Eric > Recent Status Updates

"It was in the nature of authority to fear purity more than any sort of corruption."

"Each passing year, never failing to exact its toll, keeps altering what was sublime into the stuff of comedy. Is something eaten away? If the exterior is eaten away, is it true, then, that the sublime pertains by nature only to an exterior that conceals a core of nonsense? Or does the sublime indeed pertain to the whole, but a ludicrous dust settles upon it?"

Rich in seppuku.

"How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth."

Book 2 🇯🇵

"She belonged to a generation of women who had thought nothing of washing their dinner plates in a river while corpses went floating past. That was life!"

"Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border."

"... when traversing a world of unceasing flux, the only thing of importance was to radiate beauty."

From a few pages back... "Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch."

"History is a record of destruction."

"Dreams, memories, the sacred-they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

#13

"I send my letter into the air, remembering to show gratitude to nature, to bow my head, to have compassion for those who have not a loaf of bread, nor bed to sleep in, the weary vagabonds who yet somehow find ways to experience the exaltation of existence."

"We are on this chessboard Earth, we attempt to make our moves, but at times it seems as if the great hand of a disinterested giant haphazardly sends us on a trajectory of stumbling. What do we do? We step back and seek within ourselves what is needed to be done and serve the best we can."

"A profound if not scarring breach. I understood in that moment that one must discern between a dream and a calling."

"That is something I can do, sit quietly, go elsewhere and not return empty-handed."

"All the pennies in the world can't buy our Toyland back. The threshold is etched with notches we unwittingly carve ourselves."

"The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels."

"If time was meaningless to God, why must we suffer it?"

Obstacles are our wings.
NIKOLAI GOGOL

Patti Smith might be the greatest memoirist.