And what is love in the end? Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?

– Alabaster, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

[T]here is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.

– C.S. Lewis, speaking to J.R.R. Tolkein

Via Robin Sloan.

Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter includes this bit. I’m happy to read someone agreeing with my estimation of the actual amount of expertise out there in the world. This is my personal way to handle feeling like an imposter:

Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don’t yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’re going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.

From Jenny George’s collection The Dream of Reason (I could find no place to link to, so this is printed without permission):

Spring

Speckled egg, brown egg, or sky blue with black marks –

Having broken once, the world re-forms
in miniature.
Over and over, in the nest
between two limbs; in the hollow of grass
at a marsh edge.

It’s relentless, the way it keeps trying
to return.
Joy
Joy
Joy

Living by what yet get, life by what you give.

– Winston Churchill

đź”— Unsolicited Advice to Minnesota Children by Neil Hilborn

I shouldn’t quote the whole thing because that would be inappropriate, so I’ll do something worse and excerpt a poem:

and you ingrate children of the snow
spend all your time in “classes”
learning about “things” that will teach you
nothing about ice skating on the bones
of your enemies or lighting moose
on fire or felling fir trees

Anyway, I love it!

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

– Jonas Salk

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

– Kurt Vonnegut

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Postcolonial Love Poem – I didn’t particularly understand anything I was reading. However, there was one bit I highlighted from “Snake-Light”:

When a snake swallows its prey, a row of inner teeth help walk the jaw over the prey’s body—walking like reading.

Walking over a word with the teeth of our mind.

To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.

That’s vivid!

đź“š 2022