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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.”
“Psychologists have estimated that you can only stay in love for eighteen months,” says Klein. “That’s the limit. After that it becomes admiration, respect, affection, but—” And here Ira Glass interrupts him: “The dream of it dissolves and it becomes something else.”
“Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self.” These words, from Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observations, are the last in my latest commonplace book.
