Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

This is what it comes down to:
Me on a park bench, always writing,
This is what it comes down to.

— Ada Limón / “Little Day”

Where to begin? Perhaps with a good tip: never put ninety pounds’ worth of stuff in your backpack. Don’t go on thirty-day hikes or lug around enormous inflatable boats on top of forty cans of food. I keep repeating this mantra to myself over and over again, but I’m a masochist.

— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City

. . . You belong to the world. The hands that put a peach tree into the earth exactly where the last one died in the freeze belong to the world and will someday feed it again, differently, your body will become food again for something . . . 

— Carrie Fountain / “You Belong to the World”

I went into the wilderness then, and at other times, because I wanted to live my life more intensely. I have found that in trading day-to-day concerns for more fundamental questions of safety, survival, navigation and supplies I could tap into a rawer, more authentic, more capable, part of myself. In cutting down my routine to its most simplistic, and my belongings to their most minimal – two nested pots, a roll mat, tent, Sleeping bag, map – I have luxuriated in the basic elements of life and my capacity to use them. In setting my own fire, chopping my own wood, making my home on the mountainside or in the forest, learning to keep myself warm and dry in all weathers — sometimes extreme — I have found a calmness and a clarity often missing from the rest of my life. In scaling high ridges or narrow precipices, in sharing a habitat with wild and sometimes dangerous animals, I have found a new flavour of fear and how to live with it. By seeking out situations in which there is no easy escape route, I have learned, sometimes with difficulty, how to cope without one.

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness 

I told you
When you buy monkeys
You have to take the ones that are very lively and who almost scare you
And never pick a sweet sleepy monkey that snuggles up in your arms
Because these monkeys are drugged and will be ferocious the next day
That’s what just happened to a young girl who was bitten on the nose

— Blaise Cendrars / “I Told You So”

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

— Lydia Davis / “What She Knew”

This darkness is not the scary one,
it’s the one before the sun comes up,
the one you can still breathe in.

— Ada Limón / “This Darkness”

What I’m Listening To:

And so we crumble
A ten ton head, made of wet sand
This dread circumference
You gotta be kidding me
The grass grows over me

— Radiohead / “Decks Dark”