Aeinnor Reyes

it feels like my anchor has been lost at sea.

There’s a recurring motif in the book, a haunting symbol for all of our many mental demons: the Face in the Floor. It first appears in a second-person vignette as an evil presence that only you, the reader, can feel. You wake up from a nightmare, you look around, and you suddenly notice that there is the Face in the Floor beneath you. It is a Face... See more

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul ... It ... is probably mostly

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Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.

Perhaps Walt Whitman, writing with ecstatic immediacy, best captured this in his intimation that the secret of Being is “to do nothing but listen,” so that the song of life — which is the song of love — may be heard.

I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude

Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain... See more

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across... See more