An honest mistake
"I've def been thinking of you though Colleen -- I told my boss he needed to put down the bottle the other day."
--email from a friend
At first blush I was a tad offended-- I thought my friend was saying that his boss' alcohol problem reminded him of me! But I then realized he was referring to the fact that "put down the bottle" is a phrase I use frequently when someone (sober or not) says or does something goofy.
Either way, I suppose, it's nice to be remembered for something!
While you're still in the pink
Woody Allen says "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think" (again) in a very readable little interview with the New York Times.
Photo by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Q: How do you feel about the aging process?
A Thoroughly Modern Rx
If I were a medical doctor specializing in the treatment of 21st-century illnesses, I'd prescribe the entirety of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance for an increasingly common affliction I've identified called "social media-induced malaise."
The following excerpt I would specifically recommend to treat what I call "grass-is-greener ennui," a vague but persistent discomfort one feels after viewing the Twitter and/or Facebook profiles of her seemingly more accomplished or happy friends:
"...The voices which we hear in solitude... grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
"Let yourself be inert"
From Marcel Proust's 1907 letter to his friend Georges de Lauris, regarding the recent death of his mother:
"Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her.
When you are used to this horrible thing, that she will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her rightful place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible.
Let yourself be inert, wait until the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say 'a little' because henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."
*this translation I took mostly from the September 13 issue of the New Yorker, which has a really touching compilation of Roland Barthes' notes on mourning. I changed a few words of the translation after finding the original letter in French here.
