The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can’t be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem “begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”
I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.
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Debbie Millman, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design
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Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
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Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
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Maybe it’s been only a brief separation that feels like years. Like a solo car ride that takes all night but feels like a lifetime. Watching all those highway dashes flying by at seventy miles an hour, your eyes becoming lazy slits and your mind wandering over the memory of a whole lifetime—past and future, childhood memories to thoughts of your own death—until the numbers on the dashboard clock do not mean anything anymore. And then the sun comes up and you get to your destination and the ride becomes the thing that is no longer real, because that surreal feeling has vanished and time has become meaningful again.
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The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
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It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
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A bit of baseball romance on this Opening Day
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But doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?
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The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
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In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.
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On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Overall I’m not a fan of Kerouac’s frenzied writing style, but every so often I came across a gem like this one in On the Road— a great passage that perfectly encapsulates the temporary insanity of punch-drunk love.
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The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
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“We accept the love we think we deserve.” —The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Never read the book, but really enjoyed the movie. Emma’s American accent needs a little work, but hey, nobody’s perfect (not even Hermione)
“Trust us when we tell you that this heady, baffling cocktail of physical and emotional reactions is a crush. it is the reason you haven’t yet decided to forgo school altogether…”
“All of it—the whole sweaty sick-stomached mess— is attributable to crush. The power of crush, though, daunting and impressive as it is, cannot hope to compare to that of love…”
“This is love, and we don’t need to explain the difference between love and crush, because you are now and forevermore fully aware of that difference, in both its vastness and it’s details…”
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Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
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“Inconceivable!”
“As you wish.”
“I’m not a witch, I’m your wife!”
“Mawwage, that bwessed awangement…”
“I’ve known too many Spaniards.”
