“When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.” 

plot outlines

The other day I wanted to find the perfect pain au chocolat in Chicago. I went to Twisted Bakery in Old Town because I had been there once, shortly after moving to the city. I’d found the pastry to be authentic, perfectly crisp and flaky but melting in your mouth just right, the chocolate originally bitter but baked to almost sweetness. I like donuts and cupcakes just fine but I’d rather eat a croissant, plain, no jam or anything, lightness itself, butter submitting to a perfect state. 

When I’m away from France I would rather be there than anywhere else in the world. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, this tendency of mine to idealize a place that was never mine to begin with. I’ve written a lot about my experiences there. It is easy to write about that life because it feels like somebody else lived it, another Kara in another language with another purpose. Her main goal was to be understood, and she equated comprehension with affection and even love. Her adopted country defined her role: “foreigner”.  I think I long for this place because I long for familiar shoes to fill.

When I’ve gone back, though, it’s been a different story. I realize that I’ve grown apart from that experience. To associate myself with a place again, I have to become a sort of symbol. A “foreigner”. An outsider experiencing a city for the first time over and over again, irked by its apparent betrayals or overjoyed by its gifts. In embodying that symbol, I engage with it, fulfill it, begin to believe that it is the culmination of who I am. I take the train. I get lost in unfamiliar streets. I do something that is completely “unique” to whatever setting I’m in, and it makes me feel legitimate. Like I’m living the life prescribed, recommended, expected, approved, “liked”. The life from which I can create a fiction that everybody will like, but that will challenge few. The life with “This.” printed underneath it. A life I live out of an aching desire to create, but that I have displaced, blind, on what I can buy or sell or eat or drink. 

Setting and mood are cardboard backdrops. Only character can drive a story. My story is not about where I live or what I consume but rather about who I am and what I choose to do.

Edvard Munch, Puberty (1895)

I always forget about Munch until autumn

"The importance of nonsense hardly can be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as “nonsense”, the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures. “Nonsense” is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality. There is no such thing as “nonsense” apart from a judgmental intellect which calls it that. True artists and true physicists know that nonsense is only that which, viewed from our present point of view, is unintelligible. Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense."

Gary Zukav

"

New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more.

I am very cold.

That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it.

Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen.

This page has not been written very slowly.

The parchment is hairy.

The ink is thin.

Thank God, it will soon be dark.

Oh, my hand.

Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.

St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing.

While I wrote I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.

As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, “The hand that wrote it is no more.”

"

Marginalized, notes in manuscripts and colophons made by medieval scribes and copyists

It was as if somebody had handed me a key to a secret garden where I might go lie in a fragrant meadow while everybody else pulled up weeds.

penmanship lessons

The work is bigger than you are. The work is bigger than you are.

More awful than a lie is an ill-gauged truth, delivered without consideration. There is something more important than the truth, and it is an elusive, beautiful thing. 

Beware of getting stuck in a rut. It is too easy to write acknowledgments (“I have always known”, “I knew from the beginning”, “I finally understand”) without regard for your own previous struggle or, more importantly, the struggle of those reading. Yes, you feel you have been uniquely favored in friend, foe, frame of mind. But what I want to know about is your uncertainty. That is character. 

Worry about something entirely, methodically, in one piece of writing: your forgetfulness, your body, your mind, your pain, your absolute and exuberant joy. Write your darlings, your enemies, your fantasies, your fears. Write them out of yourself. It is forgivable for a reader to return to the same story over and over, to replicate a mood, to nurse nostalgically at what they know or have known. Not so for the writer. Once you’ve written it, leave it. Move on to something new.

Dreams are the unselfconscious explorations of a pure soul.

"Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —-
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —-
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —-

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —-

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray."

Mary Oliver, “Morning Poem”

"

The smallest object that we can see, even under a microscope, contains millions of atoms. To see the atoms in a baseball, we would have to make the baseball the size of the Earth. If a baseball were the size of the Earth, its atoms would be about the size of grapes. If you can picture the Earth as a huge glass ball filled with grapes, this is approximately how a baseball full of atoms would look.

The step downward from the atomic level takes us to the subatomic level. Here we find the particles that make up atoms. The difference between the atomic level and the subatomic level is as great as the difference between the atomic level and the world of sticks and rocks. It would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a grape. In fact, it would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a room. To see the nucleus of an atom, the atom would have to be as high as a fourteen-story building! The nucleus of one atom the size of a fourteen-story building would be about the size of a grain of salt. Since a nuclear particle has about 2,000 times more mass than an electron, the electrons revolving around this nucleus would be about as massive as dust particles.

"

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics