It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing. But it is not laughing at us, we lonely humans, who are…
What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine, qtd. in Tayari Jones' An American Marriage If you pay attention to such things, you may have noticed that many books and movies, before launching into their primary narrative, have a little section--a…
Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. -Edmund de Waal (The Hare with the Amber Eyes) To be without a job is both exhilarating and depressing. On the one hand, you suddenly have time to do the things you've been dreaming of doing for months: reading…
A more apt title for this post might have been a step backward, but somehow that just didn't seem right. You see, after last week's minor pity party (colds and dissertations don't mix well), I decided that humanity had to be restored. So I cut back on my library hours and got down to the…
Dining with Dostoevsky 