Jennifer Michael Hecht @heymiserable-blog - Tumblr Blog

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want. I let my oars fall into the water. Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want. The night is so still that I forget to breathe. The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving. Tonight there are people getting just what they need. The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart. I remember you in a black and white photograph taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost. When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over. Tonight, there are people who are so happy, that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow. Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow. My hand trails in the water. I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind. — Jennifer Michael Hecht, from “September” in The Next Ancient World. Tupelo Press, 2001

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From “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Shall I bolt or battle? Or better yet, might this pass me by without regret?

From The Propagation of the Species by Jennifer Michael Hecht (via hush-syrup)

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Grief’s Weird Sister, Gratitude by Jennifer Michael Hecht

How to read a tome of Collected Poems? Read one that pivotally changes you and lose track of the page and title. How to clean a house? Lose your ring in it.

Milosz not having to make peace one day because the people are dead, nor revisit some cities of his blood, because they are razed. I’m still reading for that one.

If I wince that I got cuppy, said too much, maybe years ago, sometimes the sudden knowledge that my auditor is no longer will come in as wistful relief, if with grief.

So I’d like to find it. This “how” isn’t an engineering question, but angle, here alchemically translated to hope by way of loss.

mumeditation

None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience.

Jennifer Michael Hecht (via mumeditation)

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thegreatwhitedistance

Sometimes I think we could have gone on. All of us. Trying. Forever. But they didn’t fill the desert with pyramids. They just built some. Some. They’re not still out there, building them now. Everyone, everywhere, gets up, and goes home. Yet we must not Diabolize time. Right? We must not curse the passage of time.

(via thegreatwhitedistance)

studyrose

Sometimes I think we could have gone on. All of us. Trying. Forever. But they didn’t fill the desert with pyramids. They just built some. Some. They’re not still out there, building them now. Everyone, everywhere, gets up, and goes home. Yet we must not diabolize time. Right? We must not curse the passage of time.

“ON THE STRENGTH OF ALL CONVICTION AND THE STAMINA OF LOVE” by Jennifer Michael Hecht (via studyrose)

dearaimee

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love- Jennifer Michael Hecht

Sometimes I think we could have gone on. All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn’t fill the desert with pyramids. They just built some. Some.

They’re not still out there, building them now. Everyone, everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not diabolize time. Right?

We must not curse the passage of time.

mumeditation

None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience.

Jennifer Michael Hecht (via mumeditation)

darkkorg

From “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Great believers and great doubters seem like opposites, but they are more similar to each other than to the mass of relatively disinterested or acquiescent men and women. This is because they are both awake to the fact that we live between two divergent realities: On one side, there is a world in our heads— and in our lives, so long as we are not contradicted by death and disaster— and that is a world of reason and plans, love, and purpose. On the other side, there is the world beyond our human life—an equally real world in which there is no sign of caring or value, planning or judgment, love, or joy. We live in a meaning-rupture because we are human and the universe is not.

Hecht, Jennifer (2010-09-28). Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson (Kindle Locations 104-109). HarperOne. Kindle Edition. (via happinessweareallinittogether)

platitudeurn

Excerpt from 'Stay'

Often people demand a great deal from themselves and their lives and are despondent when reality does not measure up. Milton has long been understood as having offered consolation for this affliction, reminding us that we do not always have a say in the role that we play in the world and that sometimes we must learn to see the service we are giving when we are doing nothing but waiting.

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Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht

“In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world’s greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,’ who are also humanity’s greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.”

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From “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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CultureHISTORY: New York, 1940 - Photo by Helen Levitt

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Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 (via theparisreview)

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“Funny Strange,” Jennifer Michael Hecht

We are tender and our lives are sweet

and they are already over and we are visiting them in some kind of endless reprieve from oblivion, we are walking around in them and after we shatter with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing, thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng? Let us live as if we were still among

the living, let our days be patterned after theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

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