Taryn > Books: prh-first-to-read‎ (33)

We were, for whatever reason, the lucky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treate

We were, for whatever reason, the lucky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treated like something rare and exotic. A beautiful bird that spreads its bright wings only once a decade. Or that flower that stinks like rotting meat whenever it decides to bloom. 

What happened to us wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Our lives. The blood wasn’t fake. The knives were steel and nightmare‑ sharp. And those who died definitely didn’t deserve it. But somehow we screamed louder, ran faster, fought harder. We survived.

Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order.

There’s such a thing as too much sweetness ... All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more

You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.

 Prejudice begets prejudice, you see. Knowledge does not always evolve into wisdom.

Home will never be the same once you know what you are. Your whole life will change. Nigeria is already full of groups, circles, cultures. We have many ways. You are Yoruba, Hausa, Ibibio, Fulani, Ogoni, Tiv, Nupe, Kanuri, Ijaw, Annang, and so on. You add being a Leopard Person to that and your groups split into a thousand more groups. The world becomes that much more complicated. 

Learn how to learn. Read between the lines. Know what to take and what to discard.

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.

Passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.

Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

Everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths. Everything was worth looking at more closely.

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret, now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.

You don’t stop being a real person just because you aren’t in a real place.

"Who are these people that can withstand such a trip, the danger, the risk, the isolation, the pressure? What can these people teach us? Because if we— the species—might eventually do something like move to another planet, it would be better if we made a few improvements on ourselves first, if possible."

Intense focus on what was happening in the present eclipsed all else, but things do not disappear during an eclipse, only disappear from view.

“Why shouldn’t we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty.”

To orbit the earth is not to be shot up to some magical zone where there is no gravity, but to be shot up in such a trajectory that your subsequent fall means you won't hit anything; you will persistently and permanently miss the Earth and circle around it. To have done this is to understand the persistence and permanence of falling and to understand that what is true does not always feel like what is true.

Yoshi will not just be pretending that he is going to Mars, he will be pretending to be the most perfect person to go to Mars, and maybe he is, almost without question, he is, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have to pretend to be what he really is, because aren’t we all pretending to be who we really are?

(Letter from Yoshi to Madoka) Pluto and Charon show each other only one face, never turning away. ... In astronomy, we use the word barycenter to describe the center of mass between two orbiting objects. Our Luna is smaller than Earth, and so the barycenter of Earth and Luna is on Earth, deep within it, actually. Because Charon is so large, and its gravitational influence so great, the barycenter of Pluto and Charon lies outside Pluto. Strictly speaking, Charon does not orbit Pluto, nor Pluto, Charon. They rotate around a barycenter between them. Looking only at one piece of each other. .... I have come to believe that I have loved you incorrectly. I have been orbiting a dream I cannot touch. I only know one of your faces. It is not that I didn’t want to know another face, it is that I loved that one so powerfully. Maybe I did not wish to know. There is a possibility that you are like Luna, and you see all my faces while I see only one of yours. But, forgive me, I do not think this is true. I think we are mutually locked. Perhaps this is what it means to be married. Perhaps this is what it means to be married to me. I saw a little of you, and thought it was everything. I understand that I was wrong.

What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don’t have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker. Every what-if is a gift to anyone who’s looking for a hold on you, and that means us. If a guy’s whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he’s letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.

The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all.

You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.

The thing about daydreams is that they don’t last. One brush up against reality, and that’s the end of them.

The kind of growth required to move past race is nearly impossible to achieve because racism is rooted in the foundation of America. … Without awareness or acknowledgment of how these things have left a permanent stain on our country, then no amount of blind hope is going to remedy the erosion that race and racism have done to this country.

Explaining your life to a world that doesn't care to listen is often more draining than living in it.

“I’ll look after you. Don’t worry. I’ll always look after you.”

"You don’t know, do you, when you’re a kid, how hard it is being a grown-up? All you want is to be a grown-up too. I thought I’d be so much better at it than [my mom] was, and now that I am one, I realize how stupid that was.”

He never speaks about her, but you can somehow see the memory of her there still, in his eyes and his smile, the way they do remain a part of us, those people who have hurt us very deeply or whom we have hurt, never letting us go, not entirely.

No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standi

No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting. No time to flinch or brace.

What if all the pieces of belief and memory that comprise who I am—my profession, Daniela, my son—are nothing but a tragic misfiring in that gray matter between my ears? Will I keep fighting to be the man I think I am? Or will I disown him and everything he loves, and step into the skin of the person this world would like for me to be?
And if I have lost my mind, what then?
What if everything I know is wrong?

Experimental physics—hell, all of science—is about solving problems. However, you can’t solve them all at once. There’s always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you’ve put in the work, and if you’re lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable. Like stepping slowly back from a photomontage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.

Am I still the same man at the most fundamental level? And what is that level? If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?

What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day. To be loved. To be expected. I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

There's something horribly lonely about a place that's almost home.

[Anne] is filled with rage, but she is careful not to show it. She has had a lot of practice feeling anger without showing it. She dissembles. Isn’t that what everyone does? Everyone is faking it, all of them pretending to be something they’re not. the whole world is built on lies and deceit.

Here’s what I think. I think we’re really smart when we’re young. Ten-year-old Sarah is smarter than I am because I’m six years older. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah is dumber than me because I’m sixteen. Someone somewhere was way older and richer and dumber than all of us and paid forty-five million dollars for a bunch of dots. I think this kind of smart isn’t something they can measure with tests. I think it’s like being psychic or being holy. If I could be anyone for the rest of my life, I would be a little kid. (Sarah)

The older people get, the less they can do about things. They seem to be stuck. They seem to be glue. (Sarah)

But now it’s been so long that if I bring it up, I’ll look like a girl who can’t let go of things. Teenage girls always have to let go of things. If we bring up anything, people say we’re bitches who can’t just drop it. (Sarah)

Here’s why I like making things. I like making things because when I was born, everything I was born into was already made for me. Art let me surround myself with something different. Something new. Something real. Something that was mine. I don’t know if this means I could also be a competent architect. Or a car mechanic. Or a carpenter. I just like constructing new things that are real. I believe this is a side effect of growing from seed in soil made of lies. I believe this is a side effect of being born into ruins—this need for construction. (Sarah)

You can't change people with love. It doesn't work that way. (Helen)

"Way I reckon it, men killed more wolves than wolves ever killed men. I know who I’m more afraid of.”

I couldn’t unravel all them strands, all them lies and feelings what got knotted up over the years. Any lie can turn to truth if you believe it long enough.

I don’t much like roads. Roads is some other man’s path that people follow no question. All my life I lived by rules of the forest and rules of myself. One a’ them rules is don’t go trusting another man’s path. No matter if that’s a real one trodden into dirt or all them twists and turns his life has taken. People do it, they do what their mommies and daddies did, they make them same mistakes, they have them same joys and hurts, they just repeating. Trees don’t grow exactly where their momma is; ain’t no room, ain’t enough light and water so they end up wilting and dying off. It’s the same with us humans, though you wouldn’t know it to look at them most a’ the time. Ranches and stores are passed father to son, momma to girl, but there ain’t no room for it. Son tries to run things like he wants, father ain’t having none of it, they start feuding and soon that family ain’t no more.

Memories ain’t no one’s friend. They show you all the good things you had, all the good things you lost, and don’t let you forget all the bad shit in between

"Monsters ain’t real ’cept in kids’ imaginations, under the beds, in the closets. We live in a world a’ men and there ain’t no good come out of tellin’ them they monsters. Makes ’em think they ain't done nothing' wrong, that it's their nature and they can’t do nothin’ to change that. Callin’ ’em a monster makes ’em somethin’ different from the rest of us, but they ain’t. They just men, flesh and bone and blood. Bad’uns, truth, but men all the same…Nothin’ a man can do can make him stop bein’ a man.”

Life is life and you got to live it in the here-now not the back then.

She wanted something to end, something to conclude. And nothing seemed to be. Doors kept opening, leading to more long hallways and doors. She didn't know where she was in all of it.

We are all so vulnerable, she realized. We all dance on the knife's edge. One push, and we are over. Even someone like Celia. The wrong place at the wrong time and you become a statistic, one of the many missing, their faces fading into the past with every day that went by.

"We're all kind of living in a swirl. It's like one of those snow globes you have at Christmas. Except this is real, and it's been shaken up and a bunch of bad stuff keeps blowing past our faces."

Jenna placed her head in her hands. She wished she could remain in that position long enough--not looking, not seeing--that the problems around her would be resolved in some favorable and benevolent manner. But she knew they wouldn't be. She wasn't a little kid who could play hide-and-seek until somebody else--somebody older and more capable--shouted the all-clear.
It was her life. The swirl around her belonged to her.

People drove or walked by places where unspeakable and awful events happened all the time. A spot where someone dropped dead of a heart attack. A place where one lover told another he or she was leaving. Those spots weren't marked. Nobody knew. Life went on.

Life was just so good, somehow. It was perfectly natural that it should be expensive.

"Think about it like this: when you go to the cinema— one day you might see a comedy, the next a tear-jerker. The experience isn’t any the less valid as a result. It all gives E. H. points, you see. You know as well as I do that pain isn’t a universally negative emotion, don’t you?” I said nothing. “We wouldn’t want to eat nothing but sweet things . . . just as little as we’d want to avoid all adversity. In fact, there has to be a degree of adversity for us to appreciate our blessings."

The t

The trick to hiding something, she’d told him once, is to put it right out in plain sight.

You think you’re free until someone comes along and reminds you that you’re not.

If you looked at anything long enough it would start to become something else, or even completely undefined, and no matter what it was, you thought about it differently than you had before, and usually it was less important.

Maybe killing comes naturally to people, an instinct nobody likes to admit, a survival reflex inherited from our Neanderthal cousins. So maybe it’s the other stuff, the good manners that supposedly make us human, that are the real aberrations.

It’s a quote by George Inness: Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible. That's been with me since graduate school.
Are you going to tell me what it means? She smiled, batting her eyelashes.
Literal translation: what we see depends on what we don’t see. It’s something Inness called the reality of the unseen—a person’s spiritual truth. God is hidden, but that doesn’t make Him absent. Finding Him isn’t necessarily about seeing Him. There’s a connection between seeing and being blind. Like in the fog, when certain things, certain colors, become important. The possibility of revelation in the ordinary. He sighed, looking at her, his eyes moving slowly as if he were memorizing every inch of her. I’m boring you, aren’t I?
Not at all. I think it's fascinating.
Here's my pedestrian version: to know yourself is to forget who you are.

We were like the three Fates, weaving the story together, threads of gold, red, and midnight blue. There would be wolves and tricks and lies and cunning and vengeance in our story. I would make sure of it.

“There’s a monster in the shape of a beautiful woman. She kills people. Children, old people, everyone. She tries to kill the girl that Thief loves. He fights the monster, and he kills her, because he’s the hero. There is a great victory. And a descent into darkness. There are clues and riddles to solve, and trials of strength and wit. There’s redemption, and consequences, and ever after.”

The grief I feel is so physical it seems impossible that I am still living; that my heart continues to beat when it has been wrenched apart. I want to fix an image of him in my head, but all I can see when I close my eyes is his body, still and lifeless in my arms. I let him go, and I will never forgive myself for that.

And the photos of the son I loved with an intensity that seemed impossible. Precious photographs. So few for someone so loved. Such a small impact on the world, yet the very center of my own.

I see the look on his face [...] I used to tell myself it was contrition—although he never once apologized—but now I realize it was fear. Fear that I would see him for the man he really is. Fear that I would stop needing him.

(view spoiler)[I have the absurd urge to tell him that I’m not like the usual occupants of his court. That I grew up in a house like his, and that I went to university; held dinner parties; had friends. That I was once confident and outgoing. That before last year I had never broken the law, and that what happened was a terrible mistake. But his eyes are disinterested and I realize he doesn’t care who I am, or how many dinner parties I have held. I’m just another criminal through his doors; no different from any other. I feel my identity being stripped away from me once more. (hide spoiler)]

"They’ll put everything straight,” he says. “It’ll be like it never happened.”
No, I think, it could never be like that.

Everyone was very kind and trying to stop me from seeing his body, but I couldn’t tell them I was glad he was gone. No more of his nonsense.

Everyone was very kind and trying to stop me from seeing his body, but I couldn’t tell them I was glad he was gone. No more of his nonsense.

No one wanted to know us now. They just wanted to know about us.

And then there he was. Glen Taylor. He looks like the bloke next door was Sparkes’s first thought. But then monsters rarely look the part. You hope you’ll be able to see the evil shining out of them—it would make police work a damned sight easier, he often said. But evil was a slippery substance, glimpsed only occasionally and all the more horrifying for that, he knew.

I think I know, but really, I don’t know anything about this man that I’ve lived with all these years. He’s a stranger, but we’re bound together tighter than we’ve ever been. He knows me. He knows my weakness…I know that I caused all this trouble with my obsession.

It was journalism at its most powerful, hammering home the message with a mallet, inciting reaction, and the readers responded. The comment sections on the website were filled with unthinking, screaming vitriol, foulmouthed opinion, and calls for the death penalty to be reinstated. “The usual nutters,” the news editor summed up in morning conference. “But lots of them.” “Let’s show a bit of respect for our readers,” the editor said. And they all laughed.

Draw yourself a straight line, walk backwards on it to erase your footsteps and you will trip and crack your skull. Straddle the two sides of a stream and you will unhinge your hips. Be unstable as waters and you will not excel.

Like the pendulum on their parlour wall, they swung to both ends of dread and hope, but generally stayed in balance: no hysterical outbursts, no screaming and pounding the walls for answers, no silent bitter tears that soaked up the pillow when you lifted your head in the morning. There was just stillness. Something quiet crept about the house, made you feel a sudden chill and sprayed your arms and neck with unexpected goose rash.

Before the beginning of his memory, which was to say from the beginning of this life, there had always been the three of them. Paul and Bibi were the first people he saw, the first he touched. Everything he resented and liked, everything he knew, thought and felt, his smile and the angry pounding in his veins were all from them, and now, for the first time, taking notice of this made him feel incredibly lonely. The sort of lonely feeling that Bibi would have been tempted to slap out of him. Just the kind of thing that would have made Paul look at him in his usual bemused way and say, 'My friend, what are you saying? Please be serious'. But he sensed it that night, it hung about the room, the feeling that things may not always be like this, that they would one day grow up and live across town from each other like Ma and her cousin Aunty Julie or even die like all of Bendic's siblings whom he hardly ever spoke of. Paul turned around in his bed, the distant drumming had stopped, and mumbled something in his sleep, and Ajie was sure he could hear Bibi softly breathing from the room next door.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if they do they must cling to it and not let themselves be ambushed and have it taken from them.

Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life which she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.

Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they’d briefly managed to forget.

It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.

“We’re old enough not to care what our parents think, but somehow we do,” Paul admitted, philosophically.“That’s for sure. ” “Because they allowed

“We’re old enough not to care what our parents think, but somehow we do,” Paul admitted, philosophically.“That’s for sure. ” “Because they allowed us to exist. ” She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.

“Have you read Marriage: Dead or Alive?” Veblen said no.“It’s the magnum opus of Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig. He says marriage is a continuous inevitable confrontation that can be resolved only through death. ”

Then she snapped out of it, and they laughed about it, and she came to understand that this recognition of otherness would occur over and over until death they did part, that she couldn’t despair every time it occurred, and that anyway, Paul wasn’t a dictator like her mother…yet it was clear that your choice of mate would shape the rest of your life in ways you couldn’t begin to know. One by one, things he didn’t like would be jettisoned. First squirrels, then turkey meatballs, then corn, then—what next? Marriage could be a continuing exercise in disappearances.

She started to run, feeling the warmth of the sun and the rub of the grass under her soles, remembering how running used to make her pretend to be Mighty Mouse, shouting, “Here I come to save the day!” and later on, Maria singing, “The hills are alive ... ” and then thinking it very strange that she could not run across grass without pretending to be someone other than herself, for even now she found herself in search of something to think when running across grass.

‘If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your crapola, then you deserve it. ’ Paul and Veblen, I think you’ll understand me when I say that we’ll always be here for you, but that your own crapola is where it’s at…"

According to Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, the Swiss analyst and author of Marriage: Dead or Alive, a wedding is more than a party or a legality. It’s no less than a boxing ring, two people facing off, acknowledging their separate identities rather than their union, in the company of all the people who lay claim to them. A wedding is the time and place to recognize the full clutch of the past in the negotiation of a shared future."

It’s not just loud noises that accompany disasters, little sounds do, too, and even silence.

It’s not just loud noises that accompany disasters, little sounds do, too, and even silence.

Falling out of love is progressive. Before you no longer love, you love less. And less again, then no more at all. But it’s not something you are aware of. Falling out of love. A relationship gone lukewarm, humdrum, pragmatic, everyday, utilitarian and habit-worn, and you don’t even think it through because you don’t think about it at all.

Monstrosity never thinks it is monstrous; it always finds reasons within itself to behave as it does—acts of torture become acts of justice, or even honor.

Impunity imposes impossible cohabitation on murderers and their victims; it exacerbates suspicion and hatred. In the deepest recesses of the soul. In that secret place where bile gathers and accumulates. The heart of a volcano. In that hiding place where the most violent anger lurks, the anger that ravages everything when it erupts. Because it will not fail to erupt. In the light, perhaps, of another historical context, but it will erupt.

Memories are free. They play with us. They get fainter, they expand, they retract, they avoid us or strike like lightning. Once life gives birth to them, they become the masters of life. They are time’s foot soldiers, driving us mad. Without memories we would be free. Memory is time’s bad fairy. No memory brings true joy, serenity. Regret, remorse—memories are like so many dissonant little bells clanging inside us. And the more life goes on, the more the little music of memories rings false. You think you are your own self, but you’re nothing but your memories.

We shape the world in our own measure, and that soothes us. Under the apparent chaos, maybe there really is order in the universe. However, it cert

We shape the world in our own measure, and that soothes us. Under the apparent chaos, maybe there really is order in the universe. However, it certainly won’t be our order.

Science depresses me. It’s a terrible thing to be a bunch of atoms waiting to be disassembled. I find no consolation in knowing that they’ll recombine to form a pile of manure or, if I’m lucky, a patch of mushrooms.

We all start dying the day we’re born, but there are lots of rebirths along the way.

"Who's Hrabal?"
“A Czech writer. Sorry, we teachers have the bad habit of lacing our conversation with literary references, which is a pretty stupid thing to do.”
“Why is it stupid? It’s always good to learn something new.”
“Up to a point it is, but knowing too much can be very awkward. Valdemar’s a good example of that.”
“Who’s Valdemar? ”
“It’s better not to know.”
“So according to you, nobody should know anything!”
“OK, Buddha once said that knowledge should be like a boat. You can use it to get across the river, but once you reach the other side it’s absurd to keep lugging it with you. Do you know what I mean?”
"You've used Buddha's words to explain yourself."
“You see? I’m hopeless. That’s what I mean. I have to unlearn everything I’ve learned and go back to being a normal person. Culture is just background noise that prevents me from seeing life as it really is. Culture makes no one happy. I want to be a simpleton or a wise peasant who knows when it’s going to rain and goes to bed and wakes up when the sun sets and rises.

Thousands of candles can be lit by just one candle, and the life of that candle will not be shorter because of it. Happiness is never diminished by being shared.

Someone once said that, when you fall in love, you’re not really in love with the person but with life through that person.

Let us be thankful, for if we have not learned a lot today, we have at least learned a little; and if we have not learned a little, we have at least not fallen ill; and if we have fallen ill, we have at least not died, and for this we are thankful.

For someone else, it could be a great life: interesting, exciting and relatively free of worry. The problem is that it doesn’t happen to be the life I want. It isn’t the way I planned it. Somehow the scripts got muddled up. I, Annie, am supposed to be living in a little village outside Tavistock with the love of my life, running a company that we set up together. Somehow or other I got ejected out of my story halfway through and ended up in another person’s life; I don’t want to be here a second longer. I am too old, too scared for this existence. It’s meant for a younger, braver kind of person…the lonelier she got, the less adventurous she became.

I have noticed that the moment people become rich and achieve their earthly desires they enter a painful, spiritual vacuum. Few wealthy people turn to religion. What’s the point when it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven? Instead they often look to the soothing power of beauty. Art makes mortals feel closer to heaven…I once met a cynical painting by Courbet who said the rich bought art because they had run out of other things to spend their money on. A Corot claimed that it was copycat syndrome—just do as others do. Nothing drives men crazier than the inability to possess.

The difference between a good and a great work of art was down to an almost indistinguishable series of largely unidentifiable factors: the élan of a brushstroke; the juxtaposition of colours; the collisions in a composition and an accidental stroke or two. Like a rolling stone gathering moss, a painting gathered history, comment and appreciation, all adding to its value. In its relatively short life, Annie’s little painting, all eighteen by twenty-four inches, had accrued so much admiration and history that it had become surrounded by a halo of accumulated desire, bumping its value up to dizzy heights.

My little theory is that at the heart of all human anxiety is the fear of loneliness. It starts with their expulsion from the womb and ends with a hole in the ground. In between it’s just a desperate struggle to stave off separation anxiety using any kind of gratification—love, sex, shopping, drink, you name it. My composition is about the fleeting, transformative respite over aloneness that love offers despite the cold certainty that this reprieve is only transitory.

If I tell you that the man's face is composed of only seven strokes of a brush you'll laugh and remonstrate that this can't be so; but that is why my master is a genius and why his star is still in the firmament of great artists nearly three hundred years after his death. He understands the alchemy of red and pink and pearly white. More importantly, he understands mankind, and he can, like great artists, translate our innermost joy and fear into something tangible.

Don’t be shocked by this apparent self-reverence. As you know, my canvas is covered with the brushstrokes of a genius and overlaid with centuries of desire, love and avarice. Each of my owners added an intangible but indelible stratum: the first was my master’s outpourings; the second was his friend Julienne’s fraternal affection and these two were followed by the admiration of the great and the downright ugly; even young Annie added a little bit of magic. These layers of appreciation, though invisible to the human eye, are detectable to those with particular powers of intuition and sensitivity

"You are not so singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anx

"You are not so singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough."

Let's say for example, you see a white crow. At first you're a little surprised. You peer at the bird with heightened attention, and then eventually you switch into the more domineering mind state that making decisions requires. You can assimilate the experience and decide the bird is a dove. Or you can accommodate it and recognize that albino crows exist. The rub, as Proulx's collaborator Steve Heine told me, is that "assimilation is so often incomplete." We act as if we’re sure the bird is a dove, but the feeling that it’s not is still there in the unconscious, leaving us trapped in a similar middle ground as the doomsday believers were, stuck between assuming we’ve understood and sensing we haven’t. One way we respond to these lingering anxieties is by finding comfort in our social groups and passionately emphasizing our ideals. Proulx and Inzlicht called this reaction affirmation. Affirmation is the intensification of beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be, in response to a perceived threat.

When the world is less predictable, people are more likely to jump to conclusions or entrench their existing views. That’s the problem with striving for certainty or making rashly informed judgments of trust to escape from ambiguity. Urgently fixating on certainty is our defense mechanism against the unknown and unstable. However, what we need in turbulent times is adaptability and calculated reevaluation.

"Openness to outside influences and the frequency of travel abroad, he found, was correlated with simultaneous gains in achievements in business and religion. Most strikingly, he also discovered that the more diversity there was in Japanese society, the more creative the society was two generations later in the areas of medicine, fiction, poetry, and painting. Diversity can be painful initially, it seems, but it pays off decades later. While at first most immigrants occupy a marginal position in society, as Simonton explained, “after a generation or two not only do they become integrated but their culture becomes part of the ‘melting pot’—as we start eating pizza or chow mein."

For Chekhov, morality lay not in our relationships with what we know, but how admirably we deal with what we don't…It’s a morality distinct from IQ and common notions of confidence or self-control. Chekhov showed that not knowing doesn’t leave us without a compass, in some relativist nether land. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive…"It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense,” [Anton Chekhov] once wrote. “Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything . . . and if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.”