Un peu de vin. @un-peu-de-vin - Tumblr Blog

“Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.”

— Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests

neuro-lab

Emilia Petrarca, Joan Didion’s Style Was As Precise As Her Prose

#Joan Didion

quotespile

“Think about how often — before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID — you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around — it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.”

— Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

Colin King's Tribeca Loft

#Interiors

pairedaeza

“Isn’t the winter ground, too, a gesture of grief? The names of saints linger like seasons bearing witness.”

— John W. Evans, from “Katie Ghazals: Busteni (2),” No Season (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011)

hommedessept

#Wardobe

genericaestheticist

“Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard - not old or white or male - noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them.”

- “The End of the English Major” in The New Yorker

memoryslandscape-deactivated202

“Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. […] I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf.”

— Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s, 1974)

#Winter #Annie Dillard

pointandshooter

Needle Juniper, Bonsai & Penjing Museum, Washington, DC

photo: David Castenson

philosophybits

“Outright atheism merits greater respect than does wordly indifference. An out-and-out atheist stands only one step below the most consummate faith, but an indifferent man never has any beliefs, but only base fear.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.”

— Ben Lerner, 10:04

#Winter #Such a good book!