Clippings

Whimsy

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Mary Oliver

I didn't find an appreciation for Mary Oliver until I moved away from Ohio, supposedly in the suburb next to the one in which Oliver grew up. I don't know why her work is not more celebrated where she was born.

Dante

“Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”


— Dante Alighieri

Seen at the Substack of Philosophors. Though I have long known these lines, I think I have just found the most informative explanation in Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity.

Kafka on Writing

An advantage of keeping a diary consists in the fact that one becomes aware with reassuring clarity of the transformations one incessantly undergoes…In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today…

Franz Kafka via jillian Hess and Austin Kleon

That's a big baguette!

French bakers in Suresnes, just west of Paris, made a 461-foot baguette on Sunday. The massive loaf successfully returned the title of world’s longest baguette to France, according to Guinness World Records, as it exceeded a 435-foot baguette made by (gasp) Italians in 2019.

via The New York Times