[Vigdis] Hjorth’s newly translated novel, the aptly named Repetition (its title nods to Kierkegaard’s book of the same name), is a slender volume that elaborates an episode that appears in compressed form in Will and Testament, like a magnified detail from a painting.

Elaine Blair, “Where Is the Story?”

When [Otto] Frisch and [Rudolf] Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed.

Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already.

Scott Aaronson, “More Information on Whether Useful Quantum Computing Is ‘Imminent’”

And in this condition she had been aware of a stately, simple musical phrase, playing and repeating itself, in the shadowy ungraspable way of auditory memory, following her to the bedside, where it played again as she took a shoe in each hand. The familiar phrase—some might even have called it famous—consisted of four rising notes, which appeared to be posing a tentative question. Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and a lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord, and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer. There was no set of words she could match to these notes; it was not as if something were being said. The inquiry was without content, as pure as a question mark.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

When one looks at [Georges] La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint and candlelit quiet. This devotional context is not just part of what makes the paintings so moving, but what allows them to speak across four centuries to the question of attention. In today’s grief over the loss of it and the largely ineffective rallying cries to gain it back, the consequences are often measured by how much less we are able to learn or accomplish, but not as much is said about attention as a form of love, as perhaps the only means available to humans to elevate a person or a thing into the realm of the sacred, and how the loss of it strips us of the chance to bestow it. La Tour has something to tell us about true drama that Caravaggio doesn’t, really—about the way that it is not about drawing attention but about giving it, and how it unfolds not in the moment of action or at the apex of emotion, but in the stillness of looking so closely for so long, that it has the power to transform.

Nicole Krauss, “Out of Light”

“How can you stand it?” a man asks a woman, seated on a building’s stoop as I pass by. The air is still and warm, conducting sound.

“First of all,” she says, “I can’t.”

Cora Lewis, Information Age

When I was twelve, I used to stare at weeds
Along the road, at the way they kept trembling
Long after a car had passed;
Or at gnats in families hovering over
Some rotting peaches, & wonder why it was
I had been born a human.
Why not a weed, or a gnat?
Why not a horse, or a spider? And why an American?
I did not think that anything could choose me
To be a Larry Levis before there even was
A Larry Levis. It was strange, but not strange enough
To warrant some design. […]

Larry Levis, “Family Romance”

Every description, even just those describing normal breathing or pinkish mucus membranes, still pulls you out of the ordinary ranks of the living. Language becomes a clinic. And the more detailed the description, the more marginalised the person becomes. He is no longer a person, but a patient. Here we can already see the first substitution. The objective description of your state slowly turns you into an object. The first autopsy, while you are still alive and without anaesthesia, is performed by language. It enters coldly, looks around, describes, fixes every detail and makes it visible. Except that my father is no longer here. Each ever-more detailed medical description paradoxically leads to dehumanisation.

Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener

People are evidently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise the pain might be intolerable. The conquest of this sense of inevitability is essential to the development of politically effective moral outrage. For this to happen, people must perceive and define their situation as the consequence of human injustice: a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not endure.

Barrington Moore Jr., Injustice, in The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Philip Levine, “What Work Is”

The point of ‘doing nothing’ is to clean up our inner lives. There is so much that happens to us every day, so many excitements, regrets, suggestions and emotions that we should, if we are living consciously, spend at least an hour a day processing. Most of us manage a few minutes at best and thereby let the marrow of life escape us. We do so not because are forgetful or bad, but because our societies protect us from our responsibilities to ourselves through their cult of activity. We are granted every excuse not to undertake the truly difficult labour of leading more conscious, more searching and more intensely felt lives.

The School of Life, A More Exciting Life