Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I was reminded of something Orwell wrote about fascism in 1936: “If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.” Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book designed to wake you up.

— Dorian Lynskey / The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984

Imagine standing in a constant cone
                                         of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.
A stone on the path means the tea’s not ready,
       a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you still
hasn’t hit bottom.

— Richard Siken / “Seaside Improvisation”

My whole political stance pretty much boils down to “I care about other people and the planet” and wow does that make some people mad.

— Anonymous Meme

But if all we are is organisms in an exploded cosmos, the sum of our biology, then what is love? What is forgiveness? What is that faculty that, as if from out of nowhere, shows up in some unnamed way and provides a kind of feeling you couldn’t have asked for on your own? Is the fact that we must suffer really only evidence against the knowable within the realm of human intelligence, which time has proven wrong over and over?

— Blake Butler / Molly

For a few years now how we’ve tried to accept
we won’t ever be back to this particular quarrel

of sheets, to this exact plastic milk-jug morning,
opening our eyes together, again, yes

once more, again, how ferocious that shock
of light carving its own vows on each other’s skin.

— Kirun Kapur / “Rajat Jayanti”

“A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed.

— Peter Wehner / “The Unconstitutional Conservatives” / The Atlantic

And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fire is still alive

— Louise Glück / “Song”

What I’m Listening To: 

It’s already dead
I know you have the dove
I’m not gettin’ wet
Looks like a date is set
Show the ferret to the egg
I’m not getting led along

— Aldous Harding / “The Barrel”