Joshua

“Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“I really just want someone to come over and brush my hair or let me cry in their lap while they pet my head and tell me I'll be okay." And I cried harder because I felt so ashamed to want that from a friend—from someone who was not a romantic partner or a parent⁠—because I didn't have either right now but I still wanted it. We section off physical comfort and intimacy so heavily. We reserve it for partners only, and platonic friends can only chit-chat and that's it. How can you tell people to be okay with being single while also telling them they can only get the basic human needs of physical touch from not being single?”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

“I can barely forgive myself for the time when I negged Billy from my improv troupe onstage. He said, “I have a gift for you,” and my first instinct was to say, “No you don’t.” The scene died right then and there. See what happens when I try to nurture something? I know it seems dramatic to relate destroying an improv scene to possibly destroying a child’s life, but improv and child rearing are not so different. Both are jobs that people volunteer for and complain about endlessly, and they bore everyone around them as they talk about the process.”
― Jen Kirkman, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids

“Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves or looked like we were playing by ourselves.

I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played, seems to play back.

If playing isn't happiness or fun, if it is something which may lead to those things or to something else entirely, not being able to play is a misery. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to--there were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block'. For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

Fairy tales and myths are often about this very thing. They begin sometimes with this very situation: a dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It's a good way to say it, that something alive is gone. The television eased the problem by presenting channels to an ever-lively world I could watch, though it couldn't watch me back, not that it would see much if it could. A girl made of stone facing a flickering light, 45 years later a woman made of stone doing the same thing.

In a myth or a fairy tale one doesn't restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can't be done by logic or thought. It can't be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done?

Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.”
― Lynda Barry, What It Is