95: Great Lakes (Huron)
96: Nat’l Parks (Yellowstone)
April 8, 2023
Another bookmark just resurfaced, this time from Blue Whale in Charlottesville, where I spent some time in the summer of 2000.
(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)
bookmark
March 9, 2023
Twenty Years
On March 3rd, 2003, this quote by Walter Ong was my first post on a long-dead Textpattern blog I installed at a long-gone domain:
The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.
There were some lost years and there were some silent years, but I’ve always tried to have some sort of blog percolating quietly, like a sad little aquarium in the corner. Even if the fish died from time to time, there were at least a few snails working their methodical way along the glass, and a patient deep-sea diver gazing out impassively from behind its mossy visor, awaiting, like all of us, for a renaissance of wonder.
OTD
January 24, 2023
They crave death, they crave sorrow. They fear the future, they fear the past, they fear time. A world that has already ended cannot change; a world that does not change cannot end. Their eternity is that of the flash. Statis, the instant, and eternity — they see these three as the same thing, and they see them as the ideal. Ideals. Ideas without bodies. They fear bodies and they crave living forever solely in ideas. They love ideas because they think ideas don’t change, and they fear bodies because bodies do nothing but change. The petulant glee in their actions. They are driven by a manic fear. They fear lines, they fear circles, and they especially fear spirals. To be starved for certainty but to never have it. To live with certainty always almost within reach but always just beyond your grasp.
