vgriff

I read this Cory Doctorow piece the other day on how his digital blog acts as his searchable, connectable commonplace notebook and it made me want to go back to publishing my notes that way so here we are.

I read Crossley’s book in a COVID delirium. I couldn’t sleep on Wednesday night and when my Libby app pinged my phone at 3 am, I downloaded the book and started to read it right away. I consumed it over the next sixteen hours or so, stopping to nap and feed the dogs. I started out not liking the author because of her attachment to some jewelry that goes missing in the first chapter but she was clever enough to use this as a baseline so you could really feel her true loss as the book went on. Really a beautiful piece. I loved it.

So many good quotes to remember.

…no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they’re still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby.

Denial is humankind’s specialty, our handy aversion.

“How will he know you loved him,” she asks, “unless you try to destroy yourself?”

Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.

He would never put it in such sentimental terms, but he understood that real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

One in which I allowed for the fact that he was both the subject of a witch hunt and a witch, and one in which he felt he’d been targeted by a moment whereas I felt he’d been granted clemency by it.

Thomas Merton wrote, “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

Perhaps this is the plainest definition of anxiety: mourning what isn’t gone yet.

Russell sloughed off his hometown on purpose, came to New York as one of the city’s queer refugees. I sloughed off mine because it’s what I’d been trained to do as a suburban kid—to look at New York, to hope for New York, to feel defined by and inferior to New York.