“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

• Job 38:4,7 📚 💬
• Also beautifully quoted in Terence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

This is how we roll during a polar vortex 📷

Currently reading: Surrender by Ray Loriga 📚

Boston 📷

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.

from “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang 📚 💬

Currently reading: Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne 📚

Light and shadow 📷

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think….Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.” - John Adams

from John Adams by David McCullough 📚 💬

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“The population of Iceland is 1,000 times smaller than that of the United States. We do not hide behind our apparent lack of superpower status. What we lack in manpower, we make up in volcanoes. But we are still figuring out how to aim them."

—Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, speaking at a White House dinner for Nordic leaders in May 2016.

From How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason 📚 💬

Wachusett Reservoir 📷

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

Two people met, on a hot May Day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬

Currently reading: The Little Book of the Hidden People by Alda Sigmundsdottir 📚

First time on commuter rail since COVID 📷

“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”

• Isaiah 55:12 📚 💬

Currently reading: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami 📚

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Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick, We who had been immersed in this world became aware of another. It is pain- ful. It was Neville who changed our time. He who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his mind contracted. He became on the alert… . I noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all time past, he had chosen one person one moment in particular.

• from The Waves by Virginia Woolf 📚💬

These things are there. The garden and the tree

The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold

The woman in the shadow of the boughs

The running water and the grassy space.

They are and were there.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.

• from A.S. Byatt, Possession 📚 💬