"There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions and struggles to reinvent our personal lives, and recraft ourselves. We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. Someone attacks us, verbally or otherwise, our response is what? A counterattack."

Image source: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/calendar/event/sackler_center_first_awards_june_2...

"When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we‘re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are [...] Meditation practice isn‘t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It‘s about befriending who we are already."

"Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman."

Image: "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features" (1981) by Adrian Piper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Piper
#creativecommons

1369, the number of lights the narrator has, is the square of 37 -- the age Ellison was when he wrote this!

Image is from a play: https://www.flickr.com/photos/huntingtontheatreco/9956079653

"Up to now we‘ve been like a couple of one-eyed men walking down opposite sides of the street. Someone starts throwing bricks and we start blaming each other and fighting among ourselves. But we‘re mistaken! Because there‘s a third party present. There‘s a smooth, oily scoundrel running down the middle of the wide gray street throwing stones—He‘s the one! He‘s doing the damage! He claims he needs the space—he calls it his freedom."

"For those of us with a hunger to know the truth, painful emotions are like flags going up to say, 'You‘re stuck!' [...] When the flag goes up, we have an opportunity: we can stay with our painful emotion instead of spinning out. Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we‘re about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation."

"Hey! old connoisseur of voice sounds, of voices without messages, of newsless winds, listen to the vowel sounds and the crackling dentals, to the low harsh gutturals of empty anguish, now riding the curve of a preacher‘s rhythm I heard long ago in a Baptist church, stripped now of its imagery: No suns having hemorrhages, no moons weeping tears"

Image: Orpheus (1953), oil on canvas, by Norman Lewis; cropped somewhat by app.

From the introduction:

"My pilot was prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice [...] but his was [...] of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice [...] given a further twist of the screw by his awareness that once the peace was signed, the German camp commander could immigrate to the United States and immediately take advantage of freedoms that were denied the most heroic of Negro servicemen."

"If we find ourselves in doubt [...] we can contemplate this question: 'Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?'"

Thousand-Armed Chenresi, a Cosmic Form of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/37799

"I have a touch lamp. I have a fear of being misunderstood."

This definitely feels like the non-fiction reading equivalent of eating your vegetables (and a lot of them), but I think it's helpful that I'm going to audiobook route on this one -- I figure an hour or so a day while tidying or getting ready for work will make finishing it easier!

"[Tom White] was proud of the fact that he'd never put anyone into the ground [...] there was a thin line, he felt, between a good man and a bad one."

1922 photo of William K Hale, introduced in Chapter 3, "King of the Osage Hills."

Warning: If you research him before you've finished the book, you'll compromise the mystery aspect of it!

“Osage Warrior” by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin between 1805 and 1807, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0.

According to Wikipedia, this is around the time that Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) persuaded an attack against the Osage in one of many attempts to control them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage_Nation

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11985

"Filtered through formal and conceptual experimentation, design thinking fuses a shared discipline with organic interpretation."

Image: “Porcelain Designs” by Anonymous, French, 19th century via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/624829