“Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshipped the pastoral; if he could have written an ode he would have.” ZS
AG2024_1134017a or red flows and veils
AG2024_1134015a or it shone beneficence
“It shone beneficence in thin rods of Renaissance light, thrusting through a landscaped cloud that seemed designed for this purpose.”
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
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AG2024_1133944b or spends all day, every day, insisting
Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall
attitude of entitlement toward
the body of his wife. Some people
say the devil won’t need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing
comes after this life. Some people say
that in spite of the devil’s public,
long-standing, and meticulously
logged disdain for the health
and wholeness of his wife, the devil
spends all day, every day, insisting
grandly and gleefully on his general
pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly
considers himself to be an unswayed
crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of
the devil’s several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.
Sunshower, Natalie Shapero
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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, on The Daily, discusses his diagnosis and how to chart a path back to power for National Democratic Party. He is correct in his analysis.
A web of loss
Gauzy film between
evergreens is a web
of loss. Get closer. Reach
to touch the shimmering
gossamer and your finger
pushes through. Remember
filling that space with desire?
Someone else might grieve
the spider who abandoned
this home; others grow anxious
waiting for a deer’s walk
to wreck it. But you—
you grieve the net of thought
spun inside your own womb:
intricate and glossy and strong.
Miscarriage, Christine Stewart-Nun?ez
In the quiet, Vera could hear its sharp puffs of breath—low and fast—a complete and utter confusion. A denial. The eyes like blank boxes, but there, in their depths, a sense of something moving. A frantic dancing. Erratic. Vera felt her heart pumping awkwardly, palpitating. “Please wait,” Vera whispered.
And then it died. Just like that, she felt it go. Something horrible and also strangely thrilling in it.
Roughage, India Ennenga (Verso)
AG2024_1077693a or I can’t get the hang of it
My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods are shuttered I don't know why. "Try," say the good people who bring me my food,"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon. Otherwise, your immortality will bean exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.It takes so long for the human to become a human!He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despairbut the two together like curettesand peel back the pitch-black integuments to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time, sitting on the sketch of a boulder belowhis aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
Vijay Seshadri, The Descent of Man
Beauty fills us with a “surfeit of aliveness”
On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry, 2001
Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a “surfeit of aliveness.” In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.
“When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional.”
On Beauty: A Novel, Zadie Smith, 2005