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Living in the age of convenience

taiwanese grass jelly herb (3.1/5) (cooling, bitter mint sensation that feels light but has an intense climate. apparently, when steeped with agar agar or gelatin, it can thicken into a jelly. however, i would prefer to drink the herb as is.) "And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the most innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold lead of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness. How in such a dark place, gold draws so much light to itself is a mystery to me. Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold, but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value, for gold in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty." Tanizaki'...
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a lecture on sound

I love the way sound is able to speak--

it speaks on water, it speaks on snow, it speaks on the black hair of my mother.

When a sound is produced in a room, it propagates as pressure waves that travel through the air. Diffraction happens when sound waves happen to encounter obstacles or edges in the room and bend around them, causing changes in the sound's direction and distribution; it is the basis for what allows sound to reach areas that are not in direct line of sight with the sound source. 

We as humans are not endlessly vulnerable and causally ineffectual observers of what happens to us. Like sound waves, we are agents whose perceptions, thoughts, dreams, hopes, and beliefs also change the world and adapt to the obstacles that befound us. We search for passion and emotion that incorporates intrinsic qualities of our subjective experiences that make the experiences what they are, whether it be romance or ambition or humiliation. We need a love that does not obscure the way that we interpret the world, the way we actively shape our understanding of it and of how we fit in, or feel that we don’t.

Sounds are so similar to love in the way they are both so momentary, so unprecedented, so mesmerizing, but mostly because they are so capable of dissipating as rapidly and fleetly as they arrived. Their absences always make the silences so much louder and our yearnings fiercer. 







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  1. davidMay 23, 2023 at 4:37 PM

    i think the most interesting side of how we encounter sound is in its fleeting nature. melody emerges from no individual note, no single moment in time, yet we are able to comment on such as a result of our durational experience. something also beautiful we have come to be able to understand owing to physics is that sound inextricably connects us to objects around us. the space around us isn’t empty, we are one with the world that we sense…

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