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  1. The New YorkerPeter Schjeldahl12/16/1950 min
    3 reads3 comments
    8.7
    The New Yorker
    3 reads
    8.7
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    • bill
      Top reader of all time
      4 years ago

      A Christmas Eve miracle!! The whole thing is perfect. A long poem. 11.

      Baudelaire wrote of having been “brushed by the wind of the wing of madness.” I have felt that breeze at times, though not in a great many years now. I still have the occasional thought that what is commonly deemed sanity is absurd; but I let that slide.

      • erica4 years ago

        In a previous life, I traveled to Rishikesh in India and attended a lecture called The Art of Dying. The speaker said, "There is a level of consciousness at which this is all just light on the wall." He talked about how contemplating death makes you live properly.

        I loved this article. I agree - it is poetry.

        After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land.

        Isn't it true that we appreciate things more when we know they're coming to an end?

        Alone, I linger again with my lifelong lover: you, reader.

        Wow, I love that he breaks the fourth wall.

        Writing consumes writers. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time. Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.

        I want to feel this way about writing. Or about anything.

        Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself.

        I'm worried that not enough people use their minds to reflect on the universe. More accurate: I'm worried that I don't use my mind to reflect on the universe frequently enough.

        • bill
          Top reader of all time
          4 years ago

          Now here's a pretty sweet sentence I keep returning to:

          I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.