summer reading

although it's been a while since i actually had a required summer reading list (that stopped with high school...) summer still means having plenty o' time to be lazy and lounge around reading. from succumbing to eat, pray, love (i was super skeptical at first) to an alain de botton kick aided by my friend katie, here's what i've been reading, and the parts i dog eared...

"though such sensory blindness is often rather welcome, particularly when one is performing an operation during a shell barrage in the first world war, it is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. a sprained ankle quickly teaches us about the body's weight distribution; hiccups force us to notice and adjust to hitherto unknown aspects of the respiratory system; being jilted by a lover is a perfect introduction into the mechanisms of emotional dependency. in fact, in proust's view, we don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped."
(from how proust can change your life)

"our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like 'us' so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves. unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. in a hotel room strangled by three motorways, or in a waste land of run-down tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. we may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful. we depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. we look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. we arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at constant risk of forgetting we need - within. we turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves."
(from the architecture of happiness)

"big deal. so you fell in love with someone. don't you see what happened? this guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. i mean you got zapped, kiddo. but that love you felt, that's just the beginning. you just got a taste of love. that's just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. heck, you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. it's your destiny. don't laugh."
(from eat, pray, love.)

"a critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as band-aid solutions. but that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. the band-aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. in their history, band-aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. the band-aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost. we have, of course, an instinctive disdain for this kind of solution because there is something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort. that slow and steady should win the race. the problem, of course is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. there are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot of a little, and that is what tipping points, in the end, are all about."
(from the tipping point.)

"through romantic fatalism, we avoid the unthinkable thought that the need to love is always prior to our love for anyone in particular. our choice of partner necessarily operates within the bounds of whom we happen to meet and, given different bounds, different flights, different historical periods or events, it might not have been chloe i would have loved at all - something i could not contemplate now that it was her i had actually begun to love. my mistake had been to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. it was there error that think that chloe, rather than love, was inevitable."
(from on love)