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I am lying in bed early in the evening. A burnt honey colored candlewick sits on my rosewood bedside stand sending blades of smoke into the French countryside air. I am falling asleep, maybe my eyelids are closing or I have just started dreaming, but I don’t realize it yet.
The movement is not primarily about speed, but about freedom: the freedom, at least on occasion and when the text demands it, to read as though we care about something other than being done reading.
Slow has moved beyond food. Read Jessica Love’s essay about the makings of the Slow Reading movement, as well as about what, exactly, our eyes and brains do when we read.
(Photo by Steve Caplin via The Guardian)
“Baltimore is warm but pleasant … I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Winter Belgian design by www.GiraffeLookout.tumblr.com (Toasty Mammoth logo by Mike Davis at Burlesque Design)
Queen Victoria, almost as wide as she was tall, was a good namesake for a lake that stretched on forever.
Follow the treacherous expedition of the explorer who named Lake Victoria in “Water in the Empty Part of the Map” by Sierra Bellows.
Happy Earth Day!
Read Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin’s “What the Earth Knows” and discover some of the unexpected things the Earth can teach us.
life:
On Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday, we present a series of photos made in 1958 that illustrate the great writer’s obsession with butterflies.
(Carl Mydans—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) — Timeline Photos
His coffee is ready. When he pours it into his big mug, it comes to him that what he really loves, what he really, really, couldn’t ever possibly give up is exactly this loneliness he’s got here. Exactly this.
“High on a Hill” by David Huddle
“Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that we call totalitarian leaders ‘dictators,’ that is, nonstop talkers. In company, Hitler apparently never shut up, and, however various his interests were—in his own mind he was an architect, a philosopher, a political thinker; he was a sort of Renaissance man to ruin anyone’s idea of the Renaissance—his intimate conversation was limited.” — Read Mark Edmundson’s “Enough Already,” a commentary on the many types of bores—in addition to dictators—one can find in the world.