Rishita Chaudhary

My dear Cara,

You see I have let the weeks go by—thinking of you, but not writing to you. I believe you are one of the few who can understand that in certain crises, direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy. If I could have been with you in bodily presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign... See more

“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” the young Leo Tolstoy distilled the eternal quest in his diary as he wrestled with moral development and the search for selfhood — a search that begins as soon as we become conscious, reaches a crescendo in the formative years of adolescence and young adulthood, and continues until... See more

i’ve found it incredibly difficult to come to terms with the fact that people can just come and go out of our lives and all we are left with is grief and loss. most of the people we meet in life are just passing moments. you’ll know them for a brief period before they are a stranger again and there’s nothing you can do about this. you don’t want to

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Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,

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7. Stories trump information

Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better ,... See more

“At the same time, art cannot be understood in terms of purpose. As the sculptor Charles Ray has said, art is “for absolutely nothing.” To make, or experience, art is to enter a kind of free zone; it slows us down, places us in some epistemological estuary, takes us into the wild. We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities, from our need

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Notes on Emerson’s Notes

Name your notebooks: the names we give our notebooks designate a relationship—sometimes aspirational—with literature and the world of ideas. I wonder how my relationship to my notebooks might change if I named them “The Wide World.” Would my ideas become more expansive?

Nothing’s truly new, but you should still develop a

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