Finished reading: Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch 📝

Fun read

Finished reading: Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1 by Peach Momoko 📚

Finished reading: Twisted Romance by Alex de Campi 📚

Finished reading: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: Volume 2 by Eiji Otsuka 📚

Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent Part II by Scott Lynch in Grimdark #41 📓📚

Finished reading: Elyse Flayme and the final flood by Robin Sloan 📝

We cannot undo these curses with the same kind of magic that created them

Finished reading: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 📚

Highlights from In Praise of Shadows 📚

I finished reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki recently, which means it’s highlights time. 📚

As you might guess from the title, many of these passages are about the interplay between the subject and shadows / darkness.

Passages I Highlighted

Let’s Get Philosophical

Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with.

seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are;

On Aging vs. Progress

Yet of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people

On Elegance

If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy.

On Beauty

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.

And there may be some who argue that if beauty has to hide its weak points in the dark it is not beauty at all.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face—a full body was unnecessary.

(This is adjacent to some of those uncomfy bits I mentioned, but this feels like a line from a poem.)

“the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it makes a hut; pull it apart, a field once more.” Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

On Architecture

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.

The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life.

A room should be brighter in winter, but dimmer in summer;

On Colors

colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived.

Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam

On Ghosts

Japanese ghosts have traditionally had no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass.

Finished reading: At The Tombstone by Dimiar Anakiev 📓

Finished reading: In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki 📚

I was all set to say this is a combination of “get off my lawn” complaining meets uncomfy musings on skin color and poetic passages about shadow and darkness (which it all still is). But then it ended with a self-aware (meta?) commentary on the conflicting trends that are aging and progress and how grumbling arises from this. 😵‍💫

Just listened: Bill Frisell live at The Joint in 1986 🎵

I love weirdo guitar music, of which Bill is in the royal court. 🎸

Twang, clang, skrang

Finished reading: Snow Bones by Masaya Saito 📚

I love haiku collections that expand the form. Here, narrative in verse.

Finished reading: Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips 📚

Finished listening: Stephan Wolfram on AI on The Reason Interview podcast 🎧

Really enjoyed this episode.

Lots of thoughts started 💭

Finished listening: The Strange Case by Derek Kolstad 🎧

A post-Bourne reimagining of the source material.

I liked this version better.

Finished reading: The Daily Laws by Robert Greene 📚

Finished reading: A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Finished reading: The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher 📚

Finished reading: Reap3r by Eliot Peper 📚

Another great Peper novel, really loving these.

Business and money are the only two obscene topics left in American poetry.

-Dana Gioia

Notes & Highlights from Don't Believe Everything You Think 📚

Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) by Joseph Nguyen 📚

If you’ve kicked the tires on the mindfulness space before nothing in this book is likely to feel fresh and new. But it is a great all-in-one, no fluff read to remind you.

It boils down to: thoughts are great, thinking is where you get into trouble.

Or, as Joseph writes in the book: “Thoughts create. Thinking destroys.”

There are a lot of parallels to Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.

PAUSE

He recommends a “five-step process to help you let go of your thinking, which you’ll notice conveniently spells out the acronym PAUSE.”

  1. Pause: take deep breaths to calm your nerves
  2. Ask Yourself: “Is this thinking making me feel the way I want?” or “Do I want to keep suffering?"
  3. Understand: you have the choice to stop your thinking and let it go
  4. Say (and repeat to yourself): “Thinking is the root cause of suffering.”
  5. Experience: your emotions to their full extent

Suffering comes not from our emotions but from the thinking we attach to the emotions.

On Goal Setting

There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.

Thoughts lead to goals rooted in inspiration.
Thinking leads to goals rooted in desperation.

The value of a daily practice towards your goals is the daily part:

What matters is not how long you are doing it each day but that you are doing it to some capacity every day.

One step forward every day.

A question to guide your goal setting:

If I had infinite money, had no fear, and didn’t feel the need to receive any recognition, what would I do or create?

or

What are some of your favorite ways to express your creativity?

Allow your true dreams to reveal themselves without shutting them down. To a mind without the limits of thinking, anything is possible.

Highlights (there are a lot)

Philosopher Sydney Banks once said, “Thought is not reality, yet it is through thought that our realities are created."

The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking.

the moment we stop thinking is when our happiness begins.

Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled

Your mind’s job is to anticipate threats. Your body’s job is to regulate the resulting emotions

the path to self-actualization
isn’t to try to improve ourselves
because we think we’re not enough
but to let go of the illusion
that we’re not already enough as we are

Positive emotions are not a byproduct of thinking but the organic result of being fully in the present moment and connected to life rather than thinking about it.

Only in the present moment can the truth be found

Space has the illusion of emptiness on the surface. It is not empty but filled with infinite possibilities for us to choose a new experience of life.

Instead of looking for right or wrong, good or bad, look for truth without judgment

What you obtain externally can always be lost, but what you find within yourself can never be taken away.

Nothing that grows can stay the same—especially you.

It’s not what we have but how we feel inside that is the true measure of success, joy, and fulfillment.

We have the gift of imagination, which means our creative potential is limitless, but we create stress for ourselves when we think we need to figure out “the how” to make it happen

Judgment closes the mind, while questions open it.

what we do not question
controls us
what we question
frees us

Living life through non-thinking is accepting reality as it is instead of what we think it should be.

Your mind is the greatest salesperson and knows exactly what to say to lure you back into its vicious cycle of destructive thinking

When we let go of needing reasons to love one another, there is no end to how much love we can discover.

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.” —Louis L’Amour

truth is not something you think but something you know and feel deep in your sou

Although our fear will tell us that we are afraid of external things, such as a negative event, really what we fear is how we imagine we’ll feel if an undesired outcome happens. Fear is internal, not external.

To overcome fear, you must question what it is you are truly afraid of and then see the truth behind this fear—that it is an illusion designed to keep us in our comfort zones and nothing more

Finished reading: Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) by Joseph Nguyen 📚

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

via Kyla Scanlon

Finished reading: Wonder Woman Vol. 2 by Tom King 📚