Happy Solstice

rejoice in the longest days of the year

on note-taking, and unanswerable questions

Adam Gopnik: "

All grown-up craft depends on sustaining a frozen moment from childhood: scientists, it is said, are forever four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered; writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant."

Going through an old notebook from San Francisco days, a season of such questions, questions that continue to haunt me.

What is the difference between Truth and truths? What does it mean to pursue Truth?
How can something be true and untrue at once? (to live life in paradox)

to tell the story of someone erased:
Does the story trump everything? Can concessions to truth be made in the name of story (or concessions to fact, at least?) What is ethical writing?

My words are ribbons, prayer flags strung together in primary colors
you do the best with what you know, until you know better.

Poking holes in my world--realizing that the world in which I live is not the world in which most people live
(universalizing your own experience)

Part of our education is unlearning (deconstructing): awareness as the beginning of wisdom
-of what we don't know
-of what we fail to notice

East of Eden / Steinbeck

Lee poured a tumbler full of dark liquor from the round stone bottle and sipped it and opened his mouth to get the double taste on the back of his tongue. "No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt humans have!...and, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule--a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."