Minutes of a Monday #72

#minutesofamonday

Brain Food > A Complex Reordering

“We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation, where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over.

But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live really - to die in way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.”

Nick Cave, in an extract from ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’.

Soul Food

“I have now decided that my death should be very precious. I really want to use it. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been, and will be.”

David Bowie, Playboy Magazine interview, 1976.

LOL

Ricky Gervais on equal pay in Hollywood:

Appendix

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion

AOB

Hope your 2024 is up and running, and if not don’t worry… you’ve got all year!

This Friday, I’ll be sharing the very first ‘Minutes of a Monday Reading List 2023’ which is a quick breakdown of the books I got through in 2023.

I’m sharing it with you not to say “hey… look how much I read…eh?!” but in the hope there might be something in there for you in the weeks and months ahead.

In the meantime, have a great week - Niall