Quotes

Diary

I realized that real intimacy comes from the knowing of things that are only to be discovered through the sharing of mundanity, insights that are only to be glimpsed over the sharing of breakfast — seeing the shape of a person by how they peel an orange, how much butter they put on their bread. Do you prepare your coffee with a French press? Drip? Percolator or perhaps a moka? Pass the honey as you tell me about the thing you heard on the radio and the not-so-funny joke the professor made about Kierkegaard. What you had for lunch yesterday and what you saw on your commute. Let me pretend I can reveal you to me by the study of these habits: the small magic of the mundane, the beauty of the overlooked.

One thing I am convinced of it is this: that a person can be revealed in these seemingly tiny and insignificant occurrences, seen through — witnessed — in the threadbare ordinalities of life.

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Real Intimacy

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Diary

“If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime,” but you have done neither.

You have stood before us and eaten fish after fish, and chided us for our greed as you have done so. You have cast aside their offal and simultaneously chided us for our waste. You then told us that, coincidentally, you owned the river, and our parents should have gotten us the same if we wanted fish. You gave a man a fish to murder us if we step too close to the river, or speak too loud, or eat a fish from another river. You’ve copyrighted the fishing net. It costs us fish to leave.

Give a man a fish?

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