I didn’t want to see for miles. I didn’t want to peer into a telescope and spot the highway in the distance, the farms on the periphery the birds in formation. I wanted to stand at the base of the bird tower and crane my neck toward Chris and Hannah, bathed in sunlight, golden. Love was foolish and inevitable. We were just waiting to be shattered by it. The days were finite, full of awe.
– Lauren Fox, Days of Awe
Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.
– Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
Rabih’s awareness of the uncertainty makes him want to hang on to the light all the more fervently. If only for a moment, it all makes sense. He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself, and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children. But it is all desperately fragile. He knows full well that he has no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human passing through a small phase of contentment.
Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own. To keep all of this going, to ensure his continuing status as an almost sane person, his capacity to provide for his family financially, the survival of his marriage and the flourishing of his children – these projects offer no fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale….The courage not to be vanquished by anxiety, not to hurt others out of frustration,, not to grow too furious with the world for the perceived injuries it heedlessly inflicts, not to go crazy and somehow manage to persevere in a ore or less adequate way through the difficulties of married life – this is true courage; this is heroism in a class all its own.
– Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
So it is we connect with one another, move in and out of one another’s lives, teach and heal and affirm one another, across space and time – all of us wanderers, explorers, adventurers, stragglers and ramblers, sometimes tramps or vagabonds, even fugitives, but now and then pilgrims: as children, as parents, as old ones about to take that final step, to enter that territory whose character none of us here ever knows. Yet how young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination.
– Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children
John Updike was once asked why — for an ad, I think, like a whiskey ad or some crazy thing — why are we here? Why do we live? Sounds like a ridiculous question, but he had an instant answer for it. He said, “We’re here to give praise.” We’re here to give praise.
– Adam Gopnik, On Being interview with Krista Tippett, November 2015