Warm Recollections #33
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
A thief in an empty house.
Just as columns humanize space, certain life events humanize time. Without those events (birth, death, and a few others) we would be lost, uncomfortable — and time, instead of being three dimensional and explicable, turns into a flat infinite plane in which it is impossible to place oneself.
Language is the architecture of understanding, the columns we place in the world which enable us to make sense, to draw distinctions, and to place ourselves in reality. Events are the words of time, just as language is the columns of understanding, and architecture is the ‘events’ of space.
Doing something you don’t like can be much more active and existential and soul-awakening than something you do like. So it’s worth doing those things, and occasionally even seeking them out.
Quite nice to have an uncashed cheque for £50 from one’s dead mother: as if one always has credit there.
“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
— William Saroyan
We have all been invisible at some point in our lives.
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"Doing something you don't like can be much more active and existential and soul-awakening than something you do like." — that's basically what I tell my kids when they ask me why they need to go to school. And no, they don't believe me. But one day ...
I have such a check from my mother though she's not dead. She's caught in the inbetween of dementia. I found the check while sorting through her things after we'd moved her to a care home. It was meant to be a birthday present but she forgot. I'll treasure it forever.