flâneur

Vivian M

15 followers · 10 following · 750 views

on the atlas — 56

highlights — 159

  • All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
    Joan Didion: Why I Write ‹ Literary Hub
  • But herein lies the loophole: what might feel like moving a mental mountain to change purely for the sake of you often feels like no big deal to change for the sake of people you love. Maybe this is why people learn so much from love — you’re maximally motivated and receptive to changing yourself in order to experience life with your people.
    communication - by Molly Mielke - Mind Mud
  • I suspect this is part of what becomes tempting about this sort of existence—the ability to maintain your own, often isolated reality amongst millions of others, washing over but never concretely touching.
    No.204 - by Ella Frances Sanders - The Sometimes Newsletter
  • I think what compatibility is really about is how well two people come together under different circumstances
    imperfections - by Elaine - manners & mystery
  • The novelist Kyusaku Yumeno said that 'the brain is not a place to think', while Shigeo Miki said that 'the brain is merely a mirror reflecting the internal organs'. We tend to think that the brain is the essence of a person, but rather the brain is an accessory organ
    Fumi Imamura’s floral works — IKEBANA projects
  • Small details can be revealing of a character’s personality, like the fact that Margot’s mother always picks at the hot crust of a tart before it’s served, or that she doesn’t notice the unripe avocado flesh as she attempts to slice it into a salad.
    Slow Seasons Spring 2021 - Slow Stories
  • It took me a long time to understand the difference between loss and growth. To recognize that, like trees, we fall. But before that, we bloom
    Slow Seasons Winter 2022 - Slow Stories
  • Sentences would wrap themselves around my neck like scarves in winter, welcome and necessary and demanding to be said aloud.
    No.195 - by Ella Frances Sanders - The Sometimes Newsletter
  • So I would suspect that it could be summarised like this for now—the dream-ness, the morning-ness, it evaporates like a fine mist of rain from a burning concrete pavement, our delicate, spiderweb attention lost so instantly in paying that attention to others, and the “dream-logic” as Ng calls it vanished before the birds have even begun their earliest singing.
    No.192 - by Ella Frances Sanders - The Sometimes Newsletter
  • Why, exactly, are we always so determined to avoid meeting ourselves where we are?
    No.200 - by Ella Frances Sanders - The Sometimes Newsletter
  • Why, you might ask, would anyone engage in this kind of self-deception? The contemporary Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said that we are afraid of what we know to be true: that when we look to the centre of our own being, we won’t find anything to hold on to. In his words, we’re afraid that we don’t exist.
    How Buddhist ritual helped me ride out the storm of OCD | Aeon Essays
  • In neuroscience terms, mutuality means that the predictions launched by your brain and your partner’s brain in the moment are compatible.
    Does Buddhist detachment allow for a healthier togetherness? | Aeon Essays
  • To travel the world visiting everywhere only once can hardly bring understanding. You must return several times before a place opens up to you. Returning to the same place brings a new set of emotions, and eventually, some familiarity.
    Familiarity and Belonging - by Simon Sarris
  • i have many criticisms of rapid-fire, non-stop consumption, but none are so personal to me as this: when we submit to a cultural landscape that tells us to never stop looking for the new shiniest thing, we lose a kind of language for understanding ourselves and others. loving is a muscle that’s been strategically atrophied by a culture of manic consumption and constant availability.
    notes from the end of summer - by rayne fisher-quann
  • There’s the near-ubiquity of wearing headphones in public now, and the Spotify playlists to accommodate every scenario: “intimate dinner party,” “songs to sing in the shower,” “sad girl starter pack.” Most on-screen entertainment, whether scripted or unscripted, scarcely features an un-scored scene anymore; it’s mostly music from title card to credits.
    #148: Too much music - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • For millennia art outstripped the sciences in its ability to understand and recreate qualia, virtualize reality, and provide ennobling, edifying, educational, and entertaining simulations for humans. Indeed, art pushed science
    Meta is Murder — Objectivity and Art
  • art makes virtualized reality possible both for external sense experiences like seeing a lion or a landscape and internal, phenomenological experiences like emotional states or even qualia
    Meta is Murder — Objectivity and Art
  • Through art, we are enriched by experiences with less risk of suffering or injury; experiences are made more portable and reproducible, and are freed from temporality; we can begin at least to portray what we imagine, even if we cannot yet build it; and so on.
    Meta is Murder — Objectivity and Art
  • The only thing that remains fixed in these spaces is the idea that we are in a state of becoming, but we also in this process remain the self that we are. I do not become a pilot, I play a pilot. I am still I and the pilot is still a pilot, sort of. So in this virtual embodiment muddle we have a form of a self and that self is made malleable by the opportunity to become a form of language. (Becoming in relation to the linguistic libidinal desire-y soup of the mind.)
    What’s the point of having a body? | Dazed
  • the idea that time comes from us—that when we are genuinely present, time collapses completely, beyond our ability to detect that it is passing at all. He compares this to the paradigm we all grew up believing—what he calls “Newtonian time,” which is the idea that time is a finite resource we live in a constant scarcity of:
    on slowness, taste, and living well - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • it is also memory that creates and shapes our experience of time
    Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation – The Marginalian
  • Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.
    Virginia Woolf on the Nature of Memory and How It Threads Our Lives Together – The Marginalian
  • the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread
    Virginia Woolf on the Nature of Memory and How It Threads Our Lives Together – The Marginalian
  • These images and the way they are algorithmically organized don’t merely remind us of the past; they help shape how we think of ourselves in the present and how we might think to document our lives and articulate ourselves in the future.
    Manufactured Recollection — Real Life
  • One of my greatest fears is living my whole life commodifying my experiences and relationships into neat, consumable packages with the promise of positive returns.
    Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
  • The nostalgia continuum consistently threatens my ability to move on and out of a blue-light tinted past, and it makes definitively turning the page on any “chapter” in life nearly impossible
    Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
  • It means shedding who I was and disposing of who I knew them to be when we were last connected
    Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
  • Maybe I’m just a sucker who doesn’t know how to click the unfollow button, but the fact that I’d hardly considered it before now is the result of a certain tentativeness that has been ingrained in my relationships and experiences since I first accessed social media — a refusal to be the one to close the door on the past, and the fear of missing out on the possibilities that may still lie behind it.
    Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
  • In contrast, my memory albums are endless and ever-coagulating, flowing together to make one undefined body of memories in my Photos app. And beyond that, these “memories” are supplanted by new updates — updates that are outside our shared sphere, so far removed from the version of them that I once knew
    Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
  • Under the conditions of disposable reality and digitization, it characterizes material culture as well, dissolving the world of things which bind us together in a common world.
    The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
  • The specific question raised for me is this: what happens when the things of this world begin to recede from the material realm? When more and more of the “things” we take up during the course of our day are digitized or virtual realities, which leave few if any traces in the world?
    The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
  • What I fear is losing some small slice of myself that would be almost certainly irretrievable without it. It is no small thing for someone to release a part of themselves in this way.
    The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
  • . In large part, I think this was because it seemed to weaken an already tenuous connection with a small slice of my past, which was sustained mostly by his presence
    The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
  • “Friendship,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” That moment, I’d argue, can happen through the mediation of a work of art just as surely as it can in conversation with my neighbor.
    Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images - by L. M. Sacasas
  • So the exchange we are offered is this: in place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us, we are simply given an infinite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.
    Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images - by L. M. Sacasas
  • So, likewise, might we settle for a scanning sort of looking, one that is content to bounce from point to point searching but never delving thus never quite seeing.
    Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images - by L. M. Sacasas
  • He found the writing process too focused on the self — and for him, that exploration was often painful and depressing. Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.
    June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
  • Doing the latter for the first time, in this medium, in this way, has been teaching me a lot about plot, and story. Namely, that they create themselves. That you don’t actually need to drive the narrative, that sometimes it’s okay to just observe, to let things play themselves out. Because they will. And it it will be interesting because it’s human.
    Doing it for the plot - by Alya Mooro
  • But I think I also took the warning a bit too seriously, perhaps. Took it to heart a bit too much. Because there are many things I am afraid to write in pen, lest they prove limiting; in case they take the story towards a plot I can’t come back from, in case they introduce a character I can’t kill off.
    Doing it for the plot - by Alya Mooro
  • how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots
    Diva in Distress: Seen and be seen
  • Now I think, I was so healthy. I’d give anything to be healthy again.
    you find what you look for - by Nicole - startingfromnix
  • not to burst into a million dandelion seedlings
    Catapult | On Some Saturday, After All of This | Jonny Teklit
  • captivated by the train of the sun’s dress,
    Catapult | On Some Saturday, After All of This | Jonny Teklit
  • Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of …
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
  • so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates
    16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian