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The shit I underline in books.

@shitiunderline / shitiunderline.tumblr.com

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The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something - a thought, I guess - as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings - that time could be contained, held captive. I didn't know what was true. So I did not step back. Instead, I put my hand out. I touched the frame of the painting.

Otessa Moshfegh, My year of rest and relaxation

#my year of rest and relaxation#otessa moshfegh
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But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings and things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise. I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them. Did they wonder about things like that? Maybe they couldn't sleep at night. Were they plagued by nightmares? Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.

Otessa Moshfegh, My year of rest and relaxation

#otessa moshfegh#my year of rest and relaxation
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He promised me that he would lock me up and keep my sleeping prison a secret, that he wouldn't allow anyone to accompany him into my apartment, not an assistant, not even a cleaning person. If he was going to bring in props or furniture or materials, he'd have to bring them in himself, and above all, each time he went away, no trace of his activities could be left. Not a scrap. When I came to on the third day of each infermiterol blackout, there was to be no evidence of what had happened since my last awakening. There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.

Otessa Moshfegh, My year of rest and relaxation

#otessa moshfegh#my year of rest and relaxation
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I should have felt something - a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that - if I were in a movie - would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life's most meaningful moments: my first steps: Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn't hit. These weren't my memories. I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don't. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself - the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. So I called the estate lawyer. 'What would make more money?' I asked him. 'Selling the house, or burning it down?'

Otessa Moshfegh, My year of rest of relaxation

#otessa moshfegh#my year of rest and relaxation
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They didn't ask if I was okay, if I wanted to talk. They all avoided me. Only a few left notes under my door. "I'm so sorry you're going through this!" Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not 'being more open.'

Otessa Moshfegh, My year of rest and relaxation

#otessa moshfegh#my year of rest and relaxation#this feeling is so real
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I wanted to hold on to the house the way you'd hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding onto the loss, to the emptiness of the home itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.

Otessa, Moshfegh, My year of rest and relaxation

#otessa moshfegh#my year of rest and relaxation
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Grant says it makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtuous circle of proactivity, in other words.

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that can’t stop talking

#quiet#susan cain
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In the Repoetic everything will be perfect, while in our present prehistory the poem is never perfect and even when it would be, requires an effort that precisely implies an escape and denotes captivity.

Saint-Pol-Roux, La Repoetique

#saint-pol-roux#la repoetique
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yes, there is a poet that is just ever slightly 'younger' and 'fresher' than you close enough behind you to squish your shadow and they are reminding you that it's actually evil to say 'clean snow is good' because it is some obscure ~ism they know and you don't (or you do know but didn't conspicuously let everyone else know you know), and that it's actually super disrespectful to write about a snow that's anything other than filthy and riddled with plastic waste [because 'Dark Ecology,' which you want to point out is largely the same as a ton of Indigenous thought but don't point out because it hurts you to hurt others with knowledge (because you used to be very good at that)] which you had mentioned in an earlier published draft excerpt of The Repoetic with the dog shit, but when you messaged the younger poet about that they said that was "so suburban" of you, and sure, you'd always thought yourself trapped in an exurban condition (even though you grew up on a farm), but the point here is not to dwell on the fact that poets that might have been part of your generation (if "generation" wasn't a shrinking category with diminishing returns in an atomized bad neoliberal hellbroth world) are spineless (bad) cowards (okay, it's okay to be scared, just breathe) and don't know how to talk about work unless it's pity porn by marginalized writers (but of course they've never read that work even though they wield it like a cudgel) and they could've been your friend if they weren't traumatized into a mediocre competetiveness and they could've been your friend but you, you idiot poet, you are just a few too many memes behind the times. They're unhappy too, you see, there's this vicious jackal at their heels and they just don't know what to write about and don't want to get their first job ever before finishing their fully-funded phd on cumshit poetics; you get it. So, breathe: don't be a boob, bub.

Benjamin C. Dugdale, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux

#benjamin c. dugdale#the repoetic: after saint-pol-roux#FAVE
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The fib erglass splinters in your father's hands are distracting the congregation. They glimmer with work and anger and itch. They draw attention to his callouses, to the omitted index digit, and the sable forked tongue of the cleaved thumbnail, its cuticle a mauve rupt eyelid. The congregation was distracted by this, and so they asked him to soak his hands in the baptismal bowl at intermission (we are a progressive group, here), with most vocal surveil, scowl at the grease on his shirt cuff, the curdled purple gunkhunk curled logy then loping in to fowl the holy wet mirror. But how soft it makes his palm when he rustles your crown, your head buried by the phonebook fog of multiplication tables. Those driven shards of light at the threshold of his flesh, scared to death to find what comes next, listening for the voice of god on the other side of the door.

Benjamin C. Dugdale, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux

#benjamin c. dugdale#the repoetic: after saint-pol-roux
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When we speak of Earthly We mean earthly in the way critics described all Rock Hudson's Sirk roles As in the earth is a beloved faggot as well It too watches the death of whole generations of those it loves, it too will wither and blink out one day of heartbreak because when everyone you love is sick you are sick too; making it into the house before the door closes and the frost sets in means you alone wil[l/t] from the window, all the warmth up in the cupola, "out of my hands" it says, thinning and grinning into neoliberal nothingness The Earth gives its early thumbs up to the environmental impact assessment for the permits to build The Repoetic on so-called "Crown Land"

Benjamin C. Dugdale, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux

#benjamin c. dugdale#the repoetic: after saint-pol-roux
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""Respect for individual human personality has with us reached its lowest point," observed one intellectual in 1921, "and it is delightfully ironical that no nation is so constantly talking about personality as we are. We actually have schools for 'self-expression' and 'self-development,' although we seem usually to mean the expression and development of the personality of a successful real estate agent.""

- Susan Cain, Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking

#susan cain#quiet
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In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.

Annie Dillard, For the time being

#annie dillard#for the time being
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No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.

Annie Dillard, For the time being

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"The blue light of television flickers on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun itself, but night, and the two thousand visible stars. Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the real world. He had looked into this matter of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: "How do you stand the wind out hear?" I don't. Not for long. I drive a schoolkids' car pool. I shouted back, "I don't! I read Consumer Reports every month!" It seemed unlikely that he heard. The wind blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee. I do not know how long he stayed out. A little at a time does for me - a little every day."

Annie Dillard, For the time being

#annie dillard#for the time being
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"Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banal year."

Annie Dillard, For the time being

#annie dillard#for the time being
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How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.  Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet.

Max Porter, Grief is the thing with feathers

#grief is the thing with feathers#max porter