Orts #960
If you're on a tightrope, when you first set off you don't know how much play there is in the rope, but when you get into the middle between the ages of 20 and 40 the thing rocks like mad and it's too late to go back, even to look back. But if you go on as carefully as you can, you see the other platform and then you just make a dash for it not bothering with what the audience thinks, or waving your arms, or looking dangerous and difficult and prodigious. What you grab hold of when you get to the other side is in fact the edge of your coffin. And you get into it and you lie down and you think, 'my cuffs are frayed', 'I haven't written to my mother'. And then you think 'it doesn't matter because I'm dead'. And this is a message of hope. It will come to an end. It will come, we cannot be blamed for it and we shall be free.
— Quentin Crisp
________________________
the bizarre tale of a puppy with a miniature tail between its eyes
https://nyti.ms/32RARvJ
________________________
We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
-- Louis de Bernières (1954- ), about a relationship that endured into old age
________________________
from The Atlantic archives, June 2018: Time-Lapse Footage of Hawaii’s Kīlauea Eruption