the shallowness @theshallowness - Tumblr Blog

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier

In The Mood For Love (2000), Wong Kar Wai

Vonnegut’s books argue about ideas of freedom and mourn the dead, from their first pages to their last.

It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It tells us that human nature is the one great constant of life on earth, and it beautifully and truthfully shows us human nature neither at its best nor at its worst but how it mostly is, most of the time, even when the times are terrible.

What Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now

When people are crammed into cities, there’s not much privacy, and neighbors become spectators to one another’s personal lives.

YES, IT'S OK TO DO JOB HOPPING

There’s nothing wrong with sticking to one job for the rest of your life, but I personally think that it can breed complacency and contentment at times. I'd like to think that people who want to learn more should look for lessons outside their comfort zones.

There’s nothing wrong about indulging with the convenience of doing the same thing again and again. There's nothing wrong with settling for the average---but you’re reading this paragraph now because you’re not one of them, right? When you think you’ve learned what you ought to learn, and you think you’re hungry for something else, think about looking for new adventures. Go move out and accept that new position, that new role, that new country, that new boss, and that new company with a new set of people waiting to challenge you.

Leave if you need to leave. Move if you need to move. Change if you need to change. The successful ones always win because they risked what they thought was worth fighting for.

But for me, and I suspect for countless others like me, the threat of suicide isn't like being carried over a waterfall — it is like living in the ocean. Not as sea creatures do, native and equipped with feathery gills to dissolve oxygen for my bloodstream, but alone, with an expanse of water at all sides. Some days are unremarkable, floating under clear skies and smooth waters; other days are tumultuous storms you don’t know you’ll survive, but you’re always, always in the ocean.

Chronic, passive suicidal ideation is like living in the ocean. Let’s start talking about how to tread water.

Newest book (Logic Beach) ► https://tinyurl.com/y8ofh2hk (You may need to change the Amazon URL ending depending on your country.) YES, BUT WHERE ARE THE PAP...

“While I'm doing well in my career, my personal life admin is a mess.”

Yiyun Li wrote her devastating, brilliant new novel after the suicide of her son — in it, the unnamed narrator confronts the same situation, holding an extended conversation with her own dead son.

For every book that comes into my home, I give one away.

tgi-spideys

Spider Family Photo

There's no without. I am not gone. I'm scattered into so many pieces, sprinkled on your life like new snow.

Nellie

Was that the experiment? Getting closer to the self?

I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is somehow of interest—it doesn’t have to be motivated by plot or character. That was my only reason for writing about myself. It wasn’t because I found myself interesting, it wasn’t because I had experienced something I thought was important and worth sharing, it wasn’t because I couldn’t resist my narcissistic impulses. It was because it gave my writing a more direct access to the world around me. And then, at some point, I started to look at the main character—myself—as a kind of place where emotions, thoughts, and images passed through. - Karl Ove Knausgaard

.... the future is a branching network of opportunities and adventure. At any moment, you can begin the project of refashioning your life into what you actually wanted it to look like. There would be risks, there would be bad days, there would be stress. But that is nothing compared to the misery of realising the entire lifetime had been wasted on doubts self-sabotage.

evolvingessence

When the Cascadia fault line ruptures, it could be North America’s worst natural disaster in recorded history.

#greatreads

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

the shallowness