resilience is not sustainable we are not supposed to endure life we are supposed to live it

Conjoined whitetail fawns.

Image courtesy of Dr Gino D'Angelo from the University of Georgia.

— Harvard Divinity School, Statement from the Leadership of Religion and Public Life on the Current Spate of Violence in Palestine/Israel

The world is made of love - 2015

— Still the Water, Naomi Kawase (2014) 🫧

“Perfect Lover I” & “Perfect Lover II” by Can Sun

THE SEA!! ENGULFS US AND!!!! THE LIGHT GOES OUT!!!!!

All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony, 2021)

— Un Beau Matin (One Fine Morning) by Mia Hansen-Løve

— Adèle Haenel retires over French film sector’s ‘complacency’ towards sexual predators (Guardian)

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

— The Sensible Thing, F. Scott Fitzgerald

— RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA

Ryuichi Sakamoto playing a piano (Grand Yamaha) that survived a tsunami which killed more than 1,600 people after the earthquake in Fukushima on March 11, 2011. He said it felt like playing "the corpse of a piano that had drowned"

Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974.⁣

— Kaveh Akbar on leaving Social Media

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

happy year of the rabbit! saw this adorable window display while walking around the neighborhood.

今年は兎年だ！お散歩してたら見かけた。