Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

— Margaret Atwood / The Testaments

Each forward movement of the clouds leadens
The cupola covering the great men
A bit more.

— Hédi Kaddour / “The Answer”

Half the world was flooded and the other half parched and the crops kept failing and failing again. People were starving, even here in California. There were refugees everywhere. The wine tasted of ash.

— T.C. Boyle / Blue Skies

To throw ourselves down
helplessly, into happiness,
into an age of our own, into
our own days.
There where the Pestilence roars,
where the empty riders of the horror go.

— Robert Duncan / “Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal”

There is no proven vaccine or treatment for infections with the virus, which is closely related to Ebola virus and causes similar symptoms . . . It is an outbreak of superlatives. One of the deadliest known viruses, Marburg, has emerged in Rwanda, killing 13 people and sickening 58 in one of the biggest Marburg outbreaks ever documented. Scientists expect the outbreak to be curtailed quickly — but they warn that, overall, Marburg is on the rise.

— Saima Sidik / “Lethal Marburg virus is on the rise in Rwanda: why scientists are worried” / Nature

If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone
for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body
of a poem, in meanings left between the spread knees
of enjambment.

— Idra Novey / “Value City”

My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country—the country that I still foolishly thought was the same as the country to which I had for so many years belonged.

Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

— Margaret Atwood / The Testaments

What I’m Listening To:

You’re rereading a book
To feel reassured
By the life of your favorite hero
But don’t worry, honey, don’t worry
This is just a fairytale
Happening in the supermarket

— The Raincoats / “Fairytale In The Supermarket”