"What type of building is this? Why would you hide all the beautiful things inside where no one can see them? From the outside, all I see is pipes and bricks, broken and rusted scaffolding, dirt and grime. No one would want to enter this place."


"Because I live inside. And other people, live outside."



Neil Gaiman.



I need to hold on to you; I just can't let you go.

And it makes no senseeeeee

Perfect World, Simple Plan.



(I've been MIA for so long D: )




Day 139
Now here is nowhere.

(But that's okay, because you won't need here when I'm there.)







I can’t cry anymore. I’m empty. I’m drained. And I can’t move. Not that I’d want to.

Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lunks. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time. When you’re asleep, no one asks you to do anything. No one expects anything of you. And you don’t have to face any of your troubles.

— Stephanie Perkins

thanks to wannon.





The Illumination, by David Brockmeier


The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination. No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in a glory of leukemia.

***

An interesting thing happens when reading Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination: you quickly become lost in the painterly way he covers his world in light; using thin needlework stitching, thick roll-on strokes, or igniting someone’s skeleton in a million points of the brightest white imaginable, their core shining through their skin as if stripped clean of their top layer, Brockmeier deceives the reader in a subtle, but immensely affecting way. After so many pages of lovingly constructed imagery you realize, as I’m sure he intended, that you’ve been deriving pleasure from nothing less than the agony and suffering of others—revelling in the one-of-a-kind beauty of experience that is found only through pain, described with carefully constructed and moving use of metaphor.

Adopting a structure similar to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, The Illumination is a novel told in six modestly connected parts. At exactly 8:17 one Friday night, every wound, every sore, every broken or damaged part of every broken and damaged human on the planet begins to shine from within with a luminous white light. In that instant, all the pain we’ve worked so hard to keep to ourselves—all the agonies, large and small, we fight to bury and repress—is made visible, as obvious as the stars in the night sky. Pain, a constant in everyone’s life to varying degrees, becomes a measurable quantity in the eyes of others.

Structured loosely around a journal of love notes from a husband to his wife that makes its way through the hands of the novel’s six protagonists, The Illumination is a study of expectations and juxtapositions: the journal, an object meant for the two lovers and no one else, remains an artefact of something they’ve lost since the Illumination took hold of the world—the need to express a beauty that is pure and untainted. The journal is ratty, faded, falling apart, yet it retains its original intent—to express love and devotion. The Illumination, on the other hand, is the performance art of an unseen, unspoken higher power—an unexplainable phenomenon gifted to the world as a helping hand, to encourage the expression of one’s inner beauty and repressed pain amongst a society that has forgotten what it means to be open and honest about the terrible, amazing, stunning atrocities we take joy in and feel repulsed by at the same time:




Now the worshippers were on their feet, performing a hymn he knew by heart, their voices flowing just alongside the melody, as if tracing the banks of a stream. And if a bomb were to land on them as they sang so humbly and sincerely, the splendor of their bodies would bathe the town in silver. And if every bomb flew from its arsenal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, God would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.




In some ways, the novel feels a themed mosaic of short narratives. The six lives contained within are drastically different from one another, but as the journal passes through them—either overtly, as an object with life-altering reverence, or subtly, as something that passes through their lives like a metaphor in three-dimensions—Brockmeier uses the Illumination as a counterweight, carving his characters’ pain in swatches, slivers, and harsh-light-of-day strokes. While beautiful in the way they forge connective threads between all people of all races in every corner of the world, the light that shines from within is also disturbing, threatening, and in the end, nowhere near as beautiful as the thousand little ways one man managed to express his love to his wife with nothing but a pen and some paper.

The Illumination is not as spiritual a book as its name might imply. It’s not devoid of such connotations, but its merit is in its artistry—in the way it paints the world as a Terry Riley-esque chance-oriented symphony, the light from within playing against other people, other surfaces, with different chord and key combinations. As one person’s entire being is lit up like the lights at a movie premiere—a power chord to break one’s mind from all distractions—the slow trill of a snake of light arcing through a carefully stitched incision cuts through the cacophony, presenting a light just as bright as any other. Because all pain is not equal, but no amount of pain can be dismissed.

Thanks to Andrew Wilmot.



Right now I'm caught on Asher Book's Try, thanks to seeyoon :D








The Wind Almost Took You

When you have done the things you've done.





We all dream to live; only to find out we're barely alive.



Day 138
I can sacrifice my health.




And maybe something's missing in your mind. Maybe you don't work the same way everyone else does. Maybe you're just different. That would be good news.

((: this is for you amanda.







If you think that girl leaning out the window to smell the rain can tell you what's going on inside her heart, you know even less about it than you think.

This is for you wannon.



It's been so long since I wrote )):



But the reality is that we communicate with every part of our being, and there are times when we must use it all. When someone needs us, he or she needs all of us. There’s no text that can replace a loving touch when someone we love is hurting.



For his new movie!!!

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs



For every time a murmur of affection that passes through your lips, a rain is staring somewhere, now.





Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I guess it goes both ways, because what we seek, what we're working and striving so hard for, are just as much useless ambitions, hopes and dreams that are nothing on a speck that is almost nothing. I have Wannon and Carl Sagan to thank for this post :)



:D there was this dude on the bus who was reading a magazine and I sat behind him, a little higher ground and the page he was reading had this heading:

Taking the LEAP,
having the FAITH to follow her call

(I was thinking: LOL what call? Nature's call??)

It caught my eye mainly because the Leap and Faith were capitalised and bolded, which reminded me of Inception's "to take a leap of faith" ;D