Beneath the Skies

My name is Matt. This is mainly a commonplace book but is not limited to that. I am particularly interested in culture, languages, music (all art, really), and the general mystery of this "feverish and silly world."
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Lettin’ this baby spin today. Happy birthday, Mr. Cash!

It need not be dramatic, though. It can equally well just be the drifting into place of one more pleasant, indistinguishable little atom of wasted time, one more morning like all the others, which quietly discloses you to yourself. Lying in the bath and you notice that you’re thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you think you’ve always wanted; you got her by choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any one moment, temporarily outbid the things you said you wanted most…The HPtFtU dawns on you. You have, indeed, f***ed things up. Of course you have. You’re human, and that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience.

Francis Spufford

         Via 

Mockingbird blog 

Golden - My Morning Jacket

This song somehow captures for me the exact same feeling of driving aimlessly on a summer night, windows down, just thinking. It’s quite powerful….to me anyways. 

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep…

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

-Anne Lamott

(via paulgralen)

(via okigetit)

Mending is not the same thing as never broken. We are not being promised that it will be as if the bad stuff never happened. It’s amnesty that’s being offered, not amnesia; hope, not pretense.
Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p.166 (via invisibleforeigner)
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. … Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan, who passed away 16 years ago today, on the power and magic of books (via explore-blog)

(via lauracricket)

Rise to Me - The Decemberists