Holly Hunter in Broadcast News (1987)
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@sometimesagreatnotion
Holly Hunter in Broadcast News (1987)
Movies: Still Good!
Hello, testing, testing. Is this thing still on?
Twitter is a mess, as you’ve probably heard. So we’re thinking about coming back to the place where all this started. But are any of you 214,000 followers still around?
If we get 50 likes on this, we’ll set up shop here again within the week!
Oh hey, I’m (kind of) back here now. Twitter is a mess, and I miss the old tumblr days. Will this last? Maybe. Did I delete like 75% of my old posts on here years ago? Yes. Will it be worth following me again? We’ll see!
I will pray you find a way to be useful.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (via climbthestacks)
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say ‘going through the motions’—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
Leslie Jamison, “The Empathy Exams” (via The Believer)
Borderline - Chad (me)
Alright, here's the first installment of 80s covers, a cover of Madonna's "Borderline", recorded tonight at home.
"Andr Malraux, the French novelist, described a country priest who had taken confession for many decades and summed up what he had learned about human nature in this manner: “First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and there is no such thing as a grown-up person.” Everyone — and that includes therapists as well as patients — is destined to experience not only the exhilaration of life, but also its inevitable darkness: disillusionment, aging, illness, isolation, loss, meaninglessness, painful choices, and death.
...This tragic but realistic view of life has long influenced my relationship to those who seek my help. Though there are many phrases for the therapeutic relationship (patient/therapist, client/counselor, analysand/analyst, client/facilitator, and the latest — and, by far, the most repulsive — user/provider), none of these phrases accurately convey my sense of the therapeutic relationship. Instead I prefer to think of my patients and myself as fellow travelers, a term that abolishes distinctions between “them” (the afflicted) and “us” (the healers). During my training I was often exposed to the idea of the fully analyzed therapist, but as I have progressed through life, formed intimate relationships with a good many of my therapist colleagues, met the senior figures in the field, been called upon to render help to my former therapists and teachers, and myself become a teacher and an elder, I have come to realize the mythic nature of this idea. We are all in this together and there is no therapist and no person immune to the inherent tragedies of existence."
- Dr. Irvin Yalom (my hero)
“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing’s kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there’s also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.”
David Foster Wallace, 1996
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
W.H. Auden
It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
D.W. Winnicott
We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
Albert Camus
Having it Out with Melancholy, Jane Kenyon
If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure. - A.P. Chekov, The Cherry Orchard
1. FROM THE NURSERY
When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore.
And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad — even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib.
You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: “We’re here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated.”
I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours — the anti-urge, the mutilator of souls.
2. BOTTLES
Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell; the powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school that made me hold my breath.
3. SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND
You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.
4. OFTEN
Often I go to bed as soon after dinner as seems adult (I mean I try to wait for dark) in order to push away from the massive pain in sleep’s frail wicker coracle.
5. ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT
Once, in my early thirties, I saw that I was a speck of light in the great river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole human family. We were all colors — those who are living now, those who have died, those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm, and I no longer hated having to exist.
Like a crow who smells hot blood you came flying to pull me out of the glowing stream. “I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.
6. IN AND OUT
The dog searches until he finds me upstairs, lies down with a clatter of elbows, puts his head on my foot.
Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life — in and out, in and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .
7. PARDON
A piece of burned meat wears my clothes, speaks in my voice, dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all. It is tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure.
We move on to the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Day and night I feel as if I had drunk six cups of coffee, but the pain stops abruptly. With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.
8. CREDO
Pharmaceutical wonders are at work but I believe only in this moment of well-being. Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again.
Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet on the coffee table, lean back, and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak; someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.
There is nothing I can do against your coming. When I awake, I am still with thee.
9. WOOD THRUSH
High on Nardil and June light I wake at four, waiting greedily for the first note of the wood thrush. Easeful air presses through the screen with the wild, complex song of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye.
A real work of art destroys in the consciousness of the recipient the separation between himself and the artist — and not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.
Leo Tolstoy, “What is Art”
Aldous Huxley, asked on his deathbed to sum up what he had learned in his eventful life, said, 'It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder'.
Marc Ian Barasch, Field Notes on the Compassionate Life
We endure by enduring.
Tennessee Williams
I read this book. I think it's called "Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue." And he says in there that the virtue of reverence is rooted in the understanding that there is a world beyond human control, human invention, and human understanding. And that that world will always be there, no matter how sophisticated our technologies of probing reality become. The great mystery will be there forever. And it's the sense that it's not yours to solve. And the issue of a solution to a mystery is perhaps not a sign of wisdom. I am perfectly comfortable being in a state of ignorance before something incomprehensible. And it's in that moment that you're driven to your knees and you believe. I wouldn't call it religious. It's just what happens when you open up again to the extraordinary circumstances of being alive. And when you can open up to it and come out of your own little small tiny place in the world and say-- if you try, you know, with typewriter rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting, rewriting. And you get something on paper. And you give it to somebody. And you say, "Well, what do you think?" And if it really works, they read it and they say, "I think I'm going to be okay.
Barry Lopez