“So I started to work from memory. I knew that a novelist is allowed to do this. And if I got something wrong, it was not a simple error: it would be a function of my own warped heart. Maybe I didn’t even know Tulsa, my hometown, as well as I should. All this was grist for a novel.

But now that it’s over I have to justify myself. I read in Leviathan—all too conveniently, just in the very first pages—that Thomas Hobbes thought all imagining was decayed sense-input—that is, faded memories. His example: ‘After great distance of time, our imagination of the past is weak, and we lose (for example) of cities we have seen, many particular streets.’

So misremembering cities is the essence of imagination. Sure, we can recombine memories, to produce fantasy—put a man on a horse and call it a centaur. Or, I’ve always lazily imagined the Hobbesian “state of nature,” which is so nasty, brutish, and short, as a combination Boy Scout camp and stage set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But most of what we do is go backwards. According to Hobbes, thinking is nothing but seeking, and trying to go back and remember where to start. If you want to someday be rich, you trace back to see what you can do now, to begin to get on the right track. The same way if you have lost something, you run back and remember when you last had it.”

Finally, finally, Ben Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa is out today. Above, a few paragraphs from an essay that Lytal just published on The Paris Review Daily about remembering (and misremembering) one’s hometown. Beautiful, thoughtful, caring & memorious writing in all that he touches. 

usnatarchives:

During their presidencies, both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis suffered the death of a child—a not uncommon event for most American parents in the 19th century. Starting with the death of Willie Lincoln in 1862 and the tragic accident that befell Joseph Davis in 1864, Catherine Clinton explores Victorian mourning and the embrace of rituals of grief and symbols of remembrance during the Civil War.

Join us at noon on March 29 in the McGowan Theater at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, or watch online at our Ustream channel.

Image: Abraham Lincoln and his youngest son Tad (ARC 52628). While Lincoln was President, Tad’s older brother Willie—the middle child—died of typhoid fever while living in the White House. Tad himself died at age 18 in Chicago in 1871. Only the oldest son, Robert, lived to adulthood.

Catherine Clinton edited our Penguin Classics edition of Mary Chestnut’s Diary!

cayayofm:

I literally just learned how to make GIF animations just so that I could loop this forever. I love that Penguin.

*coughhiremecough*

*coughoraninternshipcough*

*coughtheleastyoucoulddoisreblogthiscough*

This makes a strong case.

sebastienmillon:

“Penguin Book”

My fav part in Moby Dick is when Queequeg shaves himself with his harpoon.

Can’t even…

myimaginarybrooklyn:

“Poet Wilfred Owen was born on this day in 1893. This is the opening of his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Owen wrote the poem whilst serving as a soldier in the appalling conditions of the trenches.”

A beautiful poem, found in both this collection and this one too.

vintageanchor:

“Beware the Ides of March,” the soothsayer urges Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar (act I, scene ii). Despite the forewarning, Caesar is stabbed to death on this day in 44 BC. Caesar falls and utters his famous last words, “Et tu, Brute?”

(Source: vintageanchorbooks)

unypl:

“Disgrace,” by J. M. Coetzee 
Borrow I Read

Now, that is a beautiful shot.