
“Living in New York after Boston is like discovering that there is oxygen in the air—people to talk to, plays, opera, and something in the air that somehow makes people very different here from what they are in Boston.”
Robert Lowell
more infosource: letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated February 15, 1961, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 350-51.
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category: Boston, New York City
medium: letter
“…I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter to Robert Lowell, dated August 28, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 229.
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medium: letter
“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, dated August 15, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 225.
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category: death, epitaph, loneliness
medium: letter
notes: source info is a little confusing: Lowell quotes these words of Bishop's in his letter to her
“Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.”
Robert Lowell
more infosource: letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated November 18, 1949, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 92.
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category: aquarium, past, psychology, shrink, therapy
medium: letter
“…I’ve always promised myself I’m going to spend my declining years just taking walks in Rome. Nothing could be more profitable, I think, for the last 20 years of one’s life.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter to Robert Lowell, dated Sunday, July 24, 1948, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 45.
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category: aging, Italy, old age, retirement, Rome, walking
medium: letter
“I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don’t even know the answers to. She told me: 1, that my hair ‘don’t feel like hair at all.’ 2, I was turning gray practically ‘under her eyes.’ And when I’d said yes, I was an orphan, she said ‘Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.’ So now I can’t walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling like I’m ploughing. There’s no place like New England.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter to Robert Lowell, dated Sunday, July 11, 1948, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 42-43.
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category: alone, boundaries, hairdresser, Maine, New England, orphan
medium: letter
“I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
J. D. Salinger
more infosource: The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2001), 201.
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category: burial, cemetery, death, flower
medium: fiction
“I should add…that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive, of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking.”
Erich Fromm
more infosource: The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), 95–96.
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category: drainer, psychology, self-care, social life, toxic, zombie
medium: self-help
“To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it.”
Erich Fromm
more infosource: The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), 93.
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category: discipline, good habit, health, psychology, self-care
medium: self-help


Midcentury