Here are various passages that stood out for being especially beautiful, meaningful, or otherwise noteworthy.
#5 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
A section titled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster”:
Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy … To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.
On sentimentality:
Whether it be a plant or a tree, a bird or an insect, I can never be indifferent to anything that is connected with some special occasion or experience that has once moved or delighted me.
#4 Open City by Teju Cole
A reflection on multiculturalism, those who use it as a vehicle for ignorance, and those who risk getting caught in the crossfire:
What Farouq got on the trams wasn’t a quick suspicious glance. It was a simmering, barely contained fear. The classic anti-immigrant view, which saw them as enemies competing for scarce resources, was competing with a renewed fear of Islam. When Jan van Eyck depicted himself in a large red turban in the 1430s, he had testified to the multiculturalism of fifeenth-century Ghent, that the stranger was nothing unusual. Turks, Arabs, Russians: all had been part of the visual vocabulary of the time. But the stranger had remained strange, and had become a foil for new discontents. It occurred to me, too, that I was in a situation not so radically different from Farouq’s. My presentation – the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger – made me a target for the inchoate rage of the defenders of Vlaanderen. I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or “Viking.” But the bearers of the rage could never know how cheap it was. They were insensitive to how common, and how futile, was their violence in the name of a monolithic identity. This ignorance was a trait angry young men, as well as their old, politically powerful rherotircal champions, shared the world over. And so, after that conversation, as a precaution, I cut down on the length of my late night walks in Etterbeek. I resolved, also, to no longer visit all-white bars or family restaurants in the quieter neighbourhoods.
On reading:
Taking classes never taught me anything. Everything interesting was in the books; it was books that made me aware of the variety of the world.
On the fleeting nature of mood:
It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.
#2 Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
A pure and wholesome marriage moment:
Yet I suspected, because travel so often provoked life-summational emotions (and especially now, with the sensation of the new Bug [their baby] asleep on our laps), that this would be one of those times when if I did get a peek into her [his wife’s] thoughts I would be rewarded by a specific clump of happiness that I would be permanently grateful to have learned; one of those powerful, marriage reinforcing confidences. So I thought I ought for both our sakes to ask her – but as a concession to her right to privacy I decided to vary the probe by giving my face a slightly craven and servile expression and by using the traditional porch-swing wording, “Penny for your thoughts?” in a uvularly hoisted Pee-wee Herman voice. But Jesus, I thought, a penny! Who came up with this ridiculously cheap valuation?
[Then, after a long digression] I simply had to intrude on Patty’s reflections by asking her what they were. I was on the point of leaning toward her ear when she suddenly turned smiling at me and said, “What strange plans are you hatching, Snakeboy? You have quite a conspiratorial look.” So I told her everything I could remember [here follows a summary of the digression]. The fact that I had been thinking a nice thing about her may have been enough to click her trust in me up a notch, since she then said that while I had been weighing whether to break the silence, she had been thinking that she didn’t care that the position of the hot Bug on her lap was certainly going to leave wrinkles in her dress, and that once, when she was still in college and I was in my first year at Neimtzow Controls, she had put on a green cotton dress to visit me and had stood in the aisle of the uncrowded train all the way from Philadelphia to Boston so that the cotton wouldn’t be wrinkled when I met her in the station. She’d never told me this before! A marriage-reinforcer.
A perfect example of the numerous tiny joyous moments of watching your child exist:
Two separate vacuums – a lung vacuum for inhaling, and a mouth vacuum for sucking, were in effect simultaneously! She was a remarkable, remarkable daughter.