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I Will Follow You Into The Dark (With Rain)

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“If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I will follow you into the dark.”

awwww-cute

ingodwetrustnyc

third-nature

What’s a better way to understand human psychology – ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘A person is a person through other persons’?

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

intersustainability

[ID: two excerpts from the linked article.

Excerpt 1: According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’

Excerpt 2: Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.

So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. ‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929). Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.

end ID]

storminateacup-97-deactivated20

“That’s why high school, or a crappy job, or any other restrictive circumstance can be dangerous: They make dreams too painful to bear. To avoid longing, we hunker down, wait, and resolve to just survive. Great art becomes a reminder of the art you want to be making, and of the gigantic world outside of your small, seemingly inescapable one. We hide from great things because they inspire us, and in this state, inspiration hurts.”

— One of the best articles I’ve ever read. Rookie Mag. By Spencer Tweedy. (via wildyork)

the2headedcalf-moved

being in your early twenties is like [grocery shopping alone] [having instant noodles for dinner] [remembering random details about that one friend you haven't spoken to in five years] [feeling overwhelming guilt for every purchase that isn't strictly "necessary"] [having midday naps] [finding out through facebook that the girl who was mean to you in high school has a husband and a baby] [falling a little in love with every stranger on public transport] [pretending you're not afraid of being alone] [wondering when you'll feel like a fully realized person] [listening to bands you liked in middle school] [blinking and it's suddenly december] [failing to imagine yourself ten years from now] [feeling like you're running out of time]

snout

there’s a post that’s like “its amazing how much you can get done if you just sit down and focus” with a second comment thats like “imagine being nt” and it has like thousands of notes but the op has adhd and was talking about how their meds were working really well there’s another post that’s like “how do you block gay men on okcupid” or something with a reply like “have you tried christianmingle” and it has thousands of notes but the op was a trans girl who wanted to avoid chasers there’s another post that’s like “date a quiet boy who will bring you a glass of water in the middle of the night” with a reply making fun of her “low standards” that has thousands of notes but the op was a teenage girl who was in an abusive relationship at the time that she made that post (and the reply was made by a grown man who had to apparently had to dig through months of this girl’s posts to find that one post & make fun of her for it so: yuck) point is, can we please stop making these assumptions about total strangers on this site, harassing them over innocuous posts theyve made that have been misinterpreted by literal hordes of random people and unless somebodys being outright hateful and disrespectful can we leave each other alone and mind our own business lmao

thebookquotes

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

thingsworthsaving

“I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water

aprilblizzards

1. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

2. I Always Knew - the Vaccines

3. Emma - Jane Austen

4. You Are Jeff - Richard Siken

5. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

6. Wishbone - Richard Siken

7. Littany is Which Certian Things Are Crossed Out - Richard Siken

8. She - Dodie

9. Futile Devices - Sufjan Stevens

notbecauseofvictories

Do you have any other favorite short stories from around the internet?

Lucky for you, I have a whole bookmarks folder just for my favorite short stories:

WHITE LINES ON A GREEN FIELD, Catherynne M. Valente

JACKALOPE WIVES, Ursula Vernon

HUNGRY DAUGHTERS OF STARVING MOTHERS, Alyssa Wong

MONSTRO, Junot Diaz

BREAKING WATER, Indrapramit Das

THE PARABLE OF THE SHOWER, Leah Bobet

SMALL CHANGES OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME, K.M. Szpara

THE ROSE MCGREGOR DRINKING AND APPRECIATION SOCIETY, K.T. Fisher

THE HUSBAND STITCH, Carmen Machedo

SELKIE STORIES ARE FOR LOSERS, Sofia Samatar

A KISS WITH TEETH, Max Gladstone

THE PHILOSOPHERS, Adam Ehrlich Sachs

I also highly recommend all of Kelly Link’s work, Helen Oyeyemi’s “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” and Ted Chiang’s work, though he remains a better ideas guy than a writer.