be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you win then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.
Rest in peace.
“I do not fear death” by Roger Ebert - Salon.com (via birdmechanical)
(via birdmechanical)
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting.
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. … Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
King James Bible
eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
David Foster Wallace
(worth reblogging from time to time)
(Source: shannonpareil)
“You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.”
There is endless wisdom in this letter from Sherwood Anderson to his son, lessons I’m trying to teach my own children— and lessons I’m trying to remind myself of.
I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
In a sense, there’s nothing new here, really, just the same old wisdom retold in ways that might punctuate. That’s the point: being awake to letting the piece of wisdom through so that it takes hold. It means going over this ground again and again and trying the same things again and again. I am reminded of something a political strategist said about all the things that a campaign does that may or may not actually work. “We know that 80 percent of what we do doesn’t work. We just don’ t know what 80 percent.” So, we just keep trying to follow these rules and ideas and hope to live a life of honest inquiry and creativity that sustains past lunchtime and forgetting the password for your mortgage and Tweeting about that and reading your friend you lost touch with and the end of a day look up and wonder where was I?
yes. this.
also: “The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.”
"Be with yourself. Find flaws to love, find quirks to cultivate, and find the things that you are too scared to alter. Not throw away, not change. But alter. Small alterations or large ones. Find them, and find ways to make things fit better."
It’s best to spend your teenage years doing nothing but reading. What else is there to do? The boys are in a cloud of Axe, the men are bad for you, the women aren’t interested, and the girls, like you, are trying frenetically to figure it out. Best instead to read all the things, you’ll have decades to watch television after work. It doesn’t have to be good; it’s all the apprenticeship-work of gathering information that matters.
