What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 287
Tag: Teju Cole
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Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.
John Quincy Adams heeding his father’s advice to observe the world around him.
Or as Teju Cole begs: observe, observe, observe.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 327
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Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.
Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things. A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon, pg 86.I’ve never read Steward Brand‘s book “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built“, but it’s all I could think of after reading this passage.
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Afternoon light ripened the valley
From: Another Life, by Derek Walcott. As read from Teju Cole’s essay Derek Walcott, from his collection of essays – Known and Strange Things.
I read this Derek Walcott line repeatedly. I admit I’d never heard of Walcott before reading Teju Cole’s essay.
With a few words Walcott took me to a mountain range.
I could see the orange and yellows wash across the shrubs. I watched the white and pink light flood over the granite.
I wanted to keep going back there.
Floodlights and Goalposts 