Tag: reading

Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China Cool story with 43min audio

Writing can be ridiculous. And yet despite the obvious problems and omissions there’s something—a kind of feeling, a structure, a tone—gesturing there. That something springs not from experience or information but from their synthesis and growth in my imagination. Each time I try to do this, I relearn the lesson that I can’t, during the…

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I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.…

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Zoroastrians crossing to the next world, from Valerie Hansen’s The Silk Road

Bergson on Consciousness & Memory

“If you abolish my consciousness … matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations, which…

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