Shaan

“I’ve become more aware of myself. Because of the situation. Now that I’m no I’m leaving, I see things differently. I’ve been aware of little things that I would have missed before.
‘Like what?’
Like seeing the sun shine off the roof of our old barn. I saw that this morning and stood there, looking at it. I found it moving. It was beautiful - it really was. I don’t usually think about if a landscape is beautiful or not, but I couldn’t control this feeling. I saw it and recognized that it was beautiful. But you know what? It made me sad.
‘Sad?’ I can hear him typing. He’s trying to do it quietly, but I can hear. ‘Why?’
I don’t know. I have no idea.
‘Because beauty is fleeting, maybe?’
No, I say. It’s the opposite. Beauty isn’t fleeting. Beauty is eternal. But . . . I’m not. I’m fleeting. That’s more the point.
He’s typing stops abruptly.
‘ that’s quite profound. You do seem more self-aware and introspective them when I first arrived. It makes me think of Baudelaire: ‘ I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy’.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust