Brain Food #869: 'You cannot experience a sunset online'

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Soon, I will no longer be 38. There is a certain finality to everything once presented in this way: soon and no longer. It shows how moments in life come and go like waves, building in anticipation, then eventually landing on the shore, sometimes crashing, sometimes fading.

In recent years, I have started collecting quotes in a note on my phone, not by calendar year, but by year of living. So, in lieu of a longer post, I thought I’d share a selection of quotes that resonated during my 38th year and that may feel relevant to this time of year, in the hope that some may land with you, too. Their meaning persists through time, though its interpretation may change depending on where we find ourselves within it.

One could argue the quotes are not connected, but as a friend persistently claims, everything, eventually, is.

“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.”
— Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks

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“I liked the life. That came first.”
— Cy Twombly, on his decision to settle in Rome

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“The ideas you have in the pool are like the ideas you have in a dream, where you get this sentence that answers all questions you’ve ever had about reality and you get up groggily and write it down, and in the morning, it looks like “let’s buy bananas” or something completely irrelevant. Plus, I like water. Some people just need to be near water.”
— Anne Carson

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“So what do we do, in between, besides eating oysters for dinner, and going for walks, and taking trains or flights. and melting our eyes in the next horizon. This is a way of not giving up.”
— Etel Adnan

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“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter

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“You cannot experience a sunset online.”
— Matt Bucher in The Belan Deck

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