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‘Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.’

“Eulogy from a Physicist” by Aaron Freeman, with quotes from Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, and images from NASA, Interstellar, Getty, Petrichara, and Reuters.

1- NASA: GOODS-South.

2- NASA: NGC 1850.

3- NASA: Iberian Peninsula.

4- Christopher Nolan: Interstellar.

5- NASA: From the Earth to the Moon.

6- Hannah La Folette Ryan: Subway Hands.

7- Adams Evans: Heart Nebula.

8- NASA: Exploring the Antennae.

9- NASA: Crescent Moon from the International Space Station.

10- Petrichara.

11- Getty Images.

12- NASA: SMACS 0723.

13- Reuters

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when jorge luis borges wrote in a copy of beowulf that he was working on translating, “beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”

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after the movie by Marie Howe

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I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

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desire is suffering

Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions, Frank Bidart ( @wahabibi ) | Dante and Virgil in Hell, William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Vestiges, Ángel García | Blasphemia, Eliran Kantor | So We Must Meet Apart, Jennifer S. Cheng ( @yoursoethereal ) | Prigione di Lacrime, Roberto Ferri | Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928-9; Sunday, November 4th, Simone de Beauvoir ( @theoptia ) | Ludwig Drahosch | War of the Foxes, Richard Siken ( @elfreys )

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A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

#tbr pile

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“But let me give you the dark side of writing groups. One really dark side of writing groups is, particularly newer writers, don’t know how to workshop.

“And one of the things they’ll try to do is they’ll try to make your story into the story they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.

“And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is not appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something else.

“New workshoppers are really bad at doing this. In other words, they’re really good at doing a bad thing, and they’re doing it from the goodness of their heart. They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely wrong for your story.”

—Brandon Sanderson, Lecture #1 Introduction, Writing Science Fiction And Fantasy

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Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.  But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond's big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.  Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . . 

#tbr pile

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Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.

#tbr pile

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In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

#tbr pile

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Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel’s seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.

#tbr pile

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Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.  Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? 

#tbr pile

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Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#fyodor loml fr

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From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right.

— Franz Kafka, Letter to my Father

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You were tired. You just wanted to get home. You were in an unfamiliar part of town.

You brought up the map on your phone. You tapped the saved ‘home’ marker.

The route began to unspool itself. The blue-light string rolled out to mark your path. As always.

Then it stalled. Stopped. A glitch of static. Suddenly, the route ran off the side of the map like a river breaking its banks.

That couldn’t be right. You flipped your phone upside down. Turned it side to side. The screen rotated, twisted, contorted to catch up. Still the strand of blue trailed off the map and into the void.

You closed the app. Reloaded. Tapped ‘home’ again. The same static thunder flash. The same trail, a loose thread in reality.

You entered your address manually. Same result.

You changed your starting point. Still, the suggested route twisted tantalisingly into the darkness.

You frowned. You tutted. You shrugged.

You followed the trail. You didn’t know why.

The trails led you across brightly lit roads. You expected alleys, but every path was illuminated in brilliant sodium. Light enough to cast a crown of shadows, but not dark enough to make you walk amongst them.

No, your map did not lead you into void. Instead, your path took you straight into the glare of the floodlights. You blinked against the real life lens flare. By the time you had blinked the spots out of your eyes, you were walking up a ray of 150-watt electric light.

You were already so high in the night. The path stretched up from the street lamps, spreading yellow like dandelion petals.

Your phone dangled from one hand, forgotten. But the app’s comet trail wriggled a happy dance in front of you, still leading the way.

Only five minutes from your destination now.

The city spread itself out beneath you, its highway arteries and concrete bones just patterns in the carpet under foot.

Three minutes.

The second-hand glare of a thousand thousand lamps, tail-lights, windows and adverts grew solid round you.

One minute.

An echo of the city limits welcomed you: ‘Now entering…’

In a cage made of light pollution, on a nest made of movement, the gods of the city welcomed you to their favourite haunt and offered you a tall glass of cool dreaming.

“We’ve been waiting for you.” They said.

“I know.” You said.

“We’re so afraid.”

“I know.”

“Will you help us?” They asked.

You smiled and sipped your drink.

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I ATE A BIG BAG OF FACTORY REJECT SEEDS UNTIL A HEALTHY FLOWER UNFURLED IN MY CHEST ...

I MISTOOK THE SENSATION FOR LOVE AND DIED.

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kurt vonnegut wrote "so it goes" and didn't even care that it would live in the back of my mind for the rest of my life