Ephemera Quotes

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." [Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]

Let your heart travel lightly. Because what you bring with you becomes part of the landscape.

Sit here, so I may write you into a poem and make you eternal.

If today is not your day, then be happy for this day shall never return. And if today is your day, then be happy now for this day shall never return.

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

Opportunities and choices. When a person makes a heart wish, that wish resonates through the currents and things will happen to give the person an opportunity to make the wish come true. Like a hand offered and accepted.

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.

Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely new is the most transitory of all things. It is beautiful today, and tomorrow merely ludicrous.

I write our names on the page. What of it, if the paper will be burned? I write our names in the sand. What of it, if the shore will be washed by waves? I write our names on trees that will be cut and benches that will be painted, but what of it? I will keep on writing our names because in this world of ephemera, You and I are the only constant.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this- screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers- because I'm forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What are we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?

How do we judge a dark landscape? Is it dark because the ones who already live there won't let humans have their piece of the world? Do we judge who is good and who is bad by the color and shape of their skin - or by what resonates in their hearts?

We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled, The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun. ("Ephemera")

both you and paintings are layered… first, ephemera and notations on the back of the canvas. Labels indicate gallery shows, museum shows, footprints in the snow, so to speak. Then pencil scribbles on the stretcher, usually by the artist, usually a title or date. Next the stretcher itself. Pine or something. Wooden triangles in the corners so the picture can be tapped tighter when the canvas becomes loose. Nails in the wood securing the picture to the stretcher. Next, a canvas: linen, muslin, sometimes a panel; then the gesso - a primary coat, always white. A layer of underpaint, usually a pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swished around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever -- God can happen in that quarter of an inch -- the occasional brush hair left embedded, colors mixed over each other, tones showing through, sometimes the weave of the linen revealing itself. The signature on top of the entire goulash. Then varnish is swabbed over the whole. Finally, the frame, translucent gilt or carved wood. The whole thing is done.

Ephemera Your eyes that once were never weary of mine Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids, Because our love is waning." And then she: "Although our love is waning, let us stand By the lone border of the lake once more, Together in that hour of gentleness When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep: How far away the stars seem, and how far Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!" Pensive they paced along the faded leaves, While slowly he whose hand held hers replied: "Passion has often worn our wandering hearts." The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once A rabbit old and lame limped down the path; Autumn was over him: and now they stood On the lone border of the lake once more: Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes, In bosom and hair. "Ah, do not mourn," he said, "That we are tired, for other loves await us; Hate on and love through unrepining hours. Before us lies eternity; our souls Are love, and a continual farewell.

Do not go to my grave. Mary knows, I am not there. Look for me in between pages and on people’s lips. Do not go to my old school. Do not go to my old house — I am not in any of those places. Look for me in your hearts and greet me there.

We exist only to exist.

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

Do we judge who is good and who is bad by the color and shape of their skin - or by what resonates in their hearts?

But other beings shouldn't be forgotten. You knew that when you were a student, felt that need from those no one else wanted to think about. Even demons need a home. Even a dark landscape should feel the warmth of the Light. Why have you forgotten that?

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.

Personally, she didn’t believe in heaven or hell. An earthly life was hell enough, and heaven appeared in the ephemera of every day,

A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter…No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities.

Personally, she didn’t believe in heaven or hell. An earthly life was hell enough, and heaven appeared in the ephemera of every day, like dust motes sparkling in a quiet sunrise, or a warm handshake on a frigid day. Stolen gifts.

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

The root of the greatest errors in philosophy lies in projecting our human purposes, criteria and preferences into the objective universe. Hence our "problem of evil"; we strive to reconcile the ills of life with the goodness of God, forgetting the lesson taught to Job, that God is beyond our little good and evil. Good and bad are relative to human and often individual tastes and ends, and have no validity for a universe in which individuals are ephemera, and in which the Moving Finger writes even the history of the race i water.

The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all—he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly.

In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory.

love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

The house had always been full of books, far too many for one person to get through in a lifetime. Her father didn't collect them to read, to own first editions or to keep those signed by the author; Gil collected them for the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked the pages, for the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks. Every time Flora came home he would show her his new discoveries: left-behind photographs, postcards and letters, bail slips, receipts, handwritten recipes and drawings, valentines and tickets, sympathy cards, excuse notes to teachers; bits of paper with which he could piece together other people's lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.

Sometimes you need to see the same stars from a different place to help your heart settle when it’s hurting.

our souls are love, and a continual farewell

ephemera

She barely displaces air, as if her solidity is an argument between existence and ephemera.

And there I was, awakening with a start to nothing but ephemera, shadows, and screams.

Gil collected them for the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked the pages, for the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks.

I am an eternal spirit and the things I make are but ephemera, yet I endure: Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet and we endure.

in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory

An earthly life was hell enough, and heaven appeared in the ephemera of every day, like dust motes sparkling in a quiet sunrise, or a warm handshake on a frigid day. Stolen gifts.

The wild hetman stood like a statue for a space, dimly grasping something of the cosmic tragedy of the fitful ephemera called mankind and the hooded shapes of darkness which prey upon it.

. . . the bond bubble, the tech bubble, the stock bubble, the emerging markets bubble, the housing bubble. . . One by one they had all burst, and their bursting showed that they had been temporary solutions to long-term problems, maybe evasions of those problems, distractions. With so many bubbles-so many people chasing ephemera, all at the same time-it was clear that things were fundamentally not working.

Insidious bastard," she whispered. "I don't know how you gave me that gut-jab of fear, but I won't forget you can use my own heart against me. I won't give up the landscapes in my care. Not even this one. And I won't let you have any of them. I'll find a way to do alone what it took hundreds like me to do the last time. And by the time I'm finished, I will lock you in a landscape even *you* will find unbearable.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth?

I couldn’t tell you the kind of trees in this forest, the insect things singing high-pitched around me. I like it all fine, but it’s ephemera. It’s additives. It’s irrelevant for what’s coming for me, just like the rest of the world is. Like, I like it all fine, but none of it knows my name.

Life journeys. On the way, you are influenced by others, helped by others, harmed by others. Some things happen because you have earned them. And some things happen because cruelty flickers through the dark currents and rises up without warning; causing harm, causing pain, causing tragedies that can devastate one person or and entire village.

Was this where my fascination for documented history came from? From a family so afraid of earthly erasure that they couldn’t discard the transcript of ordering two pounds of prosciutto on June 15, 1988?

The dry, formulaic chapters simply didn't interest me as much as the musty, antiquated albums stored in the archives of old buildings, or the digitised images of faded ephemera - playbills, census records, passenger manifest lists - I found online. I could lose myself for hours in these seemingly meaningless documents... To me, the allure of history lay in the minutiae of life long ago, the untold secrets of ordinary people.

I love America for an idea. The reality is important but ambiguous. In Senegal, there stands a building where slaves were stored before they were sent on to the New World. It was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. I love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. It may be an idea not everyone cares for, but it is one I need, I want. I love her for her thought, first, of where you’re going, not where you’re from; for her majestic optimism against the gray resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that in America I feel like—I am—a sexual being.

Everything is the same, the fog says “We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,” and the leaves say “We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall”—Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say “We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season”—The tree stumps say “We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth”—Men say “We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same”—While the sand says “We are sand, we already know,” and the sea says “We are always come and go, fall and plosh”—The empty blue sky of space says “All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me”—The blue sky adds “Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise”—Can

The first night I moved in, I sat in my bed after unpacking and looked around at the ephemera and trinkets. They were drawings and notes from old lovers and friends, postcards, photographs, porcelain figures, antique ashtrays. I needed these things, fixed them as soon as I arrived somewhere new, but now I was alone they seemed foolish. They looked like props for a bad theatre production, trying to summon up a personality where there was none.

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism that he would begin an essay with a bold and bald statement designed to arrest attention—a tactic that, as Williams rightly notices, he borrowed in part from GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. No regular writer can re-read his own output of ephemera without encountering a few wince-making moments of this kind; Williams admits to ‘isolating’ them but has some fun all the same. The flat sentence ‘a humanitarian is always a hypocrite’ may contain a particle of truth—does in fact contain such a particle—but will not quite do on its own. Other passages of Orwell’s, on the failure of the Western socialist movement, read more convincingly now than they did when Williams was mocking them, but are somewhat sweeping for all that. And there are the famous outbursts of ill-temper against cranks and vegetarians and homosexuals, which do indeed disfigure the prose and (even though we still admire Pope and Swift for the heroic unfairness of their invective) probably deserve rebuke. However, Williams betrays his hidden bias even when addressing these relatively easy targets. He upbraids Orwell for the repeated use of the diminutive word ‘little’ as an insult (‘The typical Socialist ... a prim little man,’ ‘the typical little bowlerhatted sneak,’ etc.). Now, it is probable that we all overuse the term ‘little’ and its analogues. Williams does at one point—rather ‘loftily’ perhaps—reproach his New Left colleagues for being too ready to dismiss Orwell as ‘petit-bourgeois.’ But what about (I draw the example at random) Orwell’s disgust at the behaviour of the English crowd in the First World War, when ‘wretched little German bakers and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob’?

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory.

You hold a coin, make a wish, toss the coin in the well as a tribute to the Guides. And then if you’re meant to have it, your wish will come true.” Nadia sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s how most people think it works. This is how it does work. You make a wish and toss a coin in the well as a declaration of your intention to have something in your life. Then what do you do?” Lynnea shook her head to indicate that she didn’t know. Nadia’s voice took on the tartness of impatience. “You roll up your sleeves and you work to make it happen.” “But

Social media is a curious thing. On the one hand, it offers an endless parade of ephemera from the daily lives of friends, family, and strangers—discussions of a fondness for yogurt, a picture of a barista’s decoration in latte foam, descriptions of excellent meals, pictures of pets and small children or maybe an abandoned easy chair on a crowded street corner. There’s all manner of self-promotion and relentless affirmation. There are knee-jerk, ill-informed reactions to, well, everything. The abundance of triviality is as hypnotic as it is repulsive.

That ephemera: The recorded sound waves of her speech on one axis and a precise measurement of the flood of adrenaline and cortisol in my body on the other. Witness statements from the strangers who anxiously looked at us sideways in public places. A photograph of her grip on my arm in Florida, with measurements of the shadows to indicate depth of indentation; an equation to represent the likely pressure. A wire looped through my hair, ready to record her hiss. The rancid smell of anger. The metal tang of fear in the back of my throat. None of these things exist. You have no reason to believe me.

Life journeys. On the way, you are influenced by others, helped by others, harmed by others. Some things happen because you have earned them. And some things happen because cruelty flickers through the dark currents and rises up without warning; causing harm, causing pain, causing tragedies that can devastate one person or an entire village.

She glanced at his handsome profile. It would be a long time before she forgot anything that happened tonight. But she had to pretend, for the sake of the Librus team--her friends--that everything was hunky dory. That she didn't give a rat's ass about Byrn. That his man-whoring didn't bother her in the least. That she didn't love him like whoa.

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory. Listen to Paul. In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message. I got it. I hope you experience it, too. It is a gift. Let me not stand between you and Paul.

… works of any degree of seriousness, they’re presenting some question as to what is real and what is simply ephemera. I mean no play is finished. Plays are abandoned. And they’re abandoned because you can only get so close and then that… it doesn’t allow you to come any closer… to the hidden narrative, the hidden truth of what’s going on… Yeah, there is a resemblance [to kabbalah]. It’s almost as though the human being is the work of the imagination, of somebody’s imagination, maybe God’s imagination. I’m not sure [a play is great because of] what its saying about human nature. I think its the process of… approaching the unwritten and the unspoken and the unspeakable. And the closer you get to it, the more life there seems to be.

For too long we have been the playthings of massive corporations, whose sole aim is to convert our world into a gargantuan shopping 'mall'. Pleasantry and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age; an age where men doffed their hats at ladies, and children could be counted on to mind your Jack Russell while you took a mild and bitter in the pub. The twinkly-eyed tobacconist, the ruddy-cheeked landlord and the bewhiskered teashop lady are being trampled under the mighty blandness of 'drive-thru' hamburger chains. Customers are herded in and out of such places with an alarming similarity to the way the cattle used to produce the burgers are herded to the slaughterhouse. The principal victim of this blandification is Youth, whose natural propensity to shun work, peacock around the town and aggravate the constabulary has been drummed out of them. Youth is left with a sad deficiency of joie de vivre, imagination and elegance. Instead, their lives are ruled by territorial one-upmanship based on brands of plimsoll, and Youth has become little more than a walking, barely talking advertising hoarding for global conglomerates. ... But now, a spectre is beginning to haunt the reigning vulgarioisie: the spectre of Chappism. A new breed of insurgent has begun to appear on the streets, in the taverns and in the offices of Britain: The Anarcho-Dandyist. Recognisable by his immaculate clothes, the rakish angle of his hat and his subtle rallying cry of "Good day to you sir/ madam!

The feeling of getting an email! As if the ghost of a passenger pigeon had flown into your home and delivered it directly into your head, so swooping and unexpected and feathered was the feeling. How suddenly full you felt of white vapor. How you set your fingers on the keyboard to write back, and your fingers disappeared almost up to the first knuckle in those clattering beige keys—so much more satisfying than the shallow keys that came later, or the touchscreens that came even after that. The story of any courtship is one of ephemera, dead vehicles, outdated technology. Name cards, canoes, pagers. The roller rink, telegrams, mixtapes. Radio dedications. The drive-in. Hotmail dot com.

When people feel a sense of belonging to a given social group, they absorb the doctrinal positions that the group advocates. However party and religious identification come about, once they take root in early adulthood, they often persist. Partisan identities are enduring features of citizens' self-conceptions. They do not merely come and go with election cycles and campaign ephemera. the public's interest in party politics climbs as elections draw near, but partisan self-conception remain intact during peaks and lulls in party competition.

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use it's proper name: Temporary.

She'd completed a small still life in oils, her first time experimenting with anything save watercolors, and she was rather proud of it. She'd plied the light just as she'd wanted, illuminating a scatter of ephemera, fraying silk and loose buttons and bits of worn glass. On a whim, she had painted one of her straw glamours, the wreath presiding over the gentle chaos.

A country is legislation, specifically designed to restrict your freedom, intellectual and physical. A country exists to make you a productive unit. A consumer. You’re fuel to your country’s economy. And all over the world, and all through history, people have been happy to kill, and to die for exactly that idea. For this Monty Python idea of what freedom is. ‘A government provides one freedom. It frees us from the tyranny of true choice. Modern democracy dazzles us with ephemera and calls it liberty. Meanwhile, the important decisions are made on our behalf. Partly, that’s because we long to be told what to do.

cult followings based on sports teams or rock stars, science fiction fandom was rooted in an essentially solitary activity: reading. Traits typically viewed as pathological or pathetic in the mainstream (like obsessing over trivia while accumulating vast hoards of treasured ephemera) were rewarded in the community as signs of “trufan” commitment. Fandom offered what every homesick space child yearned for: membership in an elite society of loners united by their belief in the future. For those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.

The belief that there is a difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and vapid, exciting and banal - this belief was once fundamental to musical education. But it offends against political correctness. Today there is only my taste and yours. The suggestion that my taste is better than yours is elitist, an offence against equality. But unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognise the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education. Judgment is the precondition of true enjoyment, and the prelude to understanding art in all its forms.

Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.

He had heard religious people talk about having revelatory experiences. Like there was one moment where everything became clear to them and all the crap and ephemera just floated away. It had always seemed pretty unlikely to him. But the Ed Nicholls had one such moment in a log cabin beside a stretch of water that might have been a lake, or might well have been a canal for all he could tell...And he realized in that moment that he had to make things right.

I suspect you knew: to live is to be irradiated. It is a sacrifice, this life.

Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?

Like mirror script, to read requires reflection, asks us to see ourselves holding the page.

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

I was too young and naive at the time to hold onto newspapers and the ad hoc ephemera figures like Margaret A. invariably generate, and certainly never dreamed that her words could be expunged from the internet. And like most people I never dreamed a person's words could be illegal.

Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?

[E]very being is … by itself infinite, has … its highest conceivable being in itself. … The life of ephemera is extraordinarily short in comparison with that of longer-lived creatures; but … for the ephemera this short life is as long as a life of years to others. The leaf on which the caterpillar lives is for it a world, an infinite space.

2Yes. And as for money it’s only mankind’s most important invention. With respect to money I think everyone has received fair warning. Money is the reason you have no responsibility to that starving girl. It is simply the single most important entity in the world today. Any discussion of justice, morality, and the like betrays a naïve ignorance of this fact. If you have money none of these ephemera matter. The only people crying for justice and fair play are the poor and therefore weak. Take your guy Hurd for example. Do you have any doubt that if he had an excess of bills his problems would evaporate? Imagine the difference, what was his bail?

Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t the right thing to do.”   “Here,

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle.

We are, paradoxically, unkind to the present, ignoring the opportunity to project it into the future, forgetting it as soon as it is past. As we would injure children by spoiling them, we injure time by being too attentive to its ephemera.

It is an incredibly normal thing to die. Surreal, sure, but only because we have convinced ourselves that our existence is more important than acknowledging our ephemera. Death makes people panic until they’re living against it every day.

Men and parties, sects and schools are but the mere ephemera of the world's day. TRUTH, high-seated upon its rock of adamant, is alone eternal and supreme.

Michelangelo used a great deal of paper, in part because he considered himself as much a poet as an artist. Between five hundred and six hundred sheets of Michelangelo’s drawings have survived, and written on many are poems, personal letters, notes, and details about finances. Almost any piece of paper he used contained a few sketches. A few are finished drawings. A stunning drawing of the resurrection of Christ is also marked with a shopping list. Masterful drawings were folded up, with notes about the banal ephemera of everyday life jotted on the reverse side. Rarely is there a single drawing on a sheet. He also wrote some three hundred poems, invented dialogues, theoretical essays, proposals, and outlines for essays on art theory, including a response to Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion. But most of this paper was not intended for anyone else to see, and before his death he attempted to destroy as much of it as he could.

the claustrophobia one feels in the sheltering arms of the press often seems permanent and conspiratorial. Notwithstanding the promise of more choices and more channels—targeted and consumer-designed magazines, barely limited numbers of cable channels—the fear of being suffocated by eternal and eternally replenished ephemera is real; so is the fear of the complete inability of a public to engage in public discourse. This latter fear—the closing off of public debate—is palpable because there is no way to answer the systemic distortions of the press in a timely, effective fashion and because the definition of “public” is already so radically changed.

And I’ll describe the email he wrote me after I said I couldn’t work on his film because I was making my own show. “How could you dismiss this opportunity to be a small part of a film that will be taught in colleges for years to come in exchange for the utter ephemera of a ‘TV Pilot.’ ” In quotes! He put it IN QUOTES! And I read the email again and again, shocked, jaw set with rage so that I couldn’t make a sound. And I imagined my own pain, my anger, magnified by fifty in the man who would send that email, the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating. And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.

Based on the parts of this... this scene that are not covered in refuse, and the drawings you have done for me, I know you are an artist with talent. Maybe I have old-fashioned views, but I simply don't understand why you would spend your time creating something like this." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of art I am used to seeing is more..." I raised an eyebrow. "More what?" He bit his lip, as though searching for the right words. "Pleasant to look at, I suppose." He shrugged again. "Scenes from nature. Little girls wearing filly white dresses and playing beside riverbanks. Bowls of fruit." "This piece shows a beach and a lake," I pointed out. "It's a scene from nature." "But it's covered in refuse." I nodded. "My art combines objects I find with images I paint. Sometimes what I find and incorporate is literal trash. But I also feel that my art is more than just trash. It's meaningful. These pieces aren't just flat, lifeless images on canvas. They say something." "Oh." He came even closer to the landscapes, kneeling so he could peer at them up close. "And what does your art... say?" His nose was just a few inches from an old McDonald's Quarter Pounder wrapper I'd laminated to the canvas so it looked like it was rising out of Lake Michigan. I'd meant for it to represent capitalism's crushing stranglehold on the natural world. Also, it just sort of looked cool. But I decided to give him a broader explanation. "I want to create something memorable with my art. Something lasting. I want to give people who see my works an experience that won't fade away. Something that will stay with them long after they see it." He frowned skeptically. "And you accomplish that by displaying ephemera others throw away?" I was about to counter by telling him that even the prettiest painting in the fanciest museum faded from memory once the patrons went home. That by using things other people throw away, I took the ephemeral and make it permanent in a way no pretty watercolor ever could.

Paris-this "most capital capital,” as Janet Flanner once called it--is a city of infinite variety: exalted, fanciful, as well as somber with the very misery of existence. These literary passages reflect this "variety" and suggest a synthesis of Parisian history, ephemera, sensory experience, and personal memoir.

PASTICHE WITH LINES FROM CONAN DOYLE Milwaukee, 2012 I have pinpointed the particular flaw in our relations: it’s how you transpose each small riot into sadness but have no Stradivarius to mourn on—you have my ears, and my feet freeze in our bed, and the knocking in the night is just a dear friend looking to score, our cat is named for a knave. We tweak our epaulets, we make margaritas in rooms populated by the ephemera of other lives that I cannot shore up my own against. This fashion rag tells me to think of the highlands so I eye-drop water into my Laphroaig and when later, for work, I stand on the Scottish street on which I once lived, it is blue melodrama or it is not real, and if the stories tally I’ll watch it again on the plane. This may appeal to your lurid taste in fiction, darling: I am your constant companion, and we have never both lived within these same walls.

I’ve concluded that happiness lives in the ephemera. You cannot see it, nor can it be considered tangible. It’s not quite an optical illusion—no, not quite—but if you try to catch it, with the ultimate intention of somehow sustaining it for a prolonged period, then happiness will quickly dissolve to grief and disappointment—inevitably, fatally.

Nature would be a truer teacher than creeds or homilies. Human life seems so small beside the vast life of great forests. The calm grand silence rebukes our own feverishness. We who fancy that the eyes of all the universe are on us, that we are the sole love and charge of its Creator, feel what ephemera we are in the giant scale of existence; what countless myriads of such as we have been swept from their place out of sight, and not a law of the spheres around been stirred, not a moment’s pause been caused, in the silent march of creation!

Our existential quest, then, is to transcend the distractions of meaningless digital ephemera that have become our companions and to regain the virtues of true friendship.

The observation that women have identifiable preferences in reading matter was, of course, not original with Victorian entrepreneurs; since the eighteenth century, magazines written for men had angled for female readers with special departments. A few ephemera apart, the first periodical explicitly addressed to women.

Throughout history libraries have testified to what a civilization meant, or wanted to believe it meant.

Who taught you to swear first? Who burst your head wide open with a sentence? Whose linguistic tics have you ingested, do you know, bust out without thinking

Ask kin-tsugi, the Japanese art of "golden joinery," in which a broken bowl is fixed and seamed with glow, cracks to the forefront, filled in by gold, rendering the repaired thing more remarkable, honoring its shatter. The result is neither broken nor unbroken, but both at once, shadow, object, corona around an eclipsed sun. Own the ways we break, it seems to say: understand that the fault lines of a mind or body are individual, and honor them.

On the other hand, there is the person in my family, who surprisingly is not me, who keeps nearly every scrap of paper she's ever touched, just in case, just in case the world is ending and everyone has enough food and water but needs ephemera, needs slips of paper, needs old articles and wrapping paper and tax documents and someone else's past to stand in for the past of us all. I hover somewhere between these two worlds, saving some memories, letting others fritter and slip away. Down one of these paths, it seems to me, the obsessive compulsive holding on and the equally aggressive letting go, lies madness, and even I don't know which one. Culturally and personally both--who can say, which path leads to the better place?