“But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul…” (Moby-Dick, Ch. 29) #MelvilleMonday 🐳

On his birthday, remembering Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). A regular in my reading ever since I read Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude two decades ago.

“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.” (opening line, Wittgenstein’s Mistress)

“Whenever a few pages of Kant had tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard. … This book [Either/Or] confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited me more than any other book.” — Walter Benjamin (at 21, in a letter)

“What an extraordinary change takes place … when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.” — Kierkegaard (an epigraph to *Wittgenstein’s Mistress*)

“Hugely, spring exists again.” — John Ashbery, “Grand Galop”

Walter Benjamin: “Just as Proust begins the story with an awakening, so must every presentation of history begin with awakening; in fact, it should treat of nothing else. This one [The Arcades Project], accordingly, deals with awakening from the nineteenth century.”

“There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.” — Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Primal poetry, poetry that allows us a taste for our inner destiny, is an adherence to the invisible. […] True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.” — Bachelard, Water and Dreams (tr. Edith R. Farrell)

another opening line came to mind: “The danger is in the neatness of identifications.” — the first line of Beckett’s first critical essay (“Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”)

Gaston Bachelard: “Connaître, c’est décrire pour retrouver.” [To know is to describe in order to retrieve.] — the opening line of the first chapter of his first book

“As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul.” (Jabès, The Book of Questions)

“Written words could tell him who he was. […] The only way to be in the world was to write himself there.” (Don DeLillo, Mao II)

“Syntax is a faculty of the soul.” (Paul Valéry, Analects)

Lispector on *The Chandelier* (letter, 1944): “Perhaps you find the title Mansfieldian because you know that I recently read Katherine’s letters. But I don’t think so. […] If I had been reading Proust at the time, it would have made one think of a Proustian chandelier, (1/4)

vielleicht lebe ich in einem Gäszchen. Von Sprache wunderbarer Sprache. (24.3.18 | da ich morgens ..., S. 70)

“We are eternal travelers of ourselves, and the only landscape that exists is what we are. We possess nothing, because we do not even possess ourselves... The universe is not mine: it is me.” — Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We are nothing; what we seek is everything.” (Friedrich Hölderlin)

“Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles.” — Hölderlin, Fragment von Hyperion, 1793

epigraphs to *An Absence of Sea*

🩶

Imagine this: The hand no longer finding itself in the dark. There would be no humanity if the body did not reflect itself, writes MMP. If the chiasmatic structure were to collapse—“It would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being.”

“neither bed nor body neither subject nor object neither time nor hands but something else… …not from anywhere I search to borrow words for this eternal letter but something trembling unnamed a grammar of flesh that cannot be conjugated only endured” 🖤 Christina Tudor-Sideri, An Absence of Sea

“The memories which two people preserve of each other, even in love, are not the same. […] For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies.” (Proust, Time Regained)

Richard Rorty: “Proust’s novel is a network of small, interanimating contingencies. […] Such contingencies make sense only in retrospect—and they make a different sense every time redescription occurs.” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)

Proust, Time Regained: “No doubt life … prevented me from discovering their essence. For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies… …even her personal charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished as soon as I was near her, [+]

“Life is an April day, that both laughs and weeps in a breath.” — Babbalanja in Mardi (Vol. 2, Ch. 79) #MelvilleMonday 🐳

Mourning dove perched, then flying away 🪶

“To me the really wonderful thing about these insects [moths] is the way they perish.” — W. G. Sebald (interview, 1998)

“Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Correction)

“Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Korrektur)

Thomas Bernhard, Correction: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, (1/2)

“…weil wir in jedem Augenblick erkennen, daß wir alles falsch gemacht haben […] deshalb korrigieren wir diese Fälschung und die Korrektur dieser Fälschung korrigieren wir wieder und das Ergebnis dieser Korrektur der Korrektur korrigieren wir undsofort, so Roithamer.” — Bernhard, Korrektur

“All poetry is the voice given to death. May our decay praise, celebrate. May our defeat shine, resound.” Jaccottet, for World Poetry Day 🌸

“I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.” — Borges, “The Immortal” (tr. James E. Irby)

“Don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. […] Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.” — Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

from Nietzsche’s notebooks (1875): “Even the independence is only apparent: each person is finally linked with his predecessors. Phantasms linked with phantasms. It is strange to take everything so seriously. (1/2)

Auch die Unabhängigkeit ist nur scheinbar: zuletzt knüpft jeder an seinen Vorgänger an. Phantasma an Phantasma. Es ist komisch, alles so ernst zu nehmen. Die ganze ältere Philosophie als kurioser Irrgartengang der Vernunft. Es ist eine Traum- und Märchentonart anzustimmen. Nietzsche, Nachlass, 1875

the path to the squirrel’s nest

“I barely fit inside myself.” — Clarice Lispector, “Brasília”

“And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.” (Musil, The Man without Qualities)

“I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.” — Keats, last letter to Charles Brown (1820)

“I have the impression of meeting people and experiencing things with the detachment of someone who has already left this world and is missing it intensely.” — Quignard, The Fount of Time

Some articles on AI and authoritarianism (slop as the aesthetics of fascism and on the techno-material production of an authoritarian everyday): newsocialist.org.uk/transmission... rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

“Going nowhere, coming from nowhere, Malone passes.” (Beckett, The Unnamable)

“The purpose of literature is indeterminate, like that of life.” (Paul Valéry, Analects)

Pascal Quignard in an interview (2020): “We do not know where the word ‘literature’ comes from. I love infinitely that there are two words whose etymology is entirely unknown: *eros* and *literature*. I love that words emerge from the night like comets.”

The word *literature* has no origin. […] I will have devoted my life to an elusive prey whose name had no meaning, no use, no function, no design, no origin, no end. — Pascal Quignard, L’Homme aux trois lettres (2020)

Read an interview with Mathias Énard and me at the @thebookerprizes.com : thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...