3.27.2015

A note I found from early last year:
Today: I thought about hiking a segment of the Appalachian Trail and getting a second bachelor's degree; I ditched my bike to read the Dalai Lama's autobiography on the train; I had two cookies for dinner instead of cooking.

3.19.2015


Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who have never lived, as strangers you never met. 
The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.
-Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 248