Fait-divers by Paul Kalanithi

"I woke up in pain, facing another day — no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can’t go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Paul Kalanithi)

Slowdive - when the sun hits, 1993

"When the Sun Hits" is a complex and evocative song that captures the essence of the shoegaze sound. It's a song that rewards repeated listening and invites the listener to create their own interpretation of its meaning."

Belle And Sebastian - everything is now part two, 2018

"Two months after the December 2017 release of EP 1, we finally got the payoff promised by its (mostly) instrumental closing track. This time, we’ve got lyrics all the way through, and there’s a sort of satisfaction to finally filling in those blanks and finding out what sort of existential crisis the phrase “Everything is different now” (or alternatively, “Everything’s indifferent now”) was actually referring to. Calm and collected as this song is, Stuart actually seems to be trying to talk someone down from a ledge, where they’re feeling completely hopeless and hemmed in by a cruel fate, ready to call it quits on life altogether."

Fait-divers by Annie Dillard

"The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less." (Annie Dillard)

Fait-divers by Niels Bohr

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” (Niels Bohr)

My Morning Jacket - it beats for you, 2005

"In 2004, a dreamy cover of "Rocket Man" concluded My Morning Jacket's first volume of rarities. Which was prescient, because it's Elton John that Jim James' songs for 2005's Z first bring to mind."

Fait-divers by Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” (Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)

Fait-divers by Richard Ford

“If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.” Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

Fait-divers on music and nature

"Our work indicates a consonance between patterns in music and in nature, but how to interpret this is more of a philosophical question"

Fait-divers by Tony Schwartz

"Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox." (Tony Schwartz)

Fait-divers by Kurt Vonnegut

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC” (Kurt Vonnegut)

Slowdive - some velvet morning cover, 1993

"Some Velvet Morning" is a song written by Lee Hazlewood and originally recorded by Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra in late 1967. It first appeared on Sinatra's album Movin' with Nancy, the soundtrack to her 1967 television special of the same name, which also featured a performance of the song. It was subsequently released as a single before appearing on the 1968 album Nancy & Lee."

Fait-divers on attention and awareness

The earlier you catch your bad mood, the easier it will be to do something about it.

Fait-divers by Wendell Berry

"A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care-taking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace." (Wendell Berry)

Fait-divers by John Steinbeck

“Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.” (John Steinbeck)

Belle And Sebastian - the girl doesn't get it, 2018

"The band’s palette might be far broader than it was 20 years ago – the bouncing disco of The Girl Doesn’t Get It contrasting nicely with the stripped-back balladry of There Is an Everlasting Song."

Fait-divers by John Horton Conway

"That’s a curious thing about the nature of mathematical existence. This rule hasn’t physically existed in any sense in the world before a month ago, before I invented it, but it sort of intellectually existed forever. There is this abstract world which in some strange sense has existed throughout eternity. Imagine an uninhabited planet, full of interesting things. You land on it, and it existed for a million years, but no people have ever been there, no sentient beings. There are such places, I’m sure. Go to some remote star and there will be something. But you don’t have to go there. You can sit in this very chair and find something that has existed throughout all of eternity and be the first person to explore it." (John Horton Conway)

Fait-divers on black holes

"as a black hole radiates Hawking radiation, it slowly evaporates until it eventually vanishes. So what happens to all the information encoded on its horizon? Does it disappear, which would violate quantum mechanics? Or is it preserved, as quantum mechanics would predict? One theory is that the Hawking radiation contains all of that information. When the black hole evaporates and disappears, it has already preserved the information of everything that fell into it, radiating it out into the universe."

Fait-divers on storytelling

Stories are our user manuals for life.

Fait-divers by Susan Sontag

"Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human." (Susan Sontag)