So, my dog is afraid of the dark. He legitimately will not go outside unless the porch light is on.
And even then, he’s nervous.
I think my dog has anxiety problems.
@3 days ago
#anxiety #dog #dogs #puppy #understatement #the things I ponder late at night while enduring dog-induced insomnia
Here it is, emphasis mine, but otherwise untouched:
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?”
@4 days ago with 1 note
#charles dickens #books #metaphor #a tale of two cities
"The frontier is capable of no finer compliment than this utter disregard of one’s folded pages. It betokens that highest faith in one’s fellow-man, the belief that he should be measured by his present deeds, not by his past. It says, translated: “This is God’s free country where a man is a man, nothing more. Our land is new and pure, our faces are to the front. If you have been square, so much the better; if not, leave behind the taints of artificial things and start again on the level—that’s all."
The Spoilers, Rex Beach
I’m really fond of the metaphor of people as books. It happens in A Tale of Two Cities as well… just a moment.
@4 days ago with 1 note
#Best-Seller #Rex Beach #Surprising Beauty #The Spoilers #books #metaphor
"It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours."
Virginibus Puerisque, Robert Louis Stevenson
I like the fact that literature is there to remind us that practically nobody has ever been perfect.
@5 days ago
#Virginibus puerisque #Robert Louis Stevenson #marriage