even*cleveland: gifts of clarity and reflection

gifts of clarity and reflection

A prism, for making rainbows whenever the sun comes out.

A deck of prompts from Moon Lists, to inspire thinking in new directions (pre-order).

Masunobu Ando's silver-glazed ceramic coffee dripper, for brewing head-clearing cups, or a tea for getting more out of your dreams.

Shiny sequin-printed socks by Maria la Rosa, for subtle sartorial surrealism.

Haneda stand mirrors, built to reflect the Golden Ratio.

A "deliciously sparkly antique faceted crystal Rivière" (I swoon), found by Kindred Black.

Sugahara glass river stone paperweight, for doing a heavy task with admirable lightness.

Blown-glass vases, for seeing into the roots of things.

Pauline Oliveros' guide to learning "to listen beyond the edge of your own imagination."

A replica Victorian-era butler's ball, to use for discreet observation via reflection.

A mirrored bookmark, and a book meant to be read more than one way.

Cirque's sterling nail polish for fingers that look like they have been dipped in silver.

Eric Ericson's "Self Image" pewter mirror, for showing more than one face.

One more indulgence: These funny gift guides are an annual delight to compile for all of you anonymous folks out there. I don't make any money from them—no affiliate links, no placements, nada! I'm an online renegade!—but if they have brought you joy or amusement, please consider making a donation to Doctors Without Borders. I'm donating what I can, too, and holding the people of Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan in my heart. Thank you.

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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