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The manuscript will live on my desk, untouched, for weeks on end. And I stare at it knowing that I should do something. But something inside me rejects it. As if it's an unwanted child begging for attention, and I, an absent parent who's too busy to care.

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I'm too exhausted to explain my soul to someone again.

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You are like a Lilly in full bloom. I catch glimpses of you and your smile. I see that you're growing and evolving. It makes me happy to see you like that, to hear your plans for the future and to hear the gratitude in your voice.

I, on the other hand, am rotting. Like a log left in the rain. My insides are growing hollow and I'm breaking apart at seams that seem impossible

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As an object of desire, that which we long for causes suffering, but as an object of mindfulness it can lead to awakening. The trick, as far as Buddhism is concerned, is to accept the fact that no experience can ever be as complete as we would wish, that no object can ever satisfy completely. In the right-handed path, the Buddha’s followers turned away from the pursuit of sensory pleasure, but in the left-handed path, they allowed themselves to come face-to-face with the gap that desire always comes up against, as well as any pleasure that it might bring. Allowing ourselves into desire’s abyss turns out to be the key to a more complete enjoyment of its fruits. By experiencing desire in its totality: gratifying and frustrating, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, successful and yet coming up short, we can use it to awaken our minds. The dualities that desire seems to take for granted can be resolved through a willingness to drop into the gap between them. Even living in the world of the senses, we can be free.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein

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i don’t think people understand how much of life is grief. not just people dying, but losing the version of yourself you thought you’d become. grieving the city you had to leave. the friends you lost not in argument, but in silence. the summer that will never come back. the feeling that maybe you peaked at 12 when you were reading books under the covers and believing in forever

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Literature is not written for academic readers and is not read exclusively by them, yet most academic accounts of literary texts seem to tacitly assume as much. This is puzzling given that one of the most powerful justifications for the academic study of literature is that the entire human species cares enormously about telling and being told stories. But what would it mean for literary scholarship to speak to the experiences of nonacademic readers? The first step needs to be to notice, listen and learn from them. Alongside “traditionally educated middle-class men gone astray,” who Kurzke sees as the “best readers” of The Magic Mountain, I would like to place many others—not least of all self-conscious young women with budding academic aspirations who are made to feel that they are living in a culturally marginal place. The point, really, is that there are no best readers; there are just readers attuned to different aspects of the text, though some are listened to more than others. 

Karolina Watroba, The Anxiety of Difficulty

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silhouette of tree branches under a starry sky

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Russian Ark, 2002

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by Carine Khalife