Flipping Pencils

Smothering Cloak, Velvet Petal

"He would be a smothering cloak, a velvet petal. It was not the thought but the shape of the thought that tormented him. It suspended above him, then mutely dropped, causing his heart to pound so hard, so irregularly, that his skin vibrated and he felt as if he were beneath a lurid mask, sensual yet suffocating."

-- Patti Smith, Just Kids

Bubble in a Stream

"Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

-- from Diamond Sutra, ca. fourth century CE

Epigraph from Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian. Sutra translated by Kenneth Saunders in The Wisdom of Buddhism, ed. Christmas Humphries, p. 122.

Insh'Allah

"'Under the sign of death.' Why should not our every utterance come accompanied by a reminder that before too long we will have to say goodbye to this world? Conventions of discourse require that the writer's existential situation, which like everyone else's is a perilous one, and at every moment too, be bracketed off from what he writes. But why should we always bow to convention? Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of present joy and future grief. Insh'Allah."
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Source: Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee, Viking 2007.

Two Billion Heartbeats in a Lifetime

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

— from "Joyas Voladoras,*" an essay by Brian Doyle

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Source: Brian Doyle, "Joyas Voladoras", originally published in The American Scholar, Autumn 2004 and reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski (Houghton Mifflin Co.) 2005, p. 44.

* Joyas voladoras: Spanish for "flying jewels." It's what the first European explorers in the Americas called hummingbirds.

Want to Boost Mood? Think about Death

If you're not clinically depressed, thinking about your own death might be a good way to improve your mood.

That's according to a recently published study—"From Terror to Joy: Automatic Tuning to Positive Affective Information Following Mortality Salience"—as summarized in Time Magazine.

Click here to read the article and find out how this counterintuitive finding might just make sense.

(Thanks to Mind Hacks for spotting this.)

You're Gone, We're Gone, It's All Gone

1. Your house without you.

2. The earth without us.

3. The galaxy without life on earth.

Witness to a Squirrel Road Killing

Dear Diary:

Driving back from the airport on city streets one morning recently, I witnessed a sudden, gripping mini-drama. My attention had been divided murkily between navigation and a haze of almost-thoughts not related to traffic flow. The driver's side window was open. Early fall leaves were falling. And then…a squirrel shot into the road.

The front right wheel of the car ahead of me hit the squirrel. The squirrel, which narrowly escaped being smushed by the back wheels of the car, started to head back toward the curb from which it came.

Dogs Are Beasts of Sorrow

"If [Roger] Grenier [a French novelist, essayist and editor] suggests that the experience of loving a dog is life-affirming, he means it in the very Gallic sense that life is lived more keenly in the knowledge of death. Dogs help with this, in short, because they generally predecease their owners: 'Because dogs inflict the suffering of loss upon us, the French sometimes call them beasts of sorrow, bêtes de chagrin.'"

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Source: Alison Gillmor, "It's a Dog's Life," an article in the April 2007 issue of The Walrus. In the quote above, the writer of the article is discussing The Difficulty of Being a Dog (University of Chicago Press, 2000) by Roger Grenier. Read Wikipedia about him (in French, alas) here.

Mom Puts Sickly Boy to Bed in Coffin

"Antonio* was so sickly as a child that for years his mother is said to have dressed him in his best clothes every evening and laid him out to sleep in a coffin, expecting him to be dead by morning."

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Anecdote quoted from: Csikszentmihaly, Milhaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 1st ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991, p. 234.

* Antonio Gramsci, Italian writer, activist and Marxist political theorist (1891-1937), who was jailed by Mussolini's Fascist regime. Read Wikipedia about him here.

Here's a photo of the 15 year-old Gramsci.