— Matthew B. Crawford, “The Cost of Paying Attention” in The New York Times

Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; "The Bloody Chamber,"

— roach-works

this is genuinely the greatest advice out there. i don't even think there's anything i can add just read it again and again. from rainer maria rilke. aka chill :)

« Although I am, today, much more moved by sober writers (in terms of writing style), I still feel the greatest admiration (and a particular tenderness) for the others, the luxuriant ones, the generous, the feverish, the monsters. It's as though they were afraid of missing a single thing. They want to embrace the whole world, imprison it in a net they are weaving as they go, urgently, as if they had to erect a cathedral before nightfall, without anyone's help, at the risk of having the entire building fall in on them. Only the sheer size of the walls and the mass of material used can maintain the improbable balance and transform ugliness into beauty. These writers are saints. Sober writers are angels. »

— Philippe Djian, Ardoise

White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky

— Anais Nin, from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgerated Diary of Anais Nin, 1932-1934 (via watchoutforintellect)