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The Real Masterpiece
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
— Colette
“Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, expecting victory after victory, you understand deeply that this is not paradise. Somehow, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it’s perfectible, that you can get it all straight. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. I tried to put this into that song called A Thousand Kisses Deep. When you understand that, you abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece.”
~ Leonard Cohen
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Crickets don’t live long. Just 90 days. For some men this is still too long. These men invented Carbaryl, a poison, to kill crickets. It is mass produced by Union Carbide, a company owned by Bayer…. Now we trust Bayer to fix headaches and kill crickets. Crickets, who sing to us of love, in the blue of the night, whose hopeless romanticism takes up only that small unused inch beneath the dresser. Crickets, those tiny miracles with ears on their long brown legs. I asked a cricket why he still sang, under such hopeless circumstances, hunted by Fascists in a soon-dying world. He said he sang for those reasons, precisely.”If there is one hour left,” he told me, observing me with…
