“As You Read A Book Word By Word And Page By Page, You Participate In Its Creation, Just As A Cellist

The Comet, the Owl, and the Galaxy.

js

Positively Present

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. people so tired mutilated either by love or no love. people just are not good to each other one on one. the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor. we are afraid. our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn’t told us about the gutters or the suicides. or he terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant.” - Charles Bukowski (born: 16 August 1920)

Neil Gaiman: 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick' | Fiction | The Guardian

the Guardian

Neil Gaiman: 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'

The American Gods and Good Omens author on his friendship with Gene Wolfe, crying over Diana Wynne Jones and falling under the spell of CS L

Good morning @neil-gaiman, thank you so much for this.  I'm psyched to add your books to my list!  I learned to read my first words with the Chronicles of Narnia.  Dawn Treader and Magician's Nephew are my favorites.  It must be the portals.

When the Baal Schem, the founder of Hasidism, had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he had set out to perform was done.  When a generation later, the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task, he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: “We can no longer light a fire, but we can pray.”  And everything happened according to his will.  When another generation had passed, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov was faced with the same task, [and] he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: “We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayers, but we know the place in the woods, and that can be sufficient.”  And sufficient it was.  But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down in his golden chair, in his castle, and said: “We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of all this.”  And, once again, this was sufficient.

Gershom Scholem, from Giorgio Agamben’s book The Fire and the Tale

The Angel With The Flaming Sword - Edwin Howland Blashfield