Finished reading (2002): A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries by Isabel Colegate 📚
A fascinating exploration of solitude, written, I think, in something quite close to the historical-travelogue voice of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
An excerpt, and an example of that voice in Colegate, can be read here. And for one of the best, but lengthy, examples of West, here.
Ski Grand Targhee
“Empathy is a moral imperative but also an epistemological one.”
Currently Reading: Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan 📚
Snagged a copy at Country Bookshelf in Bozeman.
“…sly rhymes and syncopations lend an off-foot musicality to unnerving wisdom.” If that is not a perfect definition of poetry…
Big Sky, little snow
Big Sky, hot tub
Finished reading (2021): The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 📚
Sobering, resonant, finite.
Finished reading (2021): Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 📚
A very helpful book to start the year. Overarchingly good, even great; final chapters are a bit contradictory and dissatisfying, though the tools in the appendix are solid.
On the “attention economy” of social media et al.: “It’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong decisions about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life…”
Yup.
Finished reading (2021): The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa 📚
“There is something about this mountain, this painting, this tree, we tend to say, and this something can make demands on us.”
Closest cribbage game in the history of cribbage games that’s ever “been happened” before. (And Meghan won)
