When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say // By Arab-American Poet Hala Alyan

« What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals. »

Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” In L’Infra-ordinaire

« Left alone, I washed up, changed into the Dr. Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time - the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door. »

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

« The town looked golden and antique and the mountains next to us were covered with thin pine trees. Beirut, from this bench, was like a dream, a winding staircase of awkward memories and people who no longer were, who one day would no longer be. »

Nur Turkmani, Black Hole (Source: Rusted Radishes)

« Julian walks into the Duomo and a rush of cool air washes over him. There is a small group of students standing before the altar, and a few people are sitting in the pews. He finds a seat near the apse and rests his eyes briefly, before resuming his tour of the cathedral while listening to the Mahler symphony again on his headphones. Parts of the first movement have always struck him as discordant. Yet somehow the mess of interlocking notes works. It seems to him that the Gothic vaults and imposing columns of the cathedral share this quality of dissonance. He remembers vaguely something that Aidan once told him, that architecture could be likened to music; that music is, in turn, liquid architecture. And if music is a temporal art—the division and expansion of notes in time—that meant architecture, as petrified music, is frozen time. »

Christine Lai, Landscapes

« A man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall where a spiraling basilica of shadows was pierced by shafts of light from a high glass dome above us. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked. ‘Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.’ »

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

Maria Popova, We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive

« Why do we travel? Why do we put ourselves through all the discomfort that moving across great distances and staying in faraway, foreign lands usually entails? My theory is that nature has equipped us with deceitful, flawed memories. That is why we forever set off on new adventures. Once we are home again, the discomfort transforms itself into amusing anecdotes, or is forgotten. Memory is not linear, it is more like a diagram full of points – high points – and the rest is empty. Memory is also abstract. Seen from the future, past discomfort seems almost unreal, like a dream. »

Erika Fatland, Sovietistan

« I thought there was something wrong with the way the departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t literature classified by word count? Why wasn’t science classified by country? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology? What made something a religion and not a philosophy? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history? Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly? Why was there no department of love? »

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

— Sarah Bakewell, from “Sarah Bakewell on Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and What it Actually Means to be ‘Human’” (via LitHub)