January 2012
111 posts
“Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them.”
—
Marcel Proust. (via madeofglass-
)
R.I.P. Mock Obituaries →
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
by Ben Zimmer, via Language Log
enduring ephemeral: “From my grandfather I had acquired the habit of rising early, almost... →
enduring-ephemeral.tumblr.com
“From my grandfather I had acquired the habit of rising early, almost always before five. It is a ritual I still preserve. Despite the unremitting force of inertia and in full consciousness of the pointlessness of everything we do, the seasons are met with the same unchanging discipline every…
