The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

More specifically concerning: complaint

Domesticity

12 January 2003, around 9.49.

The house is filling up again—graduate students (myself included) returning for naught week. My neighbor slams her door, rattles her keys, rustles a storm of plastic bags. I do not imagine I seem any quieter to her. And now everything smells of canned beef stroganoff, an odor which, with the interminable rumblings of the kitchen […]

an Observation (1)

30 January 2003, around 11.10.

Oh, elegies are easy, I suppose. It is simple to sing of sorrows, and tumble through agonies towards some great katharsis, as though every strong emotion needs its purge. All happinesses are alike, the knowing novelist intones. But this very violence in ourselves, this need for grief, for rage, for some last word, even to […]

Montaigne 1.45

20 November 2015, around 7.16.

anachronism There is little one can take away from Montaigne’s account of the battle of Dreux other than being glad one was not there – and that quibbling about managerial decisions has been a (justified) habit from time immemorial.

ego hoc feci mm–MMXXIV · cc 2000–2024 M.F.C.

 ::