In the auditorium, I felt the pleasure of competence and the warmth that only comes from sharing ideas. It always baffles me when my colleagues complain about teaching. Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little. For me, the best class sessions are right up there with lying in the sun, listening to bluegrass, or swimming in a mountain stream.

— Richard Powers, Bewilderment

When I read, I withdraw from the phenomenal world. I turn my attention “inward.” Paradoxically, I turn outward toward the book I am holding, and, as if the book were a mirror, I feel as though I am looking inward. (This idea of a mirror is an analogy for the act of reading. And I can imagine other analogies as well: For instance, I can imagine reading is like withdrawing to a cloister behind my eyes—an open court, hemmed by a covered path; a fountain, a tree—a place of contemplation. But this is not what I see when I read. I don’t see a cloister, or a mirror. What I see when I’m reading is not the act of reading itself, nor do I see analogies for the act of reading.)

When I read, my retirement from the phenomenal world is undertaken too quickly to notice. The world in front of me and the world “inside” me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection of these two domains—or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them.

— Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

Elisa Gabbert is immensely quotable (not the best thing to have read in the times of COVID though).

As the injustices pile up, and reserves run low, the question of where we should focus our moral attention becomes critical—when exposed to more evils than we can possibly attend to, most of us feel helpless. And what, more than helplessness, excuses apathy and inaction? Rather than confront global suffering, we may cull our feeds, or stop watching the news. Or, worse, we may make of the suffering other an enemy, turning apathy to antipathy. These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy—they are almost innocent, almost “self-care.” (We’re not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.) But layered together, they have the shade of evil.

— Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory

Guaranteed repairs

Restoration: plastering over the cracks left on any surface by the erosion of time.

Writing: an inverse process of restoration. A restorer fills the holes in a surface on which a more or less finished image already exists; a writer starts from the fissures and the holes. In this sense, an architect and a writer are alike. Writing: filling in relingos.

No, writing isn’t filling gaps—nor is it constructing a house, a building, just to fill up an empty space.

Perhaps Alejandro Zambra’s bonsai image might come closer: “A writer is a person who rubs out. . . . Cutting, lopping: finding a form that was already there.”

But words are not plants and, in any case, gardens are for the poets with orderly, landscaped hearts. Prose is for those with a builder’s spirit.

Writing: drilling walls, breaking windows, blowing up buildings. Deep excavations to find—to find what? To find nothing.

A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.

Writing: making relingos.

— Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks

[Timothy] Morton calls global warming a “hyperobject,” something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Such objects are more giant than the giant objects of megalophobia; they can’t be captured in a photograph or even an abstraction. Time-lapse gifs of melting ice don’t help; their extreme compression only minimizes the impact of what’s happening at actual size. Global warming is happening everywhere all the time, which paradoxically makes it harder to see, compared to something with defined edges. This is part of the reason we have failed to stop it or even slow it down. How do you fight something you can’t comprehend?

— Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory

Reading this, looking at the aerial-photographs of pyres in Delhi, tense-traversing the length of Kerala in the middle of the pandemic. My prayers are with the very many families weathering private hells and the possibility of unfillable voids. Title.

The difference between flying in an airplane, walking, and riding a bicycle is the same as that between looking through a telescope, a microscope, and a movie camera. Each allows for a particular way of seeing. From an airplane, the world is a distant representation of itself. On two legs, we are condemned to a plethora of microscopic detail. But the person suspended over two wheels, a meter above the ground, can see things as if through the lens of a movie camera: he can linger on minutiae and choose to pass over what is unnecessary.

— Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks

The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. ‘You’d have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one’s will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren’t going to need a will in their New Earth.’

— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide. But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.

— Ten Things I Have Learned, Milton Glaser. The bracketed title is copypasta from the PDF essay.

This:

The need for unequal privilege in an industrial society is generally advocated by means of an argument with two sides. The hypocrisy of this argument is clearly betrayed by acceleration. Privilege is accepted as the necessary precondition for improving the lot of a growing total population, or it is advertised as the instrument for raising the standards of a deprived minority. In the long run, accelerating transportation does neither. It only creates a universal demand for motorized conveyance and puts previously unimaginable distances between the various layers of privilege. Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity.

And this:

Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

From Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity. Thanks to short nights at the W Library.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

— Richard Powers, The Overstory

I read parts of Overstory perched high(…ish) above the ground, atop a concrete Maple in Vijayawada. The balcony at the eleventh floor fortress is surprisingly calm and reading-inducing, despite (or maybe, because of) the drizzle and the breeze and the bird’s eye view it shoves on you unasked. It is only after I leave the raintrees alone and come home, that the strange and lamentable significance of the building-naming-scheme[1] sinks in. Whether the builders or the people-generally-upset-at-the-absurdity-of-naming-things-after-what-was-destroyed-on-the-way-to-the-things-themselves like it or not, being in a building named after a tree (I was in Pine for most of my stay; the choice of name made severely appropriate by how gloriously alone I was for the last three weeks.) makes you see and do things differently, say, from being in a building named after itself. (Hostel 13 said HOUSE OF TITANS in university-gothic letters—awkward-cornered inlines, protruding outlines, stab-serifs[2]—and one always felt someone shrouded in security-uniform-colours was about to ID you getting out of the john.)

I read significant parts of the book (the ‘Roots’ is poetic and a guaranteed tearjerker) with the day’s newspapers laid open to the Aarey disater with an effing parking lot over dead stumps. This was reminiscent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide in ways more than one and none of those ways was fun.

With all the teaching, I’ve been more than drowning the bicycle-trips to the studio in truckloads of carbon-footprinting. On a peculiar night at AmalodTheGreat[3] over cups of thick tea, I quasi-decided to ride to the next course (in Hyderabad) and failed to realise there was not under- but over-one-thousand kilometers separating home from the college. It would have easily taken 10 days with hundred-plus kilometer days to get there in time for the first day of class. This, I am not prepared for, with the many projects deadlining in November. Yet, it looks like a good opportunity to turn courses into aftermaths of long-distance bicycle-trips; it seems like the only strict brief one could give oneself to stick to the road and hope for tailwinds. Wishful thinking: the money made from the courses can then go into funding the trips and not into unnecessary bits of gear that tie one down to a place. (I’ve come to terms with there being nothing wrong with tying oneself down to a place, mentally. Besides, the place I am tied down to is beautiful; yet it is a place in place.)

1: The other structures are named after Walnuts and Teaks. There is a tea-shop under Teak that is good material for low-hanging-fruit-puns. I’m in two minds about Walnut and Maple; they don’t do poetic justice to the the whole shebang, IMNSHO.

2: Joke! Just in case.

3: AmalodTheGreat is Vijayawada’s chai-gate in limbo. (From Wordweb: Limbo: ‘The place of unbaptized but innocent or righteous souls [such as infants and virtuous individuals].’)