In Aesop’s fables from ancient Greece, the storyteller coined the term sour grapes to depict the opinion change of a fox who realized that he could not reach grapes that he wanted. After experiencing frustation, the fox solved his cognitive dissonance by convincing himself that the grapes must be sour and that in fact he was never interested in them.
—Dan Ariely, Misbelief, Harper Collins 2023
One day, Kipling Williams, a social scientist, was walking his dog in the park. As he was strolling along, a Frisbee fell at his feet. He picked it up and tossed back to one of the guys who’d been playing with it. Grinning, the guy tossed it back to him, and Williams found himself in the middle of an impromptu triangle toss. Back and forth they went a few times, but then the two friends who had been playing together before he stumble across their path stopped throwing the Frisbee to him and went back to throwing it to each other. Williams felt bereft and excluded.
—Dan Ariely, Misbelief, Harper Collins 2023
Nas praias que são o rosto branco das amadas mortas
Deixarei que o teu nome se perca repetido
Mas espera-me
Pois por mais longos que sejam os caminhos
Eu regresso.
—Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Coral, 1950
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
—Maya Angelou, Family Friend Poems
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being …
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.
—Christian Wiman, Poetry, Janeiro de 2020