Sublime

and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye socke

Maria Popova, who writes the popular site The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), spends her days reading old books and essays. She’s passionate about finding ideas, beauty, and wisdom in these texts and then connecting them in her own unique conversation with the world.

She herself did not seem quite real.

Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I’m doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.

specter.

all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is p

Samantha and then stopped to examine my wife’s reflection in the window on the right side of the plane. I could see the lights from the airport, the red and green dots along the runway, on the other side of my wife’s transparent profile. Samantha was a spectral presence on the surface of the window and to see the world outside I had to look through

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning.