Yoga

When life smiles on you, it’s useful to know that it’s going to give you a real thrashing, and when you grope in the darkness, that the light will return. It makes you cautious and gives you confidence. It helps put your moods in perspective. At least it should.

There’s the shadow, but there’s also pure joy, and perhaps there can be no pure joy without a shadow,

but these days I get a macabre pleasure from steeping in my nervous sweat and stinky clothes.

As I near sixty, I imagine this better version of myself, this upgraded Emmanuel: serene and good-natured, with a center of gravity from which words with true weight resound—and not the “hollow sound” produced by bloated entrails, which Nietzsche talks about.

the task, the only task, that a man of good sense must seek to accomplish is to leave samsara, this wheel of change and suffering we call the human condition, and gain access to nirvana, where life is finally real, void of illusion, where you see things as they

I like Hélène’s take on her work and the things it deals with: she jokes about them while taking them seriously at the same time. Although she’s aware of how caricatural this doctrine can seem, she fully subscribes to the worldview that underlies it, and

The peaceful Dodecanese Islands, just a stone’s throw from Turkey, selectively take them in. The more upscale ones like ours are spared by what the inhabitants and summer sojourners agree—without saying it too loudly—is a plague, while the less trendy islands like Leros and Lesbos take in more than their share.

Atiq suddenly starts crying like a child. Rather than hug him, she talks to him seriously, as if he were an adult. He remembers her exact words: “Stop crying, my boy. In life you have to leave everything, always, and in the end it’s life you have to leave, so there’s no use crying, don’t cry.”

“That’s good. You didn’t just come to take our pain: you brought your own as well.”