Gallery: Michael Lange’s photos of the French Alps.
She goes on to say that she finds it “pathetic” that she has to “block out time for thinking.” Patchett is not alone in this dismay: many authors share a similar despair. (I remember my friend Ryan Holiday once putting it this way in an interview: “The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing.”)
Winter’s Watch (2017), a 14-minute 2017 film directed by Brian Bolster, presents a quiet portrait of nature, solitude — and the presence of one person on an island. From the website: “The quiet exuberance of wintering alone on an empty island off New England.”
I haven’t bought vinyl or cassette since I was a kid. All my adult music collecting has been on CD. People think I’m nuts. Marc Weidenbaum:
I sometimes wonder if much of the music I most enjoy wouldn’t have existed, wouldn’t have taken the form that it did, wouldn’t have risen to the prominence it did, without the arrival of the CD. The tabula rasa of digital sound, not only recording but reproduction, meaning production and consumption in union — the lack of surface noise, the lack of ground hum, the ability for the quietest, humblest sounds to make themselves present in a room — allowed for experiments in subtlety, in nuance, that wouldn’t merely have been drowned out on cassette and vinyl, but likely wouldn’t have been attempted, let alone flourished.