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- A Romantic in a Tinder age — that’s how I imagine most young people see themselves, inside. We want to believe that we don’t absorb the spiritual air we breath; we want to believe we resist acclimation to the climate we live in. We don’t.
- I should give myself advice—I breath more and more of this intellectually filthy air. And I like it — that’s the scary part. Resistance is hard, submission is easy.
- I’m so used to having my time occupied by work, and so good at working on my writing while pretending to work, that I don’t know what to do with myself when snow gives me the day off — I lose time because I’m not used to having it.
4. Reading the letters of Austrian author Joseph Roth; letters of desperation and moral fatigue. Roth was a Jew writing at the beginning of the Nazi-era; an alcoholic, traumatized by poverty and his time in the Austrian army during WWI. I take a grim pleasure in Roth’s letters — which remind me what it’s like for someone to live for literature, even at the cost of life. Roth is a good antidote for trite “well-being” culture; self-help culture.
5. Why do we have to like who we are? I’ve always found the insistence on self-love to be a little delusional. Hate who you are: and then you might truly discover something about yourself. Hate burns through the lies we tell ourselves.
