“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 📚 💬

He was suddenly aware of someone sitting beside him, holding his right hand. LIke a small creature seeking warmth, a hand slipped inside the pocket of his leather jacket and clasped his large hand. By the time he became fully aware, it had already happened. Without any preface, the situation had jumped to the next stage. How strange, Tengo thought, his eyes still closed. How did this happen? At one point time was flowing along so slowly that he could barely stand it. Then suddenly it had leapt ahead, skipping whatever lay between.

This person help his big hand even tighter, as if to make sure he was really there. Long smooth fingers, with an underlying strength.

Aomame. But he didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t open his eyes. He just squeezed her hand in return. He remembered this hand. Never once in twenty years had he forgotten the feeling. Of course, it was no longer the tiny hand of a ten-year-old girl. Over the past twenty years her hand touched many things. It had clasped untold numbers of objects in every possible shape. And the strength within it had grown. Yet Tengo knew right away: this was the very same hand. The way it squeezed his own hand and the feeling it was trying to convey were exactly the same.

an excerpt from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami 📚 💬

Lonni:

And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen:

Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

Everything! 💬