Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
— Bill Watterson (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)
(Source: mikekarnell, via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)
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American Life Insurance Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1971
(I.M. Pei & Partners)
Budding Love
Where the husband saw the homefield and the byre and the farmhouse and the diary and the family with Margret among them, Skuli saw only Margaret, or, at times, he didn’t see Margaret at all, but instead her hair and her eyes and her hands and her breasts, or the swell of her hips and the sway of her gait.
After being with him, Margret, too, saw these things -her wrist, her skirt, swinging about her, and she felt a puzzlement and an exhilaration that, as it faded, she yearned to feel again.
One day she went into the mountain wearing her new silk cloak, although the sun was warm on the scree of the mountain sides and she lingered there in some of the clefts where Skuli had a habit of meeting her. Now she saw him at the bottom of the hill, climbing the path from Undir Hofdi church. Now he looked up and perhaps caught sight of her, for he seemed to smile and quicken his pace.
When he spoke her name, she reached forward and pushed aside some branches of willow brush and his face was so close that it startled her and she snorted.
Skuli turned towards Margret, and at first his face bore no expression, and then she saw his jaw drop and his eyes widen in perfect admiration and surprise, such as she had never seen on his or any face in her life, and at the same time that she knew this as a sin and vanity she also fell into the terror of never seeing such a look on his face again
Hot tea, rainy nights,
slow kisses on lazy days,
thunder in our ears.
slow kisses on lazy days,
thunder in our ears.
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GREECE. Athens. Circa 1936.
Young man with laurel over the eyes. Photo by herbert list.
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By this time the sun had approached the horizon and begun upward again, and the birds, after a brief quiet, had started their raucous calling again.
