I have to believe in a world outside my own mind
I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them
I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still here

do I believe the world’s still here
is it still out there?

yeah
we all needmirrors to remind ourselves of who we are
I’m no different.

"memento" 2000

it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life’s Sentences (via azspot)

On Interactive Lit and the fancy Media-Labby Writing happening at MIT Erica says, she always thought that she was the one who was supposed to arrange words into sequences, and then to sequence the sequences into larger sets thereafter.

A snippet

            The corridor led into a column of rooms: each resembling the quiet corner of a living room. There were bookshelves densely packed with not books but people, what remained of them—their ashes encased in bronze book-like containers with book-like spines inscribed with their names. Perhaps the room was not a living room at all but a private study of somebody with money. I saw in a glass case his reading glasses. Beside them sat his framed portrait.

            Some rooms led into smaller corridors, their archways slightly different from one another. Cool cement, patterned with perennials—cinquefoil—five leaves and sometimes seven. I stood on the middle step of one and looked up at the tunnel’s skeleton. The vaulted supports were so richly decorated so that their ornament concealed their function, their necessity. The spaces in the ribbed tunnels were sometimes filled with the same book-like containers filled with ashes. Memories of years past concealed in the concrete structure. This was a destination for old souls, a place of meditation.