Nikita

The answer to how to approach your twenties lies between Plath and Didion. Everything you do is irrevocable, because time is finite, which means your choices matter. So you have to choose a fig. You cannot sit “in the crotch of this fig tree starving to death.” But choosing one fig does not cause all the others to instantly fall from the tree. If y... See more

If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronise each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.

Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the... See more

This is very similar to how people unite themselves and give each other parts of themselves — inner parts, mental not bodily parts—when they talk and listen. (You can see why I use amoeba sex not human sex as my analogy: in human hetero sex, the bits only go one way. Human hetero sex is more like a lecture than a conversation. Amoeba sex is truly m... See more

Perhaps, down here on Earth, we so readily lose perspective because we spend our days on myriad distractions keeping us from feeling the blade of time press against our lives with the urgency of living. Nothing sharpens that blade like seeing the edge between day and night, the beautiful and brutal turning edge, as the planet rotates:

Imagine if we all viewed our participation in humanity the way astronauts do, how naturally then we would unfist our nationalisms into an outstretched hand.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain... See more