There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib, r. Apr. 2025

p. 8 Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian. And my father was a man who enjoyed a meal.

p. 20 This is a miracle of the past – one that many young folks might not have the opportunity to indulge in now. Hearing word of something, someone, some brewing storm. Hearing before seeing, building up the myth before confirming it.

p. 33 And this barber told me never to pull the gray weeds from the dark garden, for they might simply grow back with a newfound ferocity. An anger at their removal, he told me. You don't want to make an enemy out of the grays, he told me one day, while lining me up. Best to just thank them for showin' up to the party. Lucky you got a party for them to show up to.

p. 34 Lord, release me from whatever might make me wish for the way I looked as a child, which I can hardly remember through this beautiful fog of mortality, this slow march to the kingdom.

p. 52 The heart doesn't break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere many of us can't even recall. It accelerates in bursts throughout a life; sometimes it hums along at its steady pace. But with the accumulation of enough pain and the promise of more to come, we can only carry ourselves so far.

p. 63 I have sat at the feet of poets who told me that there is power in withholding. In not offering the parts of yourself that people are most eager to see.

p. 74 Look, I love you and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if it is sudden. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands.

p. 90 I don’t remember when Brookhaven High School closed, though I remember wondering what they were going to do with all of the trophies, all of the banners. If they’d just be gone forever. I remember thinking that there is no success that can stop a school from closing, a building from being emptied out, encased by tall, unkempt weeds. Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

p. 112 I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.

p. 150 But if you didn’t mind shrinking, becoming invisible in the terror of the slowly descending hours, it was good to have claim to a corner that was yours and yours alone. A king remains a king, no matter how paltry the square footage of their realm.

p. 160 Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

p. 174 I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough. By this I mean that I get it. The sun dances from behind the gray, and I want the warmth. The trees are trying to fight back to life, and I root for them. But then, I think, what will become of this misery that I've held? That I've kept for myself, that I've made my own? I know my way around this. I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives. I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know.

p. 225 I like a long, aimless road trip for how it flirts with the act of leaving but never fully commits. You get to try on the outfits of different sunrises through a car window for however long you want, and then you return to the familiar colors of where you are, where your things are...

p. 227 I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

p. 316 And it is both beautiful and heartbreaking to imagine this, that we go on living while a past version of ourselves remains locked, peacefully, in a euphoric dream. What I have been asking, the door I have been pawing at this entire time, is for a reimagining of eternity. A reversal, perhaps. Not that our happiest, freest selves are fastened to a dream, while we exit and return to the living world. But that our exit is where the dreaming begins, and our real, actual living is the place where we remain at our most joyous, time moving forward by small inches, each of us growing only seconds older with each passing year. 

Real Americans by Rachel Khong, r. Apr. 2025

Page 9 I followed his gaze to the New York City street, where nothing appeared out of the ordinary: people, pigeons, bags of trash. Holding the bagel steady, the father’s mind traveled elsewhere. It was a look I remembered my mother wearing when I was a child—one I resented. How dare she think of anything but me?

Page 9 On the four blocks to the office I dodged tourists wearing backpacks and bucket hats, holding red bags from the discount designer store. They moved slowly, their faces stupid with awe. I walked fast, with purpose, gripping the cup of coffee, which burned through its cardboard sleeve, proud to be inured to a cityscape that instilled marvel in everyone else.

Page 28 We were halfway through our second bottle of wine, a Napa cabernet, and I washed the venison down with it. The wine felt drying on my tongue, perfect to chase the butter and meat, making me want more of both.

Page 36 Both were geneticists. But to my father, science was a job. He had friends and other interests. Whereas my mother was a scientist like someone might be a painter—wholly, and obsessively. It was her entire life.

Page 45 I wasn’t not drunk. The world around me was fuzzy and golden. It was a new year. That always made me a little bit sad. As though something were wrong with the old one.

Page 47 “I hate that I need to sell it. I would paint for nothing, you know? But I have to live. In art as a product there is no longer patience, or presence—only commodity.”

Page 92 When we tried to catch up there was oddly little to say. He could summarize the past two years, and I could do the same, in a matter of sentences. It should have required more—recounting the time—and yet I could have said more about my day than I could two years.

Page 96 She took me to her lab when I was nine, I told Matthew. I realized I’d never shared this story with anyone. I was still ashamed. It had happened so long ago and should have been absorbed into the comprehensible past—a tellable anecdote, like any other story from my childhood—as distant as myth. And yet, perhaps because I hadn’t aired it, it felt recent, and painful. She’d hoped that I’d fall in love with the work of becoming a research scientist, the way she once had. She’d hoped I might be seduced, as she had. But to me, the fact that everything was invisible rendered it nonexistent. It was terribly simple of me. All I saw were hands in blue gloves, pipetting clear liquids into petri dishes—I couldn’t make sense of it. I must have seemed bored. I must not have asked the questions she wished I would ask. Afterward, when I begged to get ice cream, she said no, that we were going home. She was like a child who had been refused, and was lashing out. And like that, we were both upset. I knew, then, that I had disappointed her irrevocably. I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naïve of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything. I remembered so clearly the disappointment on her face, the fear that I would never amount to anything—anything significant, anyway. And to date, she was right: I hadn’t. I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her. She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.

Page 103 When the other Lily said brunch I had pictured a crowded, shared table, elbow to elbow with hungover New Yorkers wearing sunglasses, prattling in an attempt to keep night-before regrets at bay. This wasn’t that. We met at a hotel—her suggestion. She was in the lounge area when I arrived. She stood and gave me a bony, floral hug.

Page 108 At the bottom of the staircase, two women greeted us, beaming—our stewardesses. They looked cold, with their thin-stockinged legs. I’d always thought gams was an odd word to mean “legs,” but their legs—long like arms—looked exactly like gams.

Page 112 Somehow, though of course all this had been finely calibrated by people doing invisible work. The steel refrigerator was without smudges, the beds tautly made. The fridge was bare but for glass bottles of sparkling water, inert as bowling pins.

Page 112 “Is this what you expected?” he asked, and I had to laugh. How could I have known to imagine this?

Page 113 His Florida was so different from the one I had known. Gleaming and polished, not mossy and mildewing. The condo was too high for the mosquitoes to reach us.

Page 119 Hans stuck his slobbery goatee into one of my hands, and I petted him with the other. I liked meeting dogs and children, with their low expectations.

Page 127 Matthew’s brother, Thomas, should have been the one to take over. He’d planned to study medicine. But he was gone—forever nineteen, younger than Matthew was now. Matthew’s eyes grew wet.

Page 130 On the Fourth, the family’s fisherman friend stopped by with a cooler of seafood and a box of live lobsters, who scratched at the cardboard from inside with rubber-banded claws. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to be in a box. They had no idea that death was even on the table.

Page 210 In the mornings, John and I watched the sky shift, to pink, then blue, or more often gray, which was how it stayed most days, beyond the trees, silver as a shell. The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.

Page 222 This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

Page 225 “Just do your best,” my mother had said in the morning. Even college was optional, she insisted. “You don’t have to go to college just because everyone else is.” Often she said this when she noticed how late I stayed up to study. What mattered was that I found what I loved to do, she said. At some point. There was no rush when it came to that, either. I appreciated what she was trying to do—other kids’ parents pressured them to fulfill their own forfeited childhood dreams—at the same time it annoyed me. It did matter to me. I wanted to do well in the conventional ways—having no other metrics, not knowing how else to measure myself.

Page 244 Slow down, I said to my heart. In biology we’d watched an animation of the organ: It looked tortured, writhing with every beat. It was so weird, that a heart could just go on beating—the same one—for years, until it stopped.

Page 262 From my seat, I refreshed my email. It was embarrassing, to feel the hope rise up and then, immediately, evaporate. A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.

Page 272 It was only after seeing the trees here, I realized, that I could describe what home was like.

Page 280 “You’re being a fucking idiot,” he said. “Be hurt if you want to. Sometimes I think you like it, being sad. It gives you, like, a personality.

Page 298 As a child I had learned the names of trees and birds and reptiles from paperback field guides. Now I could take a photo of anything—a beetle, a shrub—and be informed, within seconds, what it was. There was no need to wait or write down a question for later. It was a paradox: Though the results came quickly, hours passed easily this way.

Page 303 Campus was eerie, empty. Snow began to fall. I remembered, as a kid, seeing snow for the first time—my surprise that snowflakes actually looked as advertised. I’d expected they would be like the sun: drawn one way in childish pictures but more boring in real life.

Page 310 I’d seen her at Commons on occasion, eating with her friends. She never noticed me. Rarely in groups did you notice those who were alone. It only worked the other way around.

Page 316 I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled: friends’ vacations and dinners, graphics about police brutality, raccoons joyfully eating watermelon. I could feel her eyes on me, judging my phone use. It was irritating.

Page 318 My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.

Page 340 “Earth to Nick,” she sometimes said to me. “You’re not here. You’re in your head.” “Where should I be?” I’d ask. And she would take my hand in hers: warm, physical, alive. “Be here,” she’d say. “With me.”

Page 391 It’s sad that I’m dying, but why doesn’t it work in reverse? Do you ever think, how sad it is that when I was alive, you weren’t yet born? All those interesting years you missed out on.

Page 395 Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.

Page 359 I wonder if you can understand this: that the way I loved her was different from the way she wanted to be loved. Every day of my life – and there are not many more now – I will regret this.

Page 363  She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn't. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable. Her life was small, and rich, and entirely hers. She had Nick. She had the women friends she played mahjong with and fellow swimmers from the pool. Children from the day care, where she worked; patients at the hospice center, where she volunteered. Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable —more remarkable-for the fact of differences. Friendship didn't require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.

Page 370 Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another's lives – that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up living like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Page 371 At times I feel like a bird, trailing in the wake of the younger and faster. I feel my bones losing their density, becoming hollow and avian.

Private Equity by Carrie Sun, r. Feb. 2025

Page 14

The finishes were opulent—marble, glass, steel, wood, and leather in shades of beige and cream, tinseled

with cobalt—but that was not what got me. Most offices I had known had harsh fluorescent lighting

reminding you that you were hard at work. Here, the light raying from the seamless ceiling, softened

through distance and angles and filters, glowed. It mixed with nature, with its reflection off Central

Park, and caused whoever was in the room to feel alive with the same starry force that made the view—

the sky, the moon, heaven, and earth.

Page 16

This was the culture from which I was trying to escape, evinced by an offhand remark a coworker at

Fidelity made to me one night: “I basically sit on my ass and do nothing and make millions. What could

be better than that?”

Page 62

I was promoted, and a year later promoted again, to a co–portfolio manager, but I was not sure I

deserved any of this: workers around the world were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings as

I watched my base and bonus and profit sharing go up and up and up with, honestly, very little effort on

my part—and this felt cosmically wrong. I did not feel like I was adding value to the world. I felt

insulated from harm, disconnected from humanity. I had to get out.

Page 62

An affair would be so inefficient.

Page 73

Jamie said he valued, in order of importance, family, humanity, country, then his company. J.P.

Morgan—last. I did not, for a second, doubt that he believed he held those values.

Page 91

But this kind of positive, helpful bias toward a subset of people (as opposed to a negative, harmful bias

toward those not in the set) nevertheless results in social hierarchy and tiered societies.

Page 92

I could not help but observe other people’s wrap jobs. We were efficient, until we were wasteful; we

were world-class until we weren’t. Without inflation I’d have to give Boone the same grade as I would

give his microwaving skills: B.

Page 97

I questioned my reality and doubted my doubt, unsure if I felt nothing or something or perhaps

everything.

Page 140

“Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will

be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me

that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise.

People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the

genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to

encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel

like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will,

followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here

could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your

experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a

lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest,

winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.

3

Page 159

He was unmoved by temptation, manias, fads; pinned behind his monitor was a quote from Steve Jobs:

“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”

Page 162

The name of the game at Carbon, at least with Boone, was modesty, downplaying, understatement.

Acting like a start-up when you’re the clear incumbent because concealing your position—being

underestimated—lets you have a much bigger playbook.

Page 195

I spent every second reacting to the world, reacting as though a virus had infected my phone and

toggled all the switches to allow notifications to flash/buzz/sound all the time. If, as Boone believed,

how you spent your days was how you lived your life, then I was not in control of my life.

Page 195

I had urgency fatigue.

Page 195

Work felt like a series of nested em dashes, living inside a sentence that could never reach its period.

Page 237

I have never voted. Some of this is the result of an intentional deprioritization of politics; but most of it

is because some other part of me knows how much I feel compelled to identify with winners, which

scares me: I fear I might sympathize with the wrong team.

Page 269

No. There was only money. Everything else was a side effect.

Page 270

If you have the highest returns and the highest pay, nearly everything will solve itself because the

people—internal workers and external LPs—will convince themselves that they want to be a part of

your mission. Greed is good because it makes things predictable. No need to coerce or enforce or foist

any delusions when you have people volunteering to do the labor of self-persuasion.

Page 300

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 300

But the unconscious mind is an ocean where the conscious mind is a wave; I’m much more like her than

I’m not.

Page 306

Above all, I feared learning my mother had been correct when she said, “When you grow up, you’ll learn:

no one cares about you except your family.”

Page 323

In AIM, at Carbon, I saw a pattern hidden in plain sight: A small decision weighed down by repetition

becomes a massive habit. It becomes inertia.

Page 325

Companies used to go public at an earlier stage in their life cycles, making their hyper-growth phase

accessible to the average investor. But large and larger pools of capital came rushing in, which gave

start-ups an option to stay private longer, delaying their IPOs. This was often a win-win: a start-up

might not want (or be ready for) the pressure of public financial reporting; private investors might get

special access to the period of highest growth. Access is edge. Constraint is destiny. The loser, then, and

always, was the retail investor, who most likely did not have the privilege to invest in the start-up or in

the private fund. Carbon, in my view, was occupying a territory of the market to which all of the public

should have access.

Atomic Habits by James Clear, r. Dec. 2024

 p. 18 Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

p. 33 The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It's one thing to say I'm the type of person who wants this. It's something very different to say I'm the type of person who is this.

p. 38 Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it's a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don't need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don't need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn't matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

p. 87 Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.

p. 92 Instead, "disciplined" people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It's easier to practice self-restraint when you don't have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

p. 121 The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it – you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think – but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

p. 130 Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

p. 163 People often think it's weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up.

p. 164 The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

p. 165 Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper, but most people give up after a few days or avoid it entirely because journaling feels like a chore. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. "The best way is to always stop when you are going good," he said.

p. 174 When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.

p. 192 Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

p. 201 Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.... Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.... Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.... "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily...." This is why the "bad" workouts are often the most important ones.... Don't put up a zero. Don't let losses eat into your compounding.

p. 235 Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

P. 249 Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting – even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.

p. 252 Success in not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

p. 259 Happiness is simply the absence of desire.

p. 261 Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action.

My Struggle #4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, r. Dec. 2024

Page 19 It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I’d ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge. 

Page 22 What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. 

Page 60 Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position. 

Page 105 Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure. 

Page 157 Over the white timber fence you could see sections of the river, greenish in the bright sunlight, and the roofs of the houses on the other side. There were trees everywhere, these beautiful green creations that you never really paid much attention to, just walked past; you registered them but they made no great impression on you in the way that dogs or cats did, but they were actually, if you lent the matter some thought, present in a far more breathtaking and sweeping way. 

Page 164 Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. 

Page 195 Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. 

Page 208 I told her everything else and she listened, occasionally with a genuinely surprised expression on her face, as though she hadn’t thought about what I was saying. Although she had, of course, it was just that her empathy was so immense that she forgot herself and her own thoughts. Sometimes it was as if we were like minds. Or equals at least. Then something changed and the distance between us became apparent. 

Page 214 The sky above the yellow deciduous trees and the green conifers was dense and gray. The grayness, and the fact that all visibility stopped there, just a few meters above, increased the intensity of the colors; the yellow, the green, and the black were hurled into space, as it were, yet blocked by the gray sky, and that must have been why the colors shone with such abandon. They had the power to lift off and disappear into eternity but couldn’t, and so the energy was burned up where they were. 

Page 231 The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. 

Page 291 “Why didn’t you just leave?” I said. “Leave Dad?” I nodded with my mouth full. “I’ve wondered about that many times myself,” she said. “I don’t know.” We ate for a while without speaking. It was odd to think we had been in Sørbøvåg only this morning. It seemed like much longer. It was a different world. “Well, I don’t have a good answer to that,” she said at length.

Page 295 We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. 

Page 300 Yngve and Kristin had sat down on the sofa. They were looking around the way you do when you are somewhere new, discreetly absorbing their surroundings, constantly aware of each other, not necessarily with their glances but in the total way that lovers can be when everything is about the two of them. Kristin was a miracle of joy and naturalness, and that rubbed off on Yngve, he was fully open to it and wore an almost childish glow that he only had when he was with her. 

Page 343 The other letters were from Hilde and Mom. I didn’t open them until I got home, letters were a party, everything had to be perfect when I read them. Steaming coffee in a cup, music on the stereo, a rollie in my hand, and one ready on the table. I started with the one from Mom. 

Page 360 When darkness fell I let it enter the flat, too, apart from on the desk, where a small lamp shone like an island in the night. There was me and my writing, an island of light in the darkness, that was how I imagined it.

Page 366 The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing toward the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark, clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighboring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table. 

Page 367 An avalanche blocked the road, a ferry service was started, and the fact that you were only able to leave twice a day increased the feeling that this village was the only village, these people the only people. I was still getting lots of letters, and spent a lot of time answering them, but the life they represented was no longer the one that counted, the one that did was this: up in the morning, out into the snow, up the hill to school, and into class. Stay there all day, in a low-roofed, illuminated bunker, weighted down by the darkness, go home, go shopping, have dinner, and then in the evening train in the gym with the youngest fishermen, watch TV at school, swim in the pool, or sit at home reading or writing until it was so late that I could go to bed and sleep off the dead hours before the next day started. 

Page 383 While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror. 

Page 419 I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with others I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts. 

Page 431 I unpacked my clothes, ate some supper, read in bed for a couple of hours before switching off the light and going to sleep. 

Page 440 Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. 

Page 469 People were so preoccupied with trivialities, they kept searching until they found something and then they went for the jugular instead of keeping sight of the bigger picture, here we all are, humans on one earth, we’re only here for the short term, in the midst of all this wondrous creation, grass and trees, badgers and cats, fish and sea, beneath a star-strewn sky, and you get worked up over a broken guitar string? A snapped drumstick? Some silly bed linen that hasn’t been returned? Come on, what’s the matter with all of you?

Page 473 “Five more minutes,” I said. “Then you have to go back inside.” I walked toward the entrance, heard them laughing behind me, I felt such warmth for them, not only for them though, for all the pupils and all the people in the village, in fact, for everyone in the world. It was that kind of day. 

Page 477 the thought made me desperate in the same senseless way that I was sad whenever anyone left a party, as though with every person who left I came a step closer to death or some other calamity.

Page 489 I had never quite found the right tone with Tor Einar. We were the same age and had a lot in common, much more than I and Nils Erik had, but it didn’t help, it was irrelevant. I always played a role when I was with Tor Einar, which wasn’t the case with Nils Erik, and I didn’t like myself when I did, when there was a distance between the person I was and what I said, a kind of delay that allowed space for calculations, as if I wanted to say what he preferred to hear rather than what I had to say or talk about.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, r. Nov. 2024

p. 40 At 3:30 a.m., with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook.

p. 112 When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. This much at least is sure: my earliest impressions of wildlife and its pursuit retain a vivid sharpness of form, color, and atmosphere that half a century of professional wildlife experience has failed to obliterate or to improve upon.

p. 138 Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map.

p. 150 Some day my marsh, dyked and pumped, will lie forgotten under the wheat, just as today and yesterday will lie forgotten under the years.

p. 166 It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

p. 171 I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled; he doesn't understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh.

p. 177 To sum up, wildlife once fed us and shaped our culture. It still yields us pleasure for leisure hours, but we try to reap that pleasure by modern machinery and thus destroy part of its value. Reaping it by modern mentality would yield not only pleasure, but wisdom as well.

p. 182 Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

p. 189 Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

p. 211 The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

No One's Home by D.M. Pulley, r. Nov. 2024

p. 46 The plight of all children hung from his awkward shoulders, always being dragged somewhere they’d rather not go by forces beyond their control. Like luggage.