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Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, since she was out of doors, in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength and the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold at bay, to outwit all the perils that beset it (which to Swann seemed innumerable since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed mankind to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with the sultan Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her to death in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his peace of mind. Then he would be ashamed of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to deserve no pity now that he himself held Odette’s very life so cheap.
lol
In the past, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it and hold it back. But now, to the diminution of his love there corresponded a simultaneous diminution in his desire to remain in love. For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. [...]
[...] The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy first syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirs, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence it was of a town miraculously scented and flower-like, since it was called the City of the Lilies, and its cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former status of some locality, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there even by the inn-keeper who would serve me coffee on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea in front of the church, and to whom I would ascribe the disputatious, solemn and mediaeval aspect of some character in an old romance.
sweet
[...] These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say who saw nothing), as in an opera a melodic theme introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre counting only the minutes as they passed. [...]
[...] seeing on the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party and admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining [...]
My education was still not complete. After the school on the island where being happy was the first rule, a last college smoothed out my seventeen years. A domestic management school [...] I was to learn to keep house, to cook, to bake cakes. I had already learnt a bit of embroidery, at eight. It was now expected that I prepare myself to become a housewife. They found a school near a lake, Lake Zug, renowned for its cherry flans.
made me chuckle
Now it's been years since we said our long goodbyes. I'm not any smarter. I just watched my first company go down in flames and I'm starting a new one. I have to talk to lawyers for bankruptcy in the mornings and lawyers for setting up a new firm in the second. And I know that if you were here, you'd be laughing at me and telling me what a sha gua I am for doing stupid shit twice in a row and expecting it to somehow work in the second time.
I look at the Hong Kong skyline that is my desktop background sometimes and I wonder how you're doing. If your 40-year-old engaged boss is still trying to finger you in the back of taxicabs, if you're still agonizing because you kinda like him but he's engaged and 15 years older than you. If you still want to webcam with me, even though we're both people that no longer hold each other in our hearts any more. If, when you send me those little heart-filled e-mail cards on my birthday, you really mean it.
Which pains me. But I still trust you. Because you were the one girl that liked me when I had nothing, so you're the one girl I can trust once I have everything.
And I am foolish. Maybe that's why I liked you. Because you were everything I never had, and so you became everything I ever wanted, and now you're everything I'm never going to get.
And the greatest tragedy of all: I wanted to make enough cash so that a smart girl like you would not have to degrade herself to the finance-world burnout [...]
But it all didn't work out, did it? You left too soon, I ended up with other girls that made me realize how... decent of a human being you were. That made me realize how much of a complete chump I myself am. And now I'm set back another two years, another two years farther away from holding you again, another two years closer to missing out on you for the second time, as you slip on a wedding ring to some jerkoff playboy while I type uselessly on an online forum twelve fucking time zones away
In the months after the election, the media focused on tech leadership. Who did or did not trek to Trump Tower? How much diversity of opinion was there in this room of white people? How far would they Lean In to fascism? Who cares?
We focus on the rank and file, because the reality is that meaningful change to the system that brought us Trump is not going to come from the people whom that system made billionaires. Meaningful change must come from below--from the workers who write the code that generates those billions to the workers whose service makes their coding possible.
The current arrangement might seem natural and immutable. But, as one of our favorite futurologists once said: so did the Divine Right of Kings.
yessss
referring to Ursula K Le Guin
The Tech Workers Coalition doesn't see tech workers as a special kind of worker. But we understand that we have a strategic position with regard to our place in production that we can leverage to stand in solidarity with other workers--not only with the service workers who work as security guards and bus drivers in our workplaces, but with all workers.
The dominant approach among well-intentioned people in tech when faced with a problem is: I can build an app that’ll fix that. And sure, technology is awesome and most of us work in tech because we find building tools to solve problems interesting. But the structural problems we have in society won’t be fixed by an app. We’ll need to think a lot bigger than that to solve these problems.
A different approach is: tech work is crucial to every industry at this point, and it’s done by a fairly small group of people. You can shut down quite a lot with a relatively few number of workers if you collectively decide to.
quoting Kristen Sheets