📚Marginalia

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth - The living bird is not its labeled bones.

A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far and settle slowly.

All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it. The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

I usually let things go. Perhaps it’s an escape hatch, my way of allowing myself to double back and ease out the side door on a lot of my schemes.

Ideas come easily to me, enacting them comes harder.

Continous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are socail economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.

Stories never live alone; they are boundaries of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.

Sometimes the people who love us the most have the highest expectations for us, and sometimes those expectations are idealized. You have no responsibility to live up to anyone else’s expectations. You have only to live up to your own expectations.