21.06.2025 (1): Keeping Sweetness
Jun. 21st, 2025 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionI am very, very far from greatness but I love this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, come across by way of My Abandonment (Peter Rock, later got turned into a film called Leave No Trace):
I don't like how trumped up the great-men quotes are, but I think I read this in relation to my work. I need to keep sweetness. Above all keep sweetness, and my source of sweetness (and perspective) is literature and writing and films, I think. Also long walks in the morning or at dusk. Today I was very much taken over by my anxieties - mostly through no fault of my own, mind, I was just extremely sleepy - and am only now calming down.
I also told a secret to a friend yesterday, finally.
I'm reading Helen Garner's The Children's Bach, and the prose is sparkling! This is the sort of literary fiction I love. There's not a plot per se, but it's very pretty. The scenes jump a lot, the perspectives too, but the prose remains. I think I like Vicki best, since she's the loneliest, and her attempts to get out of it are absolutely heartbreaking.
Also Mrs. Helen Garner really seems to love getting into the nitty-gritty of the issues, I guess: The First Stone, This House of Grief. Truly true crime.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
I don't like how trumped up the great-men quotes are, but I think I read this in relation to my work. I need to keep sweetness. Above all keep sweetness, and my source of sweetness (and perspective) is literature and writing and films, I think. Also long walks in the morning or at dusk. Today I was very much taken over by my anxieties - mostly through no fault of my own, mind, I was just extremely sleepy - and am only now calming down.
I also told a secret to a friend yesterday, finally.
I'm reading Helen Garner's The Children's Bach, and the prose is sparkling! This is the sort of literary fiction I love. There's not a plot per se, but it's very pretty. The scenes jump a lot, the perspectives too, but the prose remains. I think I like Vicki best, since she's the loneliest, and her attempts to get out of it are absolutely heartbreaking.
Also Mrs. Helen Garner really seems to love getting into the nitty-gritty of the issues, I guess: The First Stone, This House of Grief. Truly true crime.
