Welcome to Walker Weekly, a regularly scheduled newsletter where I share things that I find interesting, useful, inspiring, or thought-provoking. If you have anything of your own that falls into these categories, please let me know in the comments! I’m always looking for new inspiration.
No issue last week – I was out on vacation. Here’s what I’ve got for you this week!
Book I’m glad I read
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. After posting about that list of top 100 books a few weeks ago, I thought I’d start working through the top 10, so I picked up Lolita (having already read Don Quixote and Blood Meridian). The subject matter is obviously challenging, but the lyrical prose is just on another level. Here are a few quotes I pulled out that really amazed me:
I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains.
And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.
Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world, and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.
Philosophy I’m pondering
You’re part of this place, not a visitor.
Craig Foster
If you haven’t seen My Octopus Teacher (YouTube), you are in for a treat. It might make you a bit kinder, gentler, and feel less like a visitor on this big green and blue rock.
Blog post I’m loving
200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness. In keeping with my theme of fascination and appreciation for solitude, this post by Maria Popova gives us a bird’s eye view of a few great writers who pondered about the value of being alone.
That’s all for this week, thanks a lot for following along!
Stay curious,
Walker
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