More specifically concerning: change
2.08.01
2 August 2001, around 14.44.
The very light is altered, or simply different. There is an air about the place, this home, that both entices and fills me with foreboding. The normalcy of little things, scanning the shelves for books, toppling things gracelessly onto the floor, and yet so much has changed – furniture moved, or simply gone. Suffice to […]
cyclic
4 May 2004, around 8.22.
To move away from one thing is not necessarily to approach another, though this may be the unintended consequence; to move towards an object does not require departing from another – but this, too, often happens. Few can observe their impulses with perspicacity.
ghost pain
24 March 2007, around 20.09.
My bookshelves look like a fighter’s mouth, full of painful and surprising gaps. Even books I thought I could not do without, books that shaped my taste and who I am, are gone. Let me explain. When we decided to move abroad I knew, of course, that most1 of the books would have to be […]
modern moral life
23 September 2007, around 22.26.
A new way of making and accumulating money, a dizzying new form of social mobility tied to this new economy, a new culture obsessively dedicated to work and financial success, consumerism, a cult of celebrity and fame, a mass culture based on journalism and advertising, a new conception of individuals as untrustworthy centers of self-interest, […]
crave
15 May 2008, around 16.15.
How the body when ill sweetens the taste – of water, for instance, or broth, or tea – even as the appetite falters. All other food seems noxious. Except waffles. This is a paradox.
fugitive
17 April 2010, around 4.57.
A cup of over-steeped tea brings back the memory of student days, bent over a book, surrounded by papers, the tea overdrawing and becoming tepid, forgotten, on the desk. Legs crossed at the ankles, or sitting on one foot, it is possible to forget time itself, to say nothing of a cup of tea. A […]
ianua
14 January 2022, around 5.41.
Christmas day. Light snow overnight, everything looking somewhat magical – clear and fresh. We plan a walk to the river, because it is a challenge getting the dog to cross the highway, but later she can run off-leash without the likelihood of encountering anybody (though who would one expect to encounter at just after sunup […]
fleeting
21 February 2023, around 11.44.
Undoubtedly, the landscape will be endearing to someone in the future, even if it changes again. People live in the world of their own moment. They get used to their environment and cannot waste emotions on grieving over everything that has changed. —Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water, trans. Lytton Smith, p. 251)
a new perplexion
24 August 2023, around 5.12.
Some bookstores don’t change; one revisits them years later and everything is same, save for the accretion of additional detritus and the depredations of the occasional browser. Other bookstores seem to feel that if they are to last, they must change constantly: Sell puzzles instead of magazines, socks instead of – books, I suppose. It […]