even*cleveland: this weekend

this weekend

It's snowing this morning, and we've already been outside once to check the bird feeder and rake the snow (the rake being Hugh's favorite yard tool). I imagine we'll be out again after nap and lunch.

I am wearing my new favorite sweater. It looks beige, but is actually flecked with all sorts of bright colors (when I was in New York, I saw a similar tweed at BDDW covering a settee and made into a coat; the sweater was a more affordable way to get a little of the multicolor magic).

Weekend plans:

And a few things worth reading (from The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The NYRB):

Juno Diaz: 'What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.”'
'tune in and stay that way'
man-made earthquakes (Scott Pruitt's legacy in Oklahoma; he has been tapped to head the EPA)
on losing abundance in the natural world (The Moth Snowstorm is next on my to-read list)
Zadie Smith: 'Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive.'

And just like that, nap time is over. Next week: a few more gift guides. Happy weekend.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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