Rishita Chaudhary

a meditative yet exuberant journey through the world within and the world without, inspired by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami : the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett: "In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of... See more

Subconsciously, we cling to the belief that the game is pre-defined. We have no control over who we’re born to, where we’re brought up, our quality of education, and how often we’re at the right place at the right time. But that’s where we trip up: we begin to conflate our lack of control over starting conditions with a lack of control over... See more

The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this... See more

t I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop... See more

Sontag points to literature’s essential allure — the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life’s infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one. A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility: