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The Open Door Bookshop

Rome | Italy

ph. nil.bertinge

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A Clear Midnight

by Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.

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Sleeping satellite, Brett Scheifflee (because)

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faye wei wei / kenesha sneed / oamul lu / pierre boncompain / mai ta / faye wei wei

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Christmas Roses, 1883, Claude Monet

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Better to Light Candles

by Merle Shain

It is better to light candles than to curse the darkness. It is better to plant seeds than to accuse the earth. The world needs all of our power and love and energy, and each of us has something that we can give. The trick is to find it and use it, to find it and give it away. So there will always be more. We can be lights for each other, and through each other’s illumination we will see the way. Each of us is a seed, a silent promise, and it is always spring.

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Jia Tolentino

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C.D. Wright

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“There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move one heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that dispatches him.”

— The Company of Wolves, by A. Carter

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why is it that whenever I am disillusioned with the world I go back to the epic of Gilgamesh

“It is the story of their becoming human together.”

This is it. This is the oldest written literary work that we know of, and it’s a story of becoming human together.

This is a story about love, and it’s a story about death, and we told this story thousands of years ago, THOUSANDS of years. We have always, always, always been wrestling with this profoundly beautiful existence and with knowing one another, while knowing that we all will die and be forgotten.

We become human by loving, but we also become human by knowing death.

And I’m just sitting here touching other human beings, another human experience, from across millennia, feeling a bit more human too through it, and I am trying very hard not to cry.

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“… colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.”

— Franz Fanon. (via deconstructingtheconstructed)

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Tired | Langston Hughes

“Tired” Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting. Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind.

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that colossal wreck

Happy Independence Day, America.

Your treatment of immigrants is not only abhorrent but also fully blind to the nature of your own existence on this continent; you, too, are visitors here.

Your greed is unmatched. For land; for money; for oil; for power; for supremacy; for all that you are able to perceive, you clamor and stretch and grasp and strangle. In your unmeasured frenzy, you destroy that for which your mouth foams.

It wasn’t enough for you just to invade, destroy, rename, and desecrate. You saw this as your right, your divine preordinance, and, in your execution thereof, you saw fit to displace not only those who stood in your way but millions more taken from the cradle of humanity itself, upon the necks of whom you would one day stand proclaiming, “Look at all that I alone have built.”

The pain and destruction you have continued to sow upon this Earth may only be rivaled in scale by the grotesquerie of the celebrations in which you continue to partake on this, the fourth day of July, a month named in vanity and hubris and idolatry.

And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— (Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”)

Enjoy your celebrations and reveries now as the King of Kings did then, and know that the day will come when this nation shares his fate.

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“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi river in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

— Toni Morrison

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“And I knew then those things that happened so long ago must have happened, but not to us. No, I don’t think people could go on living if they had lived those things. It couldn’t have been us.”

— Raymond Carver, from “The Windows of the Summer Vacation Houses,” All of Us: The Collected Poems (Vintage, 2000)

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A Small Needful Fact

by Ross Gay

Is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parks and Rec. Horticultural Department, which means, perhaps, that with his very large hands, perhaps, in all likelihood, he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house and feed small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay at Mitchell Kennerly’s house in Mamaroneck, New York, 1914.