Timely review here.

This quote from the book, though, about museums and memorials, was money:

I was surrounded by the specter of 10,000 people moving through the galleries in a manner I had witnessed elsewhere, in other exhibitions: examining, with wistful, beatific expressions, each artifact…emblems of a shameful chapter which had, to them, closed; shaking their heads but ultimately marveling—often with childlike fascination—at how such a thing could have happened, when, amidst calls for it to never happen again, it is happening all the time everywhere.

Shimoda, Brandon. The Afterlife Is Letting Go. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2024.

“But in that strange way our world is arranged, petty causes have always given birth to great events, just as great ventures have always ended up with petty consequences.”

“And anyway, I am not fond of ruminations if ruminations are all they remain.”

From The Old World Landowners

Gogol, Nikola Vasilevich. And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories. Translated by Oliver Ready. London: Pushkin Press, 2019.

Writing doesn’t prove anything,
And it only rarely persuades.
It does something much better.
It attests.
It witnesses.
It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed.
It reports on the nature of your attention.
It suggest the possibilities of the world around you.
The evidence of the world as it presents itself to you.

Proof is for mathematicians.
Logic is for philosophers.
We have testimony.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. Several Short Sentences about Writing. First Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2013.

“There’s nothing but what’s bearable as long as a man can work,” he said to himself, “the nature o’things doesn’t change, though it seems as if one’s own life was nothing but change. The square o’four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man’s miserable as when he’s happy; and the best o’working is it gives you a grip hold o’things outside your own lot.”

I’m early in the book — 100 pages or so — so the only caveat I’d add for the 21st century is that Adam Bede is a craftsman. He’s not talking of work that’s crud work for someone else or mindless work in service of nothing…

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.