“There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It’s not something we are practised at as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it’s too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves.”
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
“But, in a way, that sense of death being present, and all those wild, traumatized feelings that went with it, ultimately gave us this weird, urgent energy. Not at first, but in time. It was an energy that allowed us to do anything we wanted to do. Ultimately, it opened up all kinds of possibilities and a strange reckless power came out of it. It was as if the worst had happened and nothing could hurt us, and all our ordinary concerns were little more than indulgences. There was a freedom in that.”
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
“I don’t fear death. It’s more that I just don’t want to lose any more people, because I love them and love having them around. But, of course, we can’t make these cosmic covenants: we can’t bargain with God. It’s like asking the world to stop turning. So you learn to make peace with the idea of death as best you can. Or rather you reconcile yourself to the acute jeopardy of life, and you do this by acknowledging the value in things, the precious nature of things, and savouring the time we have together in this world. You learn that the binding agent of the world is love.”
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
“[T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
“To be awed. To experience a communal sense of awe. I can feel it on stage and see it in people’s eyes. And I experience it too. It’s certainly something I have felt many, many times at other artists’ concerts. It’s about reaching an essential and shared state through music – sometimes for a moment, sometimes for an entire concert. We’ve all experienced that. Not just a physical release, although there is that, too, but to be held by an artist at the crucial moment of expression – to be awed, second by second, at the way a song or piece of music unfolds, to be held on the edge of tears by the drama of it all, and to be, as an audience member, an essential participant in the drama itself. That is a wonderful thing. […] So thank God, quite literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder. […] These are sacred moments.”
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
― Faith, Hope and Carnage
Jonathan’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Jonathan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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