Rec | ANNIE DILLARD’S THE WRITING LIFE

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these two sentences hit me harder than I ever expected How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

@ttwardz

Feb 28, 2024

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How should a person be - sheila heti

Her words slammed into the soil of my soul and anything I am, think, or do will have grown from this

@r1ana

Dec 15, 2024

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on reading the news in your 20s

i remember wondering what they must have been thinking. while the bombs were being dropped, while their high school crush was sent to fight a war he didn't want. i wondered what they spent their days doing. what their older coworkers were whispering about in break rooms. what the best cook in their friend group was thinking as they fed dinner parties with ritz pies and canned vegetable casseroles. i wondered how it felt to keep spinning when the world was falling apart, surely the citizens knew better, surely they spoke up, surely their bones were alight with rage and confidence and desperation! surely it felt cataclyismic. that's how it's always been taught. looking back, we see the patterns. looking forward, we just see another day. these days, as my rights are being taken from me every morning, as the farmers are scared to farm and the reporters cannot report and the people are stirring unsteadily- these days i know all too well. i cut my strawberries in fours wondering if next week there will be any left. i listen to conversations in break rooms and elevators, making a tally of who's husband has a red hat and who talks about lowering taxes and whos eyes shift to the floor whenever someone says the word immigrant. i savor, save, and wonder. i worry, don't we all worry? i hold my lover tight and blanket us in gratitude, praying it is enough that we never discover how lucky and rare this moment is. when i was young i signed myself up for the revolution because it was exciting. then because it was necessary, and now because it is all there is. we expected songbirds and battle cries and passion, instead we carry casual, mundane grief. maybe there is no better future. maybe all there is is the hope of one. so i no longer wonder. i know what it is to be one of the unlucky ones. i know the lack of glory in living through the next generations 'never again'. we are not revolutionaries. we are not martyrs. we are people just getting through the day. no one will write me a biography when i am gone, my diary will not be published. but my hands will be dirty and my soul will be light when they accuse me of the crime of being human. i lived, despite it all, during it all. isn't that what it's all about?

@kiwibird4

Jan 28, 2025

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What’s that - anne sexton

Before it came inside I had watched it from my kitchen window, watched it swell like a new balloon, watched it slump and then divide, like something I know I know - a broken pear or two halves of the moon, or round white plates floating nowhere or fat hands waving in the summer air until they fold together like a fist or a knee. After that it came to my door. Now it lives here. And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal's ear that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me. You know how parents call from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in, and how you sank under water to put out the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall at night: the rustle and the skin you couldn't know, but heard, the stout slap of tides and the dog snoring. It's here now, caught back from time in my adult year - the image we did forget: the cranking shells on our feet or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is real as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street and are there and are true. What else is this, this intricate shape of air? calling me, calling you.