Lookaftering #7
What's something beautiful you've read?
Dear readers,
I came across an older post on Cup of Jo recently titled “What’s something beautiful you’ve read?”
Although the post is short, the comments section is wonderfully ample. Reading it made me want to share a few of its gems, add some of my own, and ask you that lovely question, too.
First, though, it begins with these words, which delighted me:
“Recently, I’ve started doing something I haven’t done since college. Lying in bed with a book, I’ll find myself clutching my heart over a sentence — and then feeling compelled to root around for a pen in my bedside table so I can underline an especially good sentence. Do you ever do this?”
Yes! I should absolutely do it more, though – underlining in pencil if not pen, or one of the cute Post-it notes I hoard so as not to blemish the book at all.
Writing this, I realise how I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing down quotes. I still save them, it’s just usually digital. I used to have quotes on Post-its on mirrors (mostly Mary Oliver), journals full of them, and miscellaneous bits of paper scattered around the place with favourite sentences.
I’ve missed this, but it brings me some quiet happiness to realise I miss it and know how easy it is to change.
A few favourite quotes from the Cup of Jo post:
“[My father and grandfather] both had thick, coarse beards that they cared for rigorously… it seemed that this was a kind of sacrifice made in the name of loving well, of having something that a small child could bury their hands in, something closer to the ground those hands might be reaching up from.”
– There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
“Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.”
– Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him”
– A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
I’m reminded, as I often am, fortunately, of James Joyce’s lines from “The Dead” in Dubliners:
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.“
