Grief in Three Bodies: A Conversation by Victoria Chang, Prageeta Sharma & Khaty Xiong

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

— Jean Paul Sartre - from a letter to Simone de Beauvoir

The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility of relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. There is nothing mysterious about the anxious state; it leaves one teetering in an untenable and all too familiar isolation. There is rarely desire without some associated anxiety: We seem to be wired to have apprehension about that which we cannot control, so in this way, the two are not really complete opposites. But desire gives one a reason to tolerate anxiety and a willingness to push through it.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein

embarrassment has good bones

At this hour, Losel Yauch

there is still time. there is still time. until your bones are in the fucking ground there is still time.

“i’d do it all over again” charm

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld

uh oh i miss something i can’t name again. i want to go home to something that doesn’t exist again. does anyone have a gun

the cycle of life

it's rotten work, but without the rot nothing can grow

it's rotten work but decay is an essential part of the cycle of death and rebirth

does anyone know how to escape the constant sense of waiting