mind museum.

alex. 28. spain. catch a wave and take in the sweetness; think about it, the darkness, the deepness – all the things that make me who i am.

[sandersstudies]

“They’re just looking for attention.”

Oh, a human being is seeking a social response? Human being, the social animal wired to make and track social connection? A human desires the vital blood that permitted their species to survive for millennia? The human being who was born completely helpless and primed in every way by nature to seek attention and help from their community?

Wow that’s crazy. How embarrassing. Humiliating even. Should we isolate them from community? Should we call Wire Mother?

[artemisiasea]

Mysticism is awe. And I think any human being who's lost awe is really a lost person. A civilization that's lost awe, an educational system that can't teach awe and nurture it, a worship system that is devoid of awe because it is so full of human verbosity, is perverse. These systems are doing the opposite of what we have to do, which is to awaken the heart. Mysticism is about heart-knowledge, heart-experience.

Matthew Fox, Listening to the Land

[someforbiddenparadise]

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin (as appears in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, in a section titled "Post No Bills")

[noosphe-re]

The intensity of a brief experience, the feeling of being utterly suspended in time, beyond past and future—this belongs to many, perhaps even to all sensations of beauty. Something that has the radiation of beauty strikes a chord in me, and later, when it is over, I say: I was completely at one with myself and the world, at first holding my breath for a brief moment, then utterly absorbed and immersed, filled with wonder, feeling the vibrations, effortlessly excited and calm as well, enthralled by the magic of the appearance that has struck me. Feelings of joy. Happiness. The countenance of a sleeping child, unaware of being watched. Serene, undisturbed beauty. Nothing is mediated. Everything is itself. The flow of time has been halted, experience crystallized into an image whose beauty seems to indicate depth. While the feeling lasts, I have an inkling of the essence of things, of their most universal properties. I now suspect that these lie beyond any categories of thought.

Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture

[liberatingreality]

People think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence must also consist of ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[funeral]

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology

[tristealven]

“I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt—unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.”

— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude (W. W. Norton Company, 1992) 

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

Claire Dederer, Monsters

[philosophybits]

“Strange that up to now the inner world of a person has been observed so inadequately and treated so unimaginatively. What is called psychology is one of those masks which have taken over the places in the sanctuary where real images of the gods ought to be.”

— Novalis, Last Fragments

[funeral]

Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

[bombmagazine]

“When you write a book you’re full of expectations, you make plans, you think it will turn this way or that. Yet the moment of true joy comes when you have no clue as to what you’re doing, when one phrase follows another and you’re there witnessing what comes to the surface. Traditional structures and rhymes require a similar unconscious engagement, when sound comes over sense, for instance. I’ve thrown out pieces of mine because I had them all figured out beforehand—I was hovering over the text. Books are born once they surpass you.”

— Alejandro Zambra, in his conversation with Daniel Alarcón for BOMB

[1116665-555567777]

“The value of reading, at least reading a work that is compelling enough that it penetrates, stays in the mind beyond the moment of absorption, is that it keeps the inner sensibility on alert; it puts a new testing frame around situations we encounter. It becomes an active juncture between our acting and our processing selves, an invitation to triangulate between what is imagined and what merely is.”

— Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (via thesaddestchorusgirlintheworld)

[mindmuseum]

“Kojima was changing, and watching it happen from a distance petrified me. The changes she was going through had rolled in unannounced, surrounding the small but persistently bright space she had created for me, pushing me out.”

Heaven, Mieko Kawakami

[godspreciousdaughter]

the humiliation will set u free

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

[philosophybits]

“In the ancient world religion already was to a certain extent what it will become for us — practical poetry.”

— Novalis, Logological Fragments I

[philosophybits]

“Even if one sees a friend or an enemy behaving badly, one can reflect that there are specific conditioning factors that determine this, and thereby remain happy.”

— Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Crosby & Skilton tr. (6:33)