A running collection of ideas, papers, books, and topics I've been interested in recently.
books i'm currently reading.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
A novel about family, morality, inheritance, and the tension between who people are and who they want to become.
I'm now a few chapters in, and I took a break for a bit because life got busy, but I've been enjoying it. The beginning is slower than I expected, but I don't mind it because Steinbeck makes the slowness feel intentional. He starts with the Salinas Valley, the mountains on both sides, the dry land, the river, the way the place can be beautiful and still feel hard to live in. I'm also interested in how much of the early book is about families before it is about plot. The Hamiltons feel warm and crowded and alive, with all the children and the sense that there is never quite enough money, but still a lot of energy in the house. The Trasks feel heavier and stranger. I also like that it's already asking questions about family that I think about a lot, like how much of who you are comes from where you were born? How much comes from your parents? How much comes from the stories people tell about you before you even get to define yourself? I'm very intrigued to see the answers Steinbeck offers here, or if these are the questions he's tackling at all and I got it all wrong. Only one way to find out.
papers i've found fascinating recently.
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca
A Stoic essay about time and the strange way people move through life without ever really feeling present inside of it. Seneca writes about how people give their time away constantly to anxiety, ambition, obligation, distraction, and other people's expectations, only to later realize how little of it actually felt fully lived. A lot of the essay is really about attention and consciousness and whether we are actually inhabiting our lives while we are living them.
read hereI think this one stays with me because I have a hard time existing in the present without feeling guilty about the future. There is always something else I should be doing, planning for, improving, fixing, or thinking about. Even during good moments, part of my brain is already somewhere else worrying about time running out or whether I am doing enough with the opportunities I have. I think being ambitious and grateful at the same time can sometimes turn into this constant pressure to justify your existence through productivity. This essay reminds me that if every moment only exists as preparation for another moment later on, you eventually realize you never actually allowed yourself to live anything while it was happening.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Eugene Wigner
An essay exploring one of the strangest facts about reality: mathematics, something humans invented abstractly in their heads, somehow ends up describing the physical universe with astonishing precision. Wigner reflects on how mathematical systems developed with no practical purpose often later become the exact language needed to explain physics, motion, electricity, probability, computing, and countless other natural phenomena. The essay is partly scientific, but it also feels philosophical and almost unsettling because it raises the question of why reality is understandable at all.
read hereI love this essay because it makes the universe feel simultaneously more rational and more mysterious. The idea that abstract symbols and patterns can predict the behavior of stars, particles, waves, economies, or biological systems feels almost absurd when you really sit with it. Sometimes I'll be studying something deeply theoretical and suddenly realize that the thing I'm looking at is not just a classroom exercise but an actual structure underlying reality itself. There's something deeply beautiful about that to me. It also makes me think a lot about how much of science and technology depends on humanity's ability to notice patterns long before we fully understand why those patterns exist in the first place.
my letterboxd.
Where I log my films and collect my thoughts on them.
visit profileDavid Whyte
Everything is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
updated whenever something new grabs me