Commonplace Book 03.26.20

Albert Camus, The Plague:
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

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Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations:
“The body is an afterthought. We don’t stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Unless it’s involved in pleasure or pain, we pay this moving mass of vessel, blood and bone no mind. The lungs inflate, muscles contract, and there is no reason to assume they won’t keep on doing so. Until one day, something changes: a corporeal blip.”

“When I think of it, even now, I feel it like a shove, her loneliness.”

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Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet:
“Today, during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of purpose, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life . . . ’’

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Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation:
“There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it.”

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Simone Weil:
“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”