Quotes

Sometimes I touch the things you used to touch, looking for the echoes of your fingers.

Foer:
"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."

"The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you."

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."

Emiliana Torrini

Two amazing videos from one of my favorite singers.

Switzerland

Early on a winter’s morning, a train speeds into a mountain. At least it looks that way. Really a tunnel gutted through the mountain swallows the train and spits it out into more snow. The train circles an impossibly blue lake before dropping off travelers, many of them struggling in their ski boots, in the Interlaken Ost station.
Interlaken, Switzerland is a tiny town surrounded by mountains. It is as if the brown shops and houses are a wooden floor and the mountains are four walls surrounding it. The mountains are wallpaper samples of scratchy dark pine trees, pillow soft snow and, closer to the base, jagged tan rock. Fog hangs about them, as if they are exhaling hot breath into bitter air. Clouds cast shadows, but when they move aside the sunlight burns into the snow causing it to sparkle like the lake’s water. Houses are built into the mountains and crammed along the clear water’s edge.
…
“How do the people who live there get to their houses?” asks a young train passenger.
“They fly. They think happy thoughts that lift them to their houses,” her older companion explains. The young woman laughs.
“No, but really.”
“There must be a path, maybe it is on the other side of the mountain. We just can’t see it from here.”
“I can’t even imagine what that must be live. Everyday. Living here.”
…
The houses in the heart of the town, for those who are not lucky enough to live on a snowy mountain, are like dollhouses. They come in a variety of colors, sweet sugar pink, mint green, as if the painter had just visited one of the many confectionary shops and thought to himself “well, this seems like a good idea.” The walls of these Victorian style houses are rough to the touch, unlike the smooth brown homes toward the western side of town.
…
A toyshop is nestled between a watch and chocolate shop. “How very Swiss!” a tourist says. The toyshop is bright and gives off a feeling of magic like only toyshops can. It feels like it could make anybody a child again. Every treasure is hand carved out of light colored wood. Sleds with curlicue handlebars line the windowsill, as if they are in constant need of a mountain view. Little dolls with rosy painted cheeks hold the red Swiss flag with a white cross on it. There is a basket full of tops; many of them are also painted with the nation’s flag. There is a shelf lined with simple wooden cows, all identical and all adorned with golden bells around their necks.
Out the window, past the sleds, it starts to snow yet again. This is snow that stays cold enough to keep its individual form when it lands. You can see every crevice and every crystal. In mere moments there will be more snow on the mountains, more snow on the colorful houses, more snow on the sleds accidentally left outside by children lucky enough to live in houses you have to float to.

Pictures

Tree

Maybe trees get tired, too. Maybe this tree decided, after standing tall for hundreds of years, that it just wanted to rest its eyes, like so many grandmothers after long walks. Maybe the leaning downward, the sinking to its side, took another hundred years until the tree is mostly horizontal.
This tree has its reasons to be so sleepy, I’m sure of that. If I were the type who needed to know things, I would cruelly cut the tree and count the rings of its trunk. It would not be easy—there would be hundreds of circles encircling circles, like stains from coffee mugs always set on the same place. I know the tree is old. I know the tree is older than I will ever be. Its entire body is gnarled like aging hands no one wants to hold and the roots have deteriorated into paper-thin tubes. Along the trunk the wood bubbles into jagged lumps. They look like clusters of rough eyes, or like barnacles clinging to sea rocks. Maybe this tree is confused, like grandmothers who believe they are in the circus, walking the tightropes. This tree thinks it’s underwater. It gives off a wet smell and in each crevice and every hollow knot the soil is damp and dank. It is as though the tree lived underwater and one day sprang up to attach its roots to something more permanent than shifting sand.
Though the trunk is practically lying on the ground, the branches have kept their youthful ambition. They twist around each other at odd angles, each detour taking twenty years to make. These are lackadaisical branches, taking their time on their journey to the sky. Somehow they knew that they would have an eternity to get there. The branches have all the time in the world for winding journeys and spontaneous side streets. Each thick branch ends in a delicate twig and from every twig a pod drips down. They are long and brown, like fibrous vanilla beans. Tiny birds flutter from bean to bean, shaking them like wooden wind chimes. On the trunk of the tree the soft carpet of moss is slightly worn down, perhaps from humans looking for a seat. But up where only little bird feet walk the moss is lush and dark.
Wait. Maybe this tree is so old it is not even living. How can you tell if a tree is dead? Maybe I visited on the day of her wake. Perhaps the moss and the birds were saying goodbye to a tree that had lived for so long.
I would rather not believe that. I like to think that instead of ‘goodbye’ this grandmother tree constantly whispers ‘goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.’ She sighs the words with every twinkle of her vanilla beans, with every inch she lays herself down and with every young girl she hold in her wrinkled arms. Eternally going to sleep, but never sleeping.