One of the best passages I’ve read in a while, about fecundity:

Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids; the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes, when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry. She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays some more, and eats them, too.

Anything can happen, and anything does; what’s it all about? Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow, wrote in a letter to the London Times:

‘My husband loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in the driver said: “You’re TS Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied: “Ah I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, ‘Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about,’ and do you know he couldn’t tell me.”’

Well, Lord God, asks the delicate, dying lacewing whose mandibles are wet with the juice secreted by her own ovipositor, what’s it all about?

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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A wonderful piece of writing by William James: 

“Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the site of a crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved! 

And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in the presence of particular objects… To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. 

Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals’ instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.” From The Principles of Psychology. 

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“In the end, like in Stardust Memories, we all get flushed. The beautiful ones, the accomplished ones, the Einsteins, the Shakespeares, the homeless guys in the street with the wine bottles, all end up in the same grave. So, I have a very dim view of things, but I think about them, and I do feel that I’ve come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.”

Woody Allen

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“Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings: ” I was out for a walk, it was an evening in May.” You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And then suddenly you think: “Something has happened.” No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a small silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, “Something is beginning.” 

“Something is beginning in order to end.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I know if you smile at someone and they smile back you’ve just decided that something shitty is going to happen. You might have a nice couple of dates but then she’ll stop calling you back and that will feel shitty or you will date for a long time and then she will have sex with one of your friends or you will with one of hers and that will be shitty. Or you will get married and it won’t work out and you will get divorced and split your friends and money and that is horrible. Or you will meet the perfect person whom you love infinitely and you even argue well and you grow together and you have children and then you get old together and then she’s gonna die.”

–Louis C.K.

The courage to be exists when, while taking this into account, one begins regardless. 

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“Resist the radical threat of non-being by the courage to be as oneself.”

—Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. 

Tempted to form a band of outsiders to color quotes from the book on the bathroom stalls of bookshops, dive bars, pentecostal churches, and police stations. Deeply rewarding book for anyone patient enough to wade through the multitudinous instances of the word “ontological”.  

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On whisking egg whites

from La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange

Imagine this scenario, which could occur in any number of houses possessing kitchen equipment that is otherwise quite respectable. Madame demands, in vain, that her oven produce soufflés as well risen as those at her favorite restaurant, or Mademoiselle wants to amuse herself making cookies and meringues but they are completely unsuccessful.

If, in these houses, anyone had seen egg whites whisked by a professional, they would have understood the significance of the term “firm snow peaks.” It would have been obvious why egg whites, beaten carelessly in a salad bowl, with a fork, could never have become firm enough to be capable of supporting the weight of an egg in its shell. They would also have understood why, even if they had succeeded in whisking the eggs properly, or nearly, the egg whites would have gone grainy. The egg white that goes grainy divides, like cream that curdles, into one part liquid, another part millions of little wet lumps, instead of retaining the firmness of a batter. When beaten to the consistency of “firm snow peaks,” egg whites appear more like a batter than a mousse.

To achieve this result, otherwise known as success, three conditions must be fulfilled: The purity of the egg whites, the use of appropriate utensils, and the technique of the endeavor.

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