I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
[…]
Compassion is one of the purest springs of love.
Anne Truitt, Daybook (via the ever-amazing BrainPickings)
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El canto de una niña bajo una higuera
Rosa Montero, La ridícula idea de no volver a verte
True Detective
I loved this show. I finished watching it and went and got my cousin and then watched it again with him. I loved the imagery, the storyline, the acting – but what I mainly loved was the dialogue. Here are the bits of dialogue that jumped out at me as I watched.
Cohle: Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking.
Cohle: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?
Cohle: I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.
Maggie Hart: I said something about forgiveness and he said there was no such thing as forgiveness, that people just have short memories.
Hart: See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.
Maggie Hart: Rust knew exactly who he was and there was no talking him out of it. You know, Marty’s single big problem was that he never really knew himself, so he never really knew what to want.
Cohle: To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person… And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.
Cohle: Death created time to grow the things that it would kill.
Cohle: Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.
Rust: I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.
Marty: What’s that?
Rust: Light versus dark.
Marty: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.
Rust: Yeah, you’re right about that. …
Rust: You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.
Marty: How’s that?
Rust: Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.
Miss Lou
She is the shiniest person I know. Also, she’s growing out her hair so it will be like Princess Elsa’s.
Sonnet Against Entropy
by John M. Ford
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days —
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.