A Beautiful Melancholia

The life span of an eNewsletter often begins with daily interest, even eagerness. Eventually one finds the finiteness of time crimping one's desire to open the message as frequently as before. You don't delete it because you hope to return later in the day or on the weekend, but when a period of weeks lapses with these unopened missives sitting in your inbox, you know the end is approaching.

Each eNewsletter has its own reason for existence, its own justification. Many are intended to keep you up-to-date in a specific field of endeavor. Whether it be art, science, zoology, farming, the cosmos or diesel technology, there are newsletters on the subject. Many that I have at one time signed up for I have later unsubscribed. For some reason this one, The Floating Library, continues to stimulate me somehow.

Perhaps it was a quote from Borges that first drew me. As I sifted the site's content I discovered gems. And a kindred spirit of sorts, at least for one portion of my soul. 

“Borges is our Virgil; only he knows the way.”
– Alastair Reid

"He felt in a dumb, bitter and uncomprehending way like a man who has destroyed his home without having prepared another."
– Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

'We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.'
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Raison d’être
There they are, in my own handwriting: the words that have been my prayer, evening after evening. I copied them from the books I found them in, so that they would be right in front of me, issued from my hand as if they were my own words. And now I want to write them again, kneeling here before my tablet I want to write them; for in this way I can have them with me longer than when I read them, and every word will last and have time to echo and fade away.
- R. M. Rilke