Sometimes I am hit with the overwhelming fear that I will forget the things in life that have brought me happiness. These things don't have to be big—they're often small. I'll look back through my photos and stumble upon a screenshot of a particular funny or meaningful text conversation I had and think, oh no.
In 10 years from now this will be buried almost entirely. Memories will be stacked hastily and miles deep, partially faded, either fuzzy around the edges or soggy in the middle. In my mind, the detritus of my captured day-to-day life—a delicious meal*, a snow day, a funny photo of a friend—looks like a sediment deposit, each striation a subtle variation on the last, a slow shift that is unsettlingly(beautifully?) deliberate and enduring. The memories at the bottom spread thinner as the combined weight of time and the new press firmly downwards.
This impulse to hold tight is one of the reasons I collect quotes, second to the fact that I love them.
I really, really love quotes.
There's nothing more exciting than hearing someone say something just right, using words in a way that is innovative or unique or beautiful, egalitarian or overflowing, concisely conveying meaning or thrilling in way they occupy space.
A few of the quotes I've collected happen to be about this very subject—words and how freaking great they are. I will now insert a few of my favorites:
The first quote will always be one of my favorites because I goddamn IDENTIFY with it. The way I see it, people's words, regardless of how they are packaged—whether they take the form of book, song, movie, or online article—are just as precious as more tangible manifestations of human creativity.
This is why I so often write down the things people say to me. My snapchat story (Good God, I have now referenced snapchat on my blog and there's no turning back) can be viewed as collateral damage, the unlucky result of my fascination with words uttered. If you are with me and I'm in the mood, I will publicly quote the heck out of you. That sounds like a threat but actually #consent guys, I take it seriously.
In addition to writing down sentences that strike a cord with me for their inherent special-ness, I record quotes as an exercise is getting away from myself.
Recently I wrote about this in a letter. I also self-reflected for a while, which I'm including because I am now just one big, open, emotionally introspective book:
Speaking of the importance of words, I just read George Saunders' essay "The Braindead Megaphone" (included in his book of personal essays bearing the same title), and it is magnificent. I cannot recommend it enough. Not only does he address the abject failure that is our media, and the adverse effects it's had on our collective IQ as a nation, but his argument is rooted in a belief system that I very much subscribe to. The "braindead megaphone" is most dangerous in its refusal to acknowledge the humanity within all of us—the universal elements of being alive and occupying space in the world that are simultaneously enduring and fragile, constant regardless of race or border.
I have returned again and again to a particularly powerful idea found in Audrey Lorde's Women Redefining Difference. She states that we live in a culture of opposition—of binaries—and that the devastating effects of this cultural climate can only be combatted through a fundamental shift in the way we conceive identity and difference. In the case of our fun society, in which the "mythical norm" is white, young, thin, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and financially secure, people are assigned value based on how closely they resemble or differ from this ideal. Through a cultural lens of opposition, the further a person is from this construction the lower they fall within society's invisible hierarchy (a hierarchy that manifests on a structural level in every sphere of life). Additionally, their difference is interpreted as at-odds, or as a challenge. Lorde presents the idea that we must instead work to shift this mentality, instead seeing the world in "shades of difference." In his essay, Saunders bemoans the loss/lack of of these shades and the strengthening of black-and-white thinking. As a society we have grown increasingly incapable of subtlety. Our grasp on compromise, our ability to appreciate nuance, is buried in absolutes.
I could go on about these ideas for quite a while, and probably will in future posts, but this feels like a solid stopping point for now.
If you don't feel like reading Saunders' full essay, I'll finish this off with an excerpt that just so happens to underscore the other topics discussed today! Serendipity is Alive and Well!
CONCLUSION:
Our society and the world in general can be fucking terrifying! It's true! I know I'm scared!
Despite this, people are not fundamentally bad or stupid or unknowable.
They are not entities to be simplified.
They are not easily quantifiable or fodder for sweeping generalization.
Other people are not the enemy, even when they are The Enemy, and it is easy and infinitely unproductive to think we have risen above the mass of lesser-minded individuals that currently populate the earth.
In summation,
Nobody is special. Be nicer.
*I refuse to abandon the conviction that food is one of the better things you could ever choose to photograph.
**And I recognize the irony of including this in a blog post about ~me~
In 10 years from now this will be buried almost entirely. Memories will be stacked hastily and miles deep, partially faded, either fuzzy around the edges or soggy in the middle. In my mind, the detritus of my captured day-to-day life—a delicious meal*, a snow day, a funny photo of a friend—looks like a sediment deposit, each striation a subtle variation on the last, a slow shift that is unsettlingly(beautifully?) deliberate and enduring. The memories at the bottom spread thinner as the combined weight of time and the new press firmly downwards.
This impulse to hold tight is one of the reasons I collect quotes, second to the fact that I love them.
I really, really love quotes.
There's nothing more exciting than hearing someone say something just right, using words in a way that is innovative or unique or beautiful, egalitarian or overflowing, concisely conveying meaning or thrilling in way they occupy space.
A few of the quotes I've collected happen to be about this very subject—words and how freaking great they are. I will now insert a few of my favorites:
“For my husband, words were fascinating—their origins and mutations, their ability to combine intricately. When somebody would say something in an economical way, and use grammar originally to some satisfying end, he would usually repeat it to me at the end of the day. It stayed in his mind, like a song or a painting he loved.”
—Rebecca Lee, Bobcat & Other Stories
“A sentence, Forbes seemed to believe, not only had to say something, it had to say it uniquely, with verve. A sentence was more than just a fact-conveyor; it also made a certain sound, and could have a thrilling quality of being over-full, saying more than its length should permit it to say. A sequence of such sentences exploding in the brain made the invented world seem almost unbearably real, each sentence serving as a kind of proof.”
“I later found the same quality in Hemingway, in Isaac Babel, Gertrude Stein, Henry Green: Sentences that had been the subject of so much concentration, they had become things in the world instead of attempts to catalog it”
—George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
The first quote will always be one of my favorites because I goddamn IDENTIFY with it. The way I see it, people's words, regardless of how they are packaged—whether they take the form of book, song, movie, or online article—are just as precious as more tangible manifestations of human creativity.
This is why I so often write down the things people say to me. My snapchat story (Good God, I have now referenced snapchat on my blog and there's no turning back) can be viewed as collateral damage, the unlucky result of my fascination with words uttered. If you are with me and I'm in the mood, I will publicly quote the heck out of you. That sounds like a threat but actually #consent guys, I take it seriously.
In addition to writing down sentences that strike a cord with me for their inherent special-ness, I record quotes as an exercise is getting away from myself.
Recently I wrote about this in a letter. I also self-reflected for a while, which I'm including because I am now just one big, open, emotionally introspective book:
Right now I’m sitting in the corner, on a small raised platform with just one other table. There’s a couple sitting there (about a foot away from me), and over the course of the past hour I’ve dipped in and out of shamelessly listening to their conversation. I’ve also been writing down some of the things they say, which is always something that should feel more invasive to me than it does. I do this sometimes not even because the things people say are particularly fascinating or eloquent, but because they’re so incredibly mundane and foreign at the same time. I think some incredibly talented authors (Miranda July comes to mind) write characters that are undeniably marked by the writer’s own consciousness, but it’s incredibly important to be able to write apart from ones-self (I hope that makes sense). For a writer to step entirely outside of the way they personally observe and believe and process, placing themselves squarely in another human and inhabiting that entirely.
This is definitely where I feel like I need a lot of work—I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to articulate the contents of my own brain, but when it comes to fleshing out separate characters I don’t have much practice.
I realize that I’ve dedicated a lot of time to combing through my own head, working on figuring that mess out, and it’s about time I looked past myself**.
Now that I’m thinking about it, for so many years I saw people as complete mysteries, but in a scary and potentially dangerous way—they had infinite power to misjudge me, out-think me, understand the world in ways I did not, and subsequently leave me behind. I really used my combination of low self esteem/anxiety/ever-present ego to remain locked inside an unpleasant but wholly self centered box of my own design. I reduced the people around me even as I exalted them, made them props while I assessed their every attribute in relation to me. Even when I admired a person’s intelligence or skill, I would begin to analyze how that manifested in their perception of me—it might make us compatible in a way I was convinced they could not recognize (cue internal despair) or superior in a way that made them separate and untouchable (why didn’t I recognize all that I could learn from these people rather than anguishing over whether or not they would like me?). What a sad, small way to live. What a thick collection of missed opportunities—chances to inquire, to listen, to understand.
So I guess that’s my round-about way of explaining why I like listening to other people. The lady next to me just said, “other people don’t have hobbies, they have pets,” which I don’t necessarily agree with but I think is an awesome thing to say. They’re experiencing a lot of financial problems but seem to have a very healthy and communicative relationship.
Now I'm listening to a couple discuss the relative merits of a "sweetheart table" with their wedding planner. I have no idea that that means but I love that it's happening.
Speaking of the importance of words, I just read George Saunders' essay "The Braindead Megaphone" (included in his book of personal essays bearing the same title), and it is magnificent. I cannot recommend it enough. Not only does he address the abject failure that is our media, and the adverse effects it's had on our collective IQ as a nation, but his argument is rooted in a belief system that I very much subscribe to. The "braindead megaphone" is most dangerous in its refusal to acknowledge the humanity within all of us—the universal elements of being alive and occupying space in the world that are simultaneously enduring and fragile, constant regardless of race or border.
I have returned again and again to a particularly powerful idea found in Audrey Lorde's Women Redefining Difference. She states that we live in a culture of opposition—of binaries—and that the devastating effects of this cultural climate can only be combatted through a fundamental shift in the way we conceive identity and difference. In the case of our fun society, in which the "mythical norm" is white, young, thin, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and financially secure, people are assigned value based on how closely they resemble or differ from this ideal. Through a cultural lens of opposition, the further a person is from this construction the lower they fall within society's invisible hierarchy (a hierarchy that manifests on a structural level in every sphere of life). Additionally, their difference is interpreted as at-odds, or as a challenge. Lorde presents the idea that we must instead work to shift this mentality, instead seeing the world in "shades of difference." In his essay, Saunders bemoans the loss/lack of of these shades and the strengthening of black-and-white thinking. As a society we have grown increasingly incapable of subtlety. Our grasp on compromise, our ability to appreciate nuance, is buried in absolutes.
I could go on about these ideas for quite a while, and probably will in future posts, but this feels like a solid stopping point for now.
If you don't feel like reading Saunders' full essay, I'll finish this off with an excerpt that just so happens to underscore the other topics discussed today! Serendipity is Alive and Well!
“But if we define the megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know, via high-tech sources, it’s clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; it is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others. It frequently sheds its political skin for a stroll through Entertainment Park, where it leers and smirks and celebrates when someone is brought low by, say, and absence of underwear or a drunken evening.
But why should this tendency be ascendant? Fear, yes, fear is part of it. In a time of danger, the person sounding the paranoid continual alarm will eventually be right. A voice arguing for our complete rightness and the complete wrongness of our enemies, a voice constantly broadening the definition of “enemy,” relieves us of the burden of living with ambiguity. The sensibility that generates a phrase like “unfortunate but necessary collateral damage” can, in the heat of the moment, feel like a kind of dark, necessary pragmatism.”
-George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
Our society and the world in general can be fucking terrifying! It's true! I know I'm scared!
Despite this, people are not fundamentally bad or stupid or unknowable.
They are not entities to be simplified.
They are not easily quantifiable or fodder for sweeping generalization.
Other people are not the enemy, even when they are The Enemy, and it is easy and infinitely unproductive to think we have risen above the mass of lesser-minded individuals that currently populate the earth.
In summation,
Nobody is special. Be nicer.
*I refuse to abandon the conviction that food is one of the better things you could ever choose to photograph.
**And I recognize the irony of including this in a blog post about ~me~
