[W]hatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm […]. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just the like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories. The very best ones see analogies between analogies.

Stefan Banach, in S. M. Ulam, Analogies between Analogies: The Mathematical Reports of S. M. Ulam and His Los Alamos Collaborators

                                            Unlike trees
or animals, we humans have to gather
to be real. When we’re together, we look
like more than shadows, we look true, we look like we could last
much longer than the fleeting lapse we really do.

Claudia Masin, “Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf”, in Intact, translated by Robin Myers

Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s notion of “feeling real” is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, “the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing,” which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Living alone, absolutely alone. Boredom doesn’t happen. Not loneliness in the usual sense. Only the tension, the tempo, the rhythm goes out—and that is enough. Life becomes a slack sail.

Patricia Highsmith, 15 November 1951, in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941–1995, edited by Anna von Planta

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-stewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Gabriel Marcel says that the artist who labors to produce effects for which he is well known is unfaithful to himself. This may seem obvious enough when it is badly stated: but how differently we act. We are all too ready to believe that the self we have created out of our more or less inauthentic efforts to be real in the eyes of others is a “real self.” We even take it for our identity. Fidelity to such a nonidentity is of course infidelity to our real person, which is hidden in mystery. Who will you find that has enough faith and self-respect to attend to this mystery and to begin by accepting himself as unknown? God help the man who thinks he knows all about himself.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Contact with others is what heals,
what sickens, the sun
encircled by the lonely planet
of ourselves, caught in the orbit
of the light or shadow as they draw
their heat toward us or away, as if we were
the dust kicked up by some other existence, the wake
churned at the source, the indissoluble bond we were supposed to renounce
but which awoke again each time we loved
another body. You hoped I’d write the words
that can do what music does:
step through the silence without harming it, be
part of it, and of the things that can’t be said,
the things we can’t even approach without
them darting away from us. I told you there’s nothing
like music but touch
and being touched, the particles
that meet and fuse and sometimes scrape against each other and
cause pain, and pull away, sometimes one explodes
inside the other, because there’s neither surface
nor interior: the inside is the same as out.

Claudia Masin, “The Silent Touch”, in Intact, translated by Robin Myers

A Thousand Thoughts, a thousand questions, mine, yours, ours, theirs, questions that perhaps open up things that definitive answers would only nail shut. Kronos Quartet’s long trajectory offers a series of questions that are solid and answers that elusive: How do you find a path between predictability and stability? How do you have both a clear identity and an open door that lets in new ideas and collaborators? How do you make an art that grows like a tree, ring by ring, year by year, and stands as a testament? How do you keep it alive through all the changes, and how do you incorporate the change that is, as my photographic collaborator Mark Klett likes to say, the measure of time? Or how do you proceed as Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said in some instructions for Zen Buddhist practice, “not too tight, not too loose,” not so tied by custom and convention and the past, not so formless that you lurch and spill into whatever the present offers?

Rebecca Solnit, program note for Kronos Quartet and Sam Green, A Thousand Thoughts

Days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity.
They wake us, and every day waking is absurdity;
All the things you just did yesterday to do over again, eternally.

The clench of tonsil on extra tonsil is an oyster only once,
Once, the blood and itch of broken skin, and afterwards indifference.
The boredom of the weeping aromatic bedsores only once.

But, forever fumbling for the snooze button, the gym is there
Forever, and the teeth silt over yellow to be flossed, and there
Will be, in eternity, coffee to be brewed and that moment in the shower
When you open your mouth and rhotacise the water and just stand there,
Stupid bliss of hot water, tongue-tingling, steaming the shower.

Hannah Sullivan, “Repeat Until Time”, in Three Poems

Words say, Misspell and misspell your name
Words say, Leave this life

From the singer streams of color
but from you

a room within a smaller room
habits of opposite and alcove

Eros seated on a skull as on a throne
Words say, Timaeus you are time

A page is edging along a string
Never sleep never dream in this place

And altered words say
O is the color of this name

full of broken tones
silences we mean to cross one day

Michael Palmer, “Baudelaire Series”, in Sun

In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.

Kevin Roose, “Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?”