[lustingupon]

[lustingupon]

[artfoli]

Armor, 1891, by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

[caramel-sutra]

be hold

witness and vessel

[caramel-sutra]

Saanu saariyan visar gaiyan raahvan ve

Kede paase jaiye sajana

[caramel-sutra]

[caramel-sutra]

On the contrary, humor allows you to approach the serious.

[modedamour]

[saintmarc]

[caramel-sutra]

“Whenever there is a wedding in the family,” she told Eliot one day, “or a large celebration of any kind, my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” […] "It is impossible to fall asleep those nights, listening to their chatter.” She paused to look at a pine tree framed by the living room window. “Here, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot some­ times sleep in so much silence.”

Jhumpa Lahiri

[caramel-sutra]

Closing Up

The hallways I’ve insisted are too loud have fallen quiet today and with the windows open and the fan running the classroom almost doesn’t smell of adolescents

Today I hit the reset button strip the walls bare and turn this place I have made to look like home into something sterile again.

I stack the chairs and recall the best and worst moments the ones that stick after all the others have melted together into a notion of how the year went, or didn’t compared to all the others

Today their voices do not echo on the playground I stumble across the things they’ve left behind and try to decide what do do with them

Collecting the wayward pencils from each corner  I relive the unexpected moments the thank you I heard from the last one I’d expect The time another held out their arms asking for a hug and I had to say, I’m sorry The activities we couldn’t do this year  the ones that took their place

It is the day I will notice how much gum is stuck to the underside of the furniture and find the notes they have written to each other on the table top I will peel off stickers fill the desk drawers with school supplies and set the class frogs free beside the stream

Today I will clean the fingerprints and nose prints from the aquarium glass and wonder how they got a footprint on the ceiling tile I will stack the chair that he fell out of every day straighten the table on which her tears fell erase the board where they wrote, 1 ½ school days til vacation Have a great summer and Bye-bye, Losers!

It is at the same time a celebration of summer’s onset and a kind of mourning for the faces of students I will not see again and the ones who will come back in the fall older and taller and different

This is the day to see the colleagues from the other corners of the building I have hardly seen or spoken to them since September but today we exchange plans for the summer months wish each other well and say farewell to those who won’t be back when the children return

After enough years of repeating this day it has become familiar, expected both welcome and dreaded different each time, but routine A ritual as solemn as folding a flag or holding a rosary tight between fingers

As often as I have wished for this day to come sooner there is a quiet sadness the last time the light is turned off and the door is pulled shut A silent pause I can not help but fill with some sound each time a whispered blessing that only the empty room will ever hear

-Christopher Clauss

[modedamour]

[cottagesongs]

[lustingupon]

[saintmarc]

[tepot]

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them — if the storytelling is good enough — we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible.

Excerpt from The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders (also: "War, Peace, and Our Possible Futures: George Saunders on Storytelling, the World's Fate, and the Antidote to Media Manipulation" by Maria Popova in The Marginalian).

[listslistslists]

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders