Being profound and seeming profound. – Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

-Nietzsche

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19

Going to the rest room is the most
efficient means of self-jettisoning.
Never betray urgency, not even in an
empty hallway.
If you have no idea in which direction your
Designated Mate has gone, hold still.
If you find yourself hovering beside a pair
of glass doors, you may open them and
step outside.
Nights in the South of France are a
strange, dark, piercing blue.
A bright moon can astonish, no matter
how many times you have seen it.
If you were a child who loved the moon,
looking at the moon will forever remind
you of childhood.
Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a
certain paternal promise.
Everyone has a father.
A vague story like “Your father died before
you were born” may satisfy a curious child
for an unlikely number of years.
The truth of your paternity, discovered in
adulthood, will make the lie seem
retroactively ludicrous.
Publicists occasionally have flings with
their movie-star clients.
Discovering that you are a movie star’s
daughter is not necessarily a comfort.
It is especially not a comfort when the star
in question has seven other children from
three different marriages.
Discovering that you are a movie star’s
daughter may prompt you to watch
upward of sixty movies, dating from the
beginning of his career.
You may think, watching said movies, You
don’t know about me, but I am here.
You may think, watching said movies, I’m
invisible to you, but I am here.
A sudden reconfiguration of your past can
change the fit and feel of your adulthood.
It may cleave you, irreparably, from the
mother whose single goal has been your
happiness.
If your husband has transformed greatly in
his own life, he will understand your
transformation.
Avoid excessive self-reflection; your job is
to look out, not in.

- Jennnifer Egan’s “Black Box” written via The New Yorker’s Twitter feed.
Read more here.

“Hot noon in the meadows. The buttercups
Swelter and melt, and the lovers
Pass by, pass by.
They are black and flat as shadows.
It is so beautiful to have no attachments!
I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”

— Three Women, Sylvia Plath

*
It’s strange when Mondays are not like Mondays but feel like Sundays.
For Sundays has its peeling cloth of fine gossamer thread
that spins the final end of its turn.

And Mondays have the catch in the yard,
the gasp in the dying week, when joy
unfailing, the hours rise again, born.

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?”

— Milan Kundera, Slowness