Michael > Recent Status Updates

"He quickly learned that that conversation had the potential to make him feel like he wanted to die. People under forty had optimism. They had optimism for the future; they didn't accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity. They had velocity. He couldn't bear velocity at that moment." (pg. 26)

"His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She'd apparently gotten three strikes. 'What a night,' she'd written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write, 'Enjoy this for now' or 'All desire is death.' It was best to stay off Facebook." (pg. 20)

"He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn't he just have regular, silly things?" (pg. 20)

"You always ride along with the elders with a cautious curiosity, afraid your time will come too and also comforted by their presence because age gaps are unbeatable." (pg. 116)

Really sat with this quote for a while, reflecting on the broader application of how I've had that feeling in so many spaces where I've been among my elders (in my discipline, field of study, life, church, and generally). It feels grateful.

"[B]eauty is the very principle of cycling." (pg. 107)

"[H]owever useful as tools, the obsession with figures amounts to a strange process of embalming. [...] Being the natural enemy of words (which vaguely and endlessly attempt to create meaning), measuring annihilates the possibility of a tale. [...] To pedal is to give a meaning to things, nothing more and nothing less. Cycling is a privileged way to inhabit that place where images are created." (pg. 106)

"Physical decline leads to the quest of other acmes, otherwise life would be unbearable. I am reaching the point where every one of looks back and stares at the undecipherable appearance of the path behind and bravely tries to believe that we are starting to understand." (pp. 105–106)

This resonated deeply and gave me pause. Even when we reach a stage where we can "look back" on life, we are still figuring it out.

Just wrapped up Chapter 11 and found myself going back to the mental images I have when I read Hemingway.

So much of his imagery and language (albeit originally in French and translated for this edition) in this chapter reminds me of Hemingway's writing and imagery in "A Moveable Feast" and "The Sun Also Rises." It's beautiful, rich, raw, stark, and vivid. You can feel it. Taste it. Smell it. Breathe it. I love it.

"Picture a street on which they sprint tirelessly, alone in their world, as usual. A street swarming with chairs and crossed legs, with packed terraces under the garlands, with crippled plane trees and money fountains littered with hard luck and small coins."

"His cranium at that very moment must look like the ceiling of a Renaissance nuptial bedroom, painted with bloody allegories, a mess of clouds and anger."

"He lives, like every time he rides and tries to ride fast, inside himself. ... He ignores his pain, he avoids it, he turns it down, he eludes it. He fools it. He moves along with it every time it comes too close, he lies to it. He moves it around, too: that is why he bites his tongue. A drop of blood to rush for, to take the pain to a part of the body where it cannot do any damage." (pp. 71–72)

"He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness."

"Once, God explained all mysteries. Now He has been usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age.”

Really loving this book. Loving the inner thoughts of the characters, bureaucratic tensions, and raw humanity of flawed people balancing their relationships to God and engagement with the broader earthly systems of power.

"Obviously, the peloton cannot be boiled down to its name....It is malleable, and that is an understatement: it is shaped by the wind, the road, and the goals of the individuals who compose it."

Recently began our last story from this compendium after finishing the story of Dengar. I forgot what a tragically beautiful story his was, and the boys loved it as well. Can’t wait to finish this (again) soon!

I really resonate with the idea of this quote. On the bike, it's me and nature around me. And much of the time, that's just how I want it to be.

“For me, it was all a matter of wind and barren horizon. I wanted to be alone on the brink of the world—nothing else mattered.”

We completed the story of Boba Fett and have now moved on to reading "The Prize Pelt" (the story of Bossk, who is on the hunt for Chewbacca and other Wookies as part of a religious quest). Enjoying the opportunities to refining my best Bossk voice, though not sure how accurate it is.

Riding is a release and painful shelter from a stormy world. I feel this.

“Every rider learns by pedaling to locate that wound inside and to tear it open fearlessly. Pedaling brings consistency to the thick and genuine void binding the skin to the world. […] From that day, like all riders, I did my best to spend as much time as possible away from the world, sheltered by that sweet rampart of familiar pain.”

Just finished up "The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett." LOVE IT. It gets better and I take something new from it every time I read it. I've read it a half dozen times now in my lifetime, and every time I love it. I love Boba Fett, and this story is such a fitting tribute to one of the heros I grew up adoring. Loved getting to share it with my boys and helping them fall in love with the complexity of my fav.

More bedtime reading for the kids. This book, admittedly, doesn't really lend itself to reading aloud. But, I'm enjoying the opportunity all the same... if only because of how metaphysical and esoteric the prose is about something so enjoyable as cycling. It is certainly above their age range, but I appreciate the opportunity to process that with the kids.

Read the first chapter to the boys at bedtime. While Grant's prose isn't nearly as succinct and simple as Hemingway's, it is direct and the logical progression of the things he is recounting has a similar feeling to Hemingway. Really impressed by how he so neatly captured his childhood in a single chapter, and EXTREMELY blown away (as were my boys) by how much he did (relative to today's kids) at such a young age.

"But too colorful a style often blurred the shades and ignored the absolute, limitless way to ride that turns training into asceticism and performance into a kind of gnosis. Too often, champions were celebrated only in the naïve light of their pure achievements—or worse, of their success—without recognizing how they were motivated by their unhappiness, their taedium vitae." —Olivier Haralambon

Started reading this to the boys for our bed time reading, and instantly fell in love. Scratches the perfect itch of waxing poetic about cycling, while also tapping into the philosophy I loved reading in undergrad. It's like Foucault and some of the greatest names in cycling had a metaphysical baby... and it's perfect. Can't wait to read more.