Susan Su

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on the atlas — 33

highlights — 71

“That’s all we want as teachers, as mentors,” he says. “To know we were heard. And to be validated by that child, now an adult, calling us out of the blue to tell us of the impact. That is immeasurable.”
Thank You for Finding Me - Longreads
it is your turn now to recognize and greet it, to cradle what is ordinary and see what is reflected to you from the strange choreography of life.
Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists - Longreads
I learned I didn’t want to own things, didn’t want to dig up other people’s lands. I could sit quietly and observe anywhere, and anywhere I could find a story.
Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists - Longreads
inspired by the idea of the fictionality of fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps more interesting, routes.
Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Real - The New York Times
The trouble with the term “magic realism,” el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Real - The New York Times
Look, we’re not like Americans. We don’t need to talk about everything that gives us a negative feeling.
“Peking Duck” | The New Yorker
no están muertos los pájaros de nuestros besos/ están muertos los besos/ los pájaros vuelan en el verde olvidar/
Afsari | Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems) | Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
se despertó la lluvia de un pájaro que espera al mar en el mar
Afsari | Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems) | Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
Before he self-translates back into Spanish, the poet begins with a linguistic self-banishment, opting for the exilic tongue par excellence in order to circumvent the discourse and material violence of Argentina’s military dictatorship and regain control over the conditions of his own forced expropriation.
Afsari | Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems) | Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
If we dive beneath the romantic surface of the poems, we discover allegories of exilic discourse below the ostensible sensual longing, where dreams of a distant native land and mother tongue, of loved ones disappeared, are encoded in the figure of the beloved.
Afsari | Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems) | Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
For Gelman, Ladino, the language of the Sephardim, is a tongue that exists exclusively in exile. The diasporic language of Ladino carries histories of displacement, beginning with the Edict of Expulsion of Granada in 1492, which ordered the banishment of the Jews and Conversos from the kingdoms of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs.
Afsari | Juan Gelman, Dibaxu (selected poems) | Absinthe: World Literature in Translation
to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
In Blackwater woods by Mary J Oliver - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry
I wonder if it hurts to live – And if They have to try – And whether – could They choose between – It would not be – to die –
I measure every Grief I meet (561) by Emily Dickinson - Poems | Academy of American Poets
how the things those others said to them seemed to retroactively reshape the original experience, to make the experience less coherent for them after the fact
Adam Levin on How to Exacerbate Trauma | The New Yorker
The result is a world where people are more connected than ever, yet lonelier than ever.
The Age of The Social Paradox - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
human beings are pulled by two needs: autonomy (our desire to control our own life) and connection (our need to belong)
The Age of The Social Paradox - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.
“Friends,” by Grace Paley | The New Yorker
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life.
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
“You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?”
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
The ability to believe and disbelieve simultaneously seems a prerequisite for any parent.
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so that they can become more fully themselves?
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
We parents could only do so much for our children, to raise them to be bold and free, but the world outside this bubble we called our family was often not a kind place.
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
“Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right.”
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
Men die; and they are not happy. Half of the line is a fact; the other half, a conjecture. There is no cause-and-effect emphasized: Do men die because they are not happy, or are they not happy because they have to die someday? The two statements, existing together, are like two hands kept close, barely touching or with their fingers intertwined.
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
Necessity also dictates that all the details should be noticed and filed away without any excessive feeling.
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
everything is relevant, everything has weight, and everything leads to a moment in the past, which becomes a memory, which in turn becomes a narrative
两个儿子的死亡与生活 | 纽约客 --- The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker
Today, they were going to go to Central Park, sit on a blanket, make friendship bracelets, and braid each other’s hair. They were earnest. I heard no sarcasm. An interloper to this casual, wholesome moment, I was reminded that, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom.
The Trouble with Friends | The New Yorker
But is any of that really possible or fair? How well do I tolerate being called out on my bullshit, and how comfortable am I now at calling other people out on theirs? Can a true friend stay with you forever, or, a better question, can a friend stay true to you forever?
The Trouble with Friends | The New Yorker
Inconvenient as it may be for you to step out of class, mute the Zoom screen, get off the subway, this friend is having a crisis and she would like your opinion, even though it’s not an opinion she’ll take; she would still like you to hear and validate her crisis.
The Trouble with Friends | The New Yorker
Here are my deepest, most authentic feelings, friend. Please kindly tell me yours. But when that gesture is not reciprocated, when I sense the wall coming up, I’m so mad at myself for having revealed so much that I withdraw.
The Trouble with Friends | The New Yorker
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker
“for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker
Our society seems to carry a strong historic respect for intellectual competence, but not really the kind of agency and entrepreneurial spirit that US admissions seem to reward.
The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
It is in that moment that I am reminded that magic does not always serve to augment itself. That you can just sit in those pockets of time and feel it rise. It is in this contrast that I see the difference between those who pursue magic and those whose pursuit is in fear of never becoming magicians.
The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
And then your idea of success morphs into that of those around you. It seems that people in SF are being pulled away from the dreams they had that and into this fire that has transformed the tech of the 21st century.
The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
There must be a thousand things in his life like the desert plant, remembered only by him, that were never shared with his family. There are many words that my father and I did not say to each other, “I love you” among them.
The Ability to Cry | The New Yorker
“Because once you read good fiction you’ll find people in life disappointing.”
The Ability to Cry | The New Yorker
My mother is not one to put her arms around me. My father was not one to express his feelings easily.
The Ability to Cry | The New Yorker
But erasing, I have learned, does not stop with a new language, and that, my friend, is my sorrow and my selfishness. In speaking and in writing in an adopted language, I have not stopped erasing. I have crossed the line, too, from erasing myself to erasing others. I am not the only casualty in this war against myself.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
Not having the exact language for the bleakness I felt, I devoured Mansfield’s words like thirst-quenching poison. Is it possible that one can be held hostage by someone else’s words? What I underlined and reread: Are they her thoughts or mine?
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
A private language, however, defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
But I have given these moments—what’s possible to be put into English—to my characters. Memories, left untranslated, can be disowned; memories untranslatable can become someone else’s story.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
What’s abysmal is that one’s erratic language closes in on one like quicksand: “You are nothing. You must do anything you can to get rid of this nothingness.” We can kill time, but language kills us.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
But this violent desire to erase a life in a native language is only wishful thinking. One’s relationship with the native language is similar to that with the past. Rarely does a story start where we wish it had, or end where we wish it would.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
What I could not bring myself to destroy I sealed up and brought with me to America, though I will never open them again.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
My abandonment of my first language is personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation—political or historical or ethnographical. This, I know, is what my husband was questioning years ago: was I prepared to be turned into a symbol by well-intentioned or hostile minds?
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
Still, one cannot avoid the fact that a private decision, once seen through a public prism, becomes a metaphor.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker
It’s the absoluteness of my abandonment of Chinese, undertaken with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.
To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker