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I started reading Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia, and it starts off with a quote by David Foster Wallace: “Every love story is a ghost story.”

I paused on it because we are all pre-ghosts—we just don’t look like one yet—so our love stories WILL become ghost stories. Death is woven into the fabric of life.

David apparently wrote that sentence in a letter to a former teacher. It appears without context:

Wallace skips a few lines and adds the quotation, “Every love story is a ghost story.” The phrase appears as if suspended in the white space surrounding it. After a few more lines is Wallace’s attribution: “Virginia Woolf to Merv Griffin, on the The Merv Griffin Show, 1971.” … My guess is that Wallace made the whole thing up as a joke, I told Max.

The wife of the letter recipient and the author of a DFW biography both try to trace the phrase: who said it first, and what does it mean. In the end, it’s left as a mystery.

Which means you can imagine it means anything that speaks to you.

Once upon a time, I had a passionate love affair with Google Reader.

After my feedreader was snatched from my trembling hands (do I sound dramatic? Because it was really really really unnerving to change feedreaders), I moved to Feedly, which I now love. But it was a rocky start. I mean, I came to Feedly so raw, so upset from having lost Google Reader. Could I ever love a feedreader again?

Um, yes, yes I could.

But that is the mindset with which I read this post about that change in the Internet from the Google Reader days to the algorithms that now rule our lives.

I don’t think it’s just looking back with rose-coloured glasses. I think the Internet really was better back in 2008. When content was delivered to you chronologically vs. controlled by an algorithm that doesn’t truly know you but is trying really hard to deliver what it thinks you want to see based on all the data it has collected on you. Or how we once subscribed to the things we wanted to read rather than leave content consumption to chance by following links from social media.

The author writes,

When Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.

I miss that Good Internet.

There is a museum of broken relationships online. There are also several versions in cities around the world, curating artifacts as tangible reminders of a human connection, and a traveling exhibit. But I liked the idea of an online exhibit. Physical objects drive the point home, but sometimes all you need is the story.

The stories are sometimes bitter, but the ones I find hardest to read are the wistful ones. Where something wasn’t working out or it really was a case of bad timing. And then there are the tiny snippets, like the one about the claddagh rings or the Snoopy—what was the trigger or was it always built into the relationship?

It feels like a good collection space for all of the relationships and friendships that have drifted apart or ended during the pandemic.

I first heard about death cleaning years ago. It was part of the wave of Scandinavian ideas to reach the United States, such as hygge. Döstädning is the act of cleaning up your own possessions and papers before death so you don’t leave the task for someone else.

It’s a lovely idea, though not entirely practical unless you have a heads up that death is imminent. There are things that I know others will want to get rid of after I’m gone, but I’d like to hold onto these things until the last possible second. Like all of my VHS tapes. What if they come back into usefulness when I reach 80, but I dumped them at 79?

Can you tell that I like my things? I have a little Bilbo Baggins in me, except I could never be goaded into going on an adventure. That’s what they call me: Zero Adventures Mel.

But I digress. Kottke looped back to this idea recently with a musing on the little chores that take place after someone is gone (canceling subscriptions, etc) and how we can practice kindness by helping others as they go through these tasks. He writes: “Millions of deeply grieving partners and parents and children are dealing with little chores like this, trying to navigate a typically uncaring system while somehow holding it together.”

If we always come from a place of thinking the person may be going through something, it increases the chances that we’ll be kind to the people who need it most.

The ChickieNob and I are partway through the third book in The Magicians trilogy. I think those books should be required reading for all high schoolers, especially the second book. I have a quote from it that I carry with me wherever I go, and I couldn’t wait to get to that point in the second book, for the quote to be in context and ChickieNob to understand it.

The Paris Review had a piece about reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text. She explains,

I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, if she would spend a semester teaching me how to pray with Jane Eyre. Throughout the semester, we homed in on what I was searching for, a way to treat things as sacred, things that were not usually considered to be divinely inspired. The plan was that each week I would pull out passages from the novel and reflect on them as prayers, preparing papers that explored the prayers in depth. Then, together, we would pray using the passages.

I don’t formally pray with The Magicians, but I certainly use the books similar to prayer. I mean, what is prayer—a way to make sense of life, right? And like prayer, depending where I am in life at the moment, I get something different out of the pages each time. So I love the idea of naming a book a sacred text, of gathering that understanding of the self and the world around you from its pages.