I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

I walk through rooms that remember laughter that is no longer mine, and I see faces that once held warmth and now hold only memory. And in that absence, I feel the yearning. I feel the hunger for a life that holds me together when everything else wants to pull me apart.

- I Owe Myself a Good Life (Substack)

It’s a curious book, not easily categorized. As the subtitle outlines, it is a collection of “brief essays,” arranged in the format of an imaginary encyclopedia, with each entry ranging from personal anecdote or recollection to etymology and jargon all the way to scientific fact and even Yiddish. These, more than anything, are poems—some of them