I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them. And work which one hopes may be of some use. Then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor. Such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps. What more can the heart of a man desire? - Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness.

The above quote is also found in this movie.

“There is something deeply and indefinably interesting in the swinish race,” the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, in 1841, from Brook Farm, the Massachusetts commune where he was helping to care for pigs and other livestock. “They appear the more a mystery, the longer you gaze at them; it seems as if there was an important meaning to them, if you could but find out.”

That’s the beginning of Caleb Crain’s essay on Walden’s place in Upstream Color. The whole thing is pretty brilliant.

Via Canada

On an impulse I turned down a side street I hoped would lead back onto California. My gym shoes splashed through water, not puddles but a current that swirled the rubbish out of the gutters. The street was flooded: every hydrant opened, boards jammed in their geysering mouths, fanning pressurized water in to the prismatic mist of phantom rainbows. I was in a strange neighborhood that expressed its anarchy in water, a village on the shore of pouting hydrants. Its inhabitants wore wet clothes plastered to their bodies and cavorted through the torrents. A young Spanish girl in shorts stood beside the fountain of a red fire pump, her arms spread as if she were balancing on ripples. She was humming aloud to herself – a tune without a language, maybe her secret fire-pump song.

“Hey, Clarinet Boy,” she singsonged, and I stopped and stood, catching my breath. “Play something,” she said and gestured for me to come through a curtain of spray. And, as if I belonged there, I stepped to the shelter of where she waited beneath a cascading canopy of water.

“What you want to hear?” I asked, as if I could play anything. - Stuart Dybek, “Song”

Via his novel of short stories, I Sailed With Magellan