I wish I could walk the whole world in one night, just to know where I was. I would see how everything is related, who goes to bed early, who stays up to get drunk, who’s alone and who’s hungry, who sits alone on rooftops and who gets away with evil. Raccoons running into sewers and trains on overpass railroads. A world where you’re alone and you can’t run away from the fact of your own existence. It enlivens you every brush of wind across your face.
I don’t care for places that don’t admit of human brokenness.
You realize how many of your reasons are social reasons once you find yourself alone.
The deepest part of a person is in what they hope for. Because no one knows one can only move toward what one hopes. There must be some evidence for it, yes; but how much can one require?
There is a large question to be answered. Every intellectual reaches a limit – no one gets beyond estimation, the finding of a higher probability. So there is no idea of a pure intellect; life is based on further assumptions. What are those assumptions? If we don’t recognize them, doesn’t that make us less of a whole intellect?
The dreamlike way in which our lives connect; this is a good aim of art.
Driving around the city earlier in the evening I looked at all the houses and remembered how limited we are in our options of where to go. You live in a city of many thousands of buildings, but your city, the one your life actually happens in, is really comprised of only a handful of buildings.
You don’t see all the people other people chose not to be. People are made in very specific moments, quietly, invisibly, inside their heads, probably a long time ago.
Sometimes people say they have missed me and that they want to hang out, but they are people I have never really opened up to. I wonder who they think they will be hanging out with.
If there’s something that’s in our life that we value that we haven’t thought about in awhile, eventually it will pop back up in our thoughts. In this way we have a ‘cycle of thoughts’ that keeps rotating through the things we consider important. But if one thing falls off the cycle maybe we won’t really notice – there are so many things to cycle through, how can you keep track of one little thing that falls through the cracks? And maybe this would happen to a few things, and new things would subtly take their places in the rotation. This goes on until someday our cycle barely resembles the original cycle. And here we must wonder: are we each our own personal Ship of Theseus?
Most people think you only need to learn new words until you are about seventeen.
It is easy to do what the people around you are doing. It is hard to do what you value.
If you don’t work well with another person, either your hopes are not the same, or you disagree about how you would best achieve those hopes.
Everyone’s got a person they always love being around.
I feel like other people speak into my writing while they’re not even here. But I imagine what they would say and I try to account for it too. I try to make sure that yes, I think this, but this person would have this interpretation, and surely there’s something to that? But then I never say anything completely, purely, spontaneously. I am always partly other people. And I wonder, how much of me am I sacrificing so that I keep the idea that this other person makes sense. Maybe if I stripped away the layers of long-settled social dust I would see what I really thought, and that it is nothing like this other person says. But I want to keep my friends and so I convince myself that they must be right.
It is a very difficult thing to be honest.
What I’ve learned from relationship talk is that you should never try to predict the other person’s thoughts.
If you only argue in general, you will only prove in general. But there’s no person who is ‘in general’.
I hear all the things you do not ask; they say you do not care. Perhaps you did not think to ask them. But there are ways we should be that perhaps we do not know about. We must stay awake.
There are always subtle goals implied by your actions. If you talk about the best kind of investments, your goal is a financially successful life. If you talk about philosophy a lot, it’s to not have any friends. If you are always smiling, it’s to not face the bad things of life. I wonder what the goal of my life has accidentally turned out to be.
You spend all your time planning your pleasures. How much time do you spend planning others’ pleasures?
People who haven’t been loved carry around a need to be loved, and they react more negatively when they feel people are being critical rather than loving. If they had been affirmed in the past, they wouldn’t be so sensitive. Everyone needs someone they know will cheer them on, no matter what.
There is this idea of ‘reaching’ for people. Some people you want to know about, to understand, to be near them. You desire the experience of who they are, the things they do, the things they say, the thoughts they think. Not in a hugely intimate way, but just in a real one, one where you both realize it is good to know people, and so you are happy that there is someone else who knows the good things in life, and that they’re here and willing to partake in it. But when you only ever reach for people, and they stay on their perch, their ledge, and don’t even seem to realize that you’re doing this intentional reaching, it seems horrible, like you might as well not only just not be reaching, but that you might as well not even be there at all. Sometimes you wonder if you just floated around if people would reach for you.
You think your life will stay the same, but it all disappears.
The only question is – what does a man do who is only forced to, but does not truly exist in this world? When the world is not your home, how do you treat it?