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I had just come to New York then, after breaking up with a man named Robert. At first, everything had gone well with Robert. We lived in Buffalo, on the ground floor of a large house, and while he taught at a local university and read and worked on his dissertation in the study, I tried to make things grow in our little patch of a garden and did some part-time research for a professor of political science. At night, we cooked dinner together or with other couples from Robert's department, or once in a while went dancing or to a movie, and I thought Robert was happy. But after a while Robert seemed to lose interest in me, and part of what I had been was torn from me as he pulled away. And the further he pulled away from me, increasingly the only thing I cared about was that he love me, and there was nothing I would not have done to be right for him. But although I tried and tried to figure out how I ought to be, my means for judging such a thing seemed to have split off with him. So while Robert seemed to grow finer and more fastidious - easily annoyed by things I said or did - I seemed to grow coarser and more unfocused, and even my athletic tallness, which Robert had admired when we met, with the dissolving of his affection came to feel like untended sprawl, and my long blond hair, which I'd been proud of at one time, seemed insipid and childish - just another manifestation of how unequal to Robert I had proved to be. And after a time I was overtaken by a paralysis that spread through every area of my life, rapidly, like an illness.

Flotsam, Deborah Eisenberg

The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers - seen close-up on the television screen - and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent - if not an inappropriate - response.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

flower-child-jessie-deactivated

darrenaronofskys-blog

"As for myself, I very often stay on at the office and work for an extra hour or two - especially when the weather is bad. It’s not that I’m overly ambitious - it’s just a war of killing time, until it’s all right for me to go home. You see I have this little problem with my apartment…"

- The Apartment, directed by Billy Wilder

You think about people who are important here on Earth, or were, at least, in the recent past- Gandhi or Beethoven or John Lennon or whatever, and then just think about the Sun. And then it’s like you’re six years old all over again, wondering “Where does the Universe end?" and you’re just as meaningless as you always were, and will be. And you think of all the men, your friends, your mom and your dad and your job, and your home, and your money- they all make you feel like you’re safe, but, even if they’re beautiful, you won’t be. The whole world could burst into flames in five minutes, for wild reasons no scientist ever thought to predict, or a piano could fall on your head, or maybe you’ll get sick next year, or maybe somebody’s going to murder you, or your parents, or your kid, or maybe the dude you think you’re in love with’s going to get hit by a car on his way to work and you’re going to write a cool novel about it, which may sell terribly and depress you, and then you’re probably going to get cancer, or dementia- And there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself from any of it. And there’s nothing you can do to turn yourself into a planet, or the ocean. You are unimportant and unsafe, and once you fully understand that, well then- oh my God. It’s amazing! You’re free.

#hilarious

thesteward

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EVERYTHING IS GREAT AND I LIKE IT