Part I.
If an invasion of privacy is the price of fame, then “can you recommend me a good book?” is the small talk tax of being a writer. Understandably, it is my most frequently asked question—and while I’m always spirited by the sentiment, I admit I often hesitate because I am a patron saint of gatekeeping of how personal my choices are. How do you explain to someone that your library—though 1:1 with classic literature and niche modernism—is also a result of deeply personal alchemy? Without sounding senile or pretentious? This is not to say I consider my choices revolutionary, but…. reading and I have never been on casual terms. That being said, it’s a New Year and I am a New Woman with a New Haircut; I believe sharing is caring. I promise not to wax poetic about the sacredness of these books, but I do hope you find something you didn’t know you were looking for <3
You may consider opening this in your web browser or the Substack app since this post is too long for email. Whoops!
1.
“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some mornings when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest; paid passage back to the world out there.”
This is my automated response to the aforementioned question, btw. Everyone needs this book in their literary lexicon.
2.
“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. but stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
If I could go back and re-experience one book all over again, it would be this. Because it’s not just a book, it’s a love letter—a quiet revolution of tenderness, a masterclass in intimacy. It is everything I envision a “twin-flame” relationship to be like. My dear
3.
“Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn't complain. I don't make the fucking rules.”
Pure! Satirical! Cultural! Brilliance!!!!!!!
4.
“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”
This made me WEEP like a baby omg.
5.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Stunning, stunning discourse. I Do Not recommend reading this on your period unless you’re already hinging on an existential crisis.
6.
“The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”
No bullshit, this is one of the most prolific pieces of writing I have ever encountered. I may even go so far as to say this is just as critical, if not more so, to your literary lexicon than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Be wary of: the exposure of ugly habits, liberation from confusion, and further reason to resign from what doesn’t serve you (hint: social media).
7.
“On the wall there is a white hole, the mirror. It is a trap. I know that I am going to let myself be caught in it. It is the reflection of my face. Often during these wasted days, I stay here contemplating it. I can understand nothing about this face.”
This book has its own kind of Sartrean ache, if you will. But I loved every second of it. I loved it even more when I learned it was “flagged” by “various institutions” for its philosophical content and depiction of existential despair. Hot.
8.
“Wisdom is achieved very slowly. This is because intellectual knowledge, easily acquired, must be transformed into ‘emotional,’ or subconscious, knowledge. Once transformed, the imprint is permanent. Behavioral practice is the necessary catalyst of this reaction. Without action, the concept will wither and fade. Theoretical knowledge without practical application is not enough.”
Though this book tripped me the fuck out, it equally achieved the impossible in lessening my paranoia. I don’t know that I have read anything more fascinating.
9.
“Artists interested in becoming famous in our society should know that it is not they who will become famous, but another version of themselves with the same name, and that other version will eventually take over and perhaps, one day, kill the true artist within them.”
Fun fact: This was originally a speech given by Camus in 1957, just a few days before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. My favorite French philosopher with the most BDE.
10.
“So he accuses me of “struggling for dominance?” Sorry, wrong number.”
I am a woman written by Sylvia Plath. That is all.
11.
“It is because I am speechless in the honor of your company, it is because I am reeling in the fragrance of some utterable hospitality, it is because I have forgotten all my questions, that I throw myself to the floor, and vanish into yours.”
The original Certified Lover Boy™
12.
“We have left the acceleration of history and entered the acceleration of reality.”
To say: the loss of place is joined by the loss of the body.
13.
“In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes art.”
Rumi essentially defines my early days as a poet, writing words of nonsense on a borrowed 1940s Underwood <3
14.
“I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don't believe in soul mates anymore and I'm not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are.”
I LOVE THIS BOOK AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT!
15.
“And the light seems to be eternal
and joy seems to be inexorable,
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind”
He’s just a man who writes with bread and butter. You know?
16.
“The man sits at one of the cafes in the hypothetical ghetto. He writes postcards because breathing prevents him from writing the poems he’d like to write. I mean: free poems, no extra tax. His eyes retain a vision of naked bodies coming slowly out of the sea. Then all that’s left is emptiness. “Waiters walking along the beach” … “The evening light dismantles our sense of the wind” …”
Rarely am I without three things: a clip, lipstick, and this book—which is best enjoyed either going to, or coming from.
17.
[in reference to Jackson Pollock]: “The trajectory of his too-brief career retains a drama, as evergreen as a folktale, of volcanic ambition and personal torment attaining a liftoff, with the drip technique, that knitted a man’s chaotic personality and revolutionized not only painting but the general course of art ever after.”
Succinctly: A collection of essays written by an art critic who moonlights as a poet.
Confessionally: I kind of judged this book by its cover because I really loved the title.
Factually: He’s kind of a big deal (to Me and to the world, but mostly Me)
18.
“I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised I can do this.One of the horses walks towards me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thanks you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?”
??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!!!! (moniker for feeling mind-blown)
19.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz …”
And yet again: ??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!!!!
20.
“I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”
Reading this was like eavesdropping on a passionate, doomed affair—slightly uncomfortable, yet impossibly mesmerizing. A salient meditation on boundaries surrounding forbidden love and societal constraints.
21.
“To wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me.”
Reads like a cashmere blanket of poetic melancholia, likely sold at Scandia Home for $899.
22.
“I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”
Unrelated: I have a bone to pick with Lili Anolik who may as well be the president of “Eve Babitz is a Saint and Joan Didion is a Cunt” fan club. But that is, as they say, a story for a different time.
Great testimony on how to move through a Saturn return🪐
this is a phenomenal list..maybe this time i'll actually plan some time into my day just for reading 🥲🫶🏼