I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
— Margaret Atwood (via atomos)
I wish I were a poet. I’ve never confessed that to anyone, and I’m confessing it to you, because you’ve given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I’ve spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind’s eye. It’s been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I’ve been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, ‘Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.’ I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we’ll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer (via atomos)
“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
― Terence McKenna
I’m concerned about the future of books and bookstores, but I’m even more concerned about the 14,000 people who lost their jobs in the liquidation of Borders. Thomas Jefferson said he couldn’t live without books, but we really can’t live without jobs.
(And look, I’m a capitalist: I understand that an efficient economy creates jobs where they’re needed and removes them where they aren’t. I get that we can’t pay people to do work that doesn’t add value. But I think bookstores do add value, and I hope to convince lots of other people that I’m right. That’s something Hank and I are thinking about a lot as we plan for The Fault in Our Stars tour. We want to find ways to reward bookstores for all the value they bring to our lives, while still embracing the truth that the Internet is a great place to find and buy books.)
