Rational Perception: Archive

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

Dec 7, 2011

“I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

Dec 7, 2011

“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

Dec 7, 2011

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

Dec 7, 2011

“Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.” —Jonathan Safran Foer (via black-wolves)

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Jack Siegel: Peer Pressure

http://www.jacksiegel.com/

Dec 6, 2011

“Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, I remain unconvinced that the distinction matters.” —Joan Didion

Dec 6, 2011

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Dec 6, 2011

Dec 5, 2011

Guess what? College wasn’t the best time of my life.

Dec 5, 2011

Dec 1, 2011

Rational Perception

December 2011

53 posts