Other Writing, etc. | Vida Yao

Vida Yao 姚维达

Department of Philosophy, Rice University

6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005-1892

Farewell for Now

I. Farewell for Now: Menil

A version of this essay is available in

The Houston Chronicle.

If you are checking out the city, here are some suggestions that will dated in a quick minute.

& if you're feeling beat down, never forget Jose Altuve's origin story (from before he got that Houston leverage).

a 14-year old girl responds

to Derek Parfit.

A fragment of a poem.

metaphysics everywhere,

but don't forget

metaphysics as a guide to morals

follow me on insta @vida.philosophy

untitled image

pink

we were born sick

untitled image

untitled image

"Unlike ordinary lust, which could be appeased by pictures or by pure imagination, the lust for revenge could not be touched."

"But I’m not one of those with a resentful temperament: I have a quiet heart."

untitled image

lbj

untitled image

"People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lillies, and it made her life a burden to her...

...for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lillies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs."

you heard them say it

untitled image

"He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. She just didn't know. He might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she'd find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved."

"When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself."

untitled image

I am a man with a heart that offends
With its lonely and greedy demands

untitled image

untitled image

like a dogless bone

untitled image

untitled image

untitled image

untitled image

"Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but it is full of strife; but even that is better than nothing, isn't it?"

untitled image

untitled image

it'll pass.

"She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape."

untitled image

untitled image

"May storm winds and worries bear off the man who lectures my anguish"

untitled image

wake up wake up

untitled image