We met as Sparks - Diverging Flints
Sent various - scattered ways -
We parted as the Central Flint
Were cloven with an Adze -
Subsisting on the Light We bore
Before We felt the Dark -
We knew by change between itself
And that etherial Spark.
— Emily Dickinson
Unwritten poems were killing him.
— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
They were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes
“Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?”
“But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.”
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for the hollows of your legs
— Pablo Neruda (via philphys)
Durer’s “Melencolia I”
…Forests were set on fire -but hour by hour
They fell and faded -and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash -and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world…
— from Darkness, by Lord George Gordon Byron
He turned the desert into pools of water
and the parched ground into flowing springs;
there he brought the hungry to live,
and they founded a city where they could settle.
They sowed fields and planted vineyards
that yielded a fruitful harvest;
he blessed them, and their numbers greatly increased,
and he did not let their herds diminish.
— The Book of Psalms, Chapter 107, Verses 35-38
Oh Lord, you’ve given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.
— Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and always will be beautiful—is Truth.
— Leo Tolstoy, “Sevastapol in May”
heading to #OccupyCal.
wish me luck.
“They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using … . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”
He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing. Sitting or kneeling you couldn’t. Standing? His head might come up some day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too: trim grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well, so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It’s the blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With thanks.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
BLOOM: (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
— James Joyce, Ulysses
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
— Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
