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November 11, 2017

From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet:
[We] are all equally derived from no one knows what; we're shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel.

From Harper's:
In evaluating a new Body Odor Disgust Scale, researchers found that silent smelly farts are the body odor for which disgust differs most widely depending on whether the odor is one’s own or a stranger’s.

From The Guardian (Philip Pullman on "The book that changed my life/the world")
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

From The Economist:
Perversely, policies to help the poor unintentionally exacerbate the plight of left-behind places. Unemployment and health benefits enable the least employable people to survive in struggling places when once they would have had no choice but to move. Welfare makes capitalism less brutal for individuals, but it perpetuates the problems where they live.

From Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things:
August 2, 2014: it was James Baldwin’s birthday. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. He is one of those people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical—John Coltrane would have turned eighty-eight this year; Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned eighty-five—people who could still be with us but who feel, at times, very far away, as though they lived centuries ago.
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