“To make reality bearable, we must all entertain a few little fantasies.” — Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom 🌸 (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries.” (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain)

The river was such a deep dark blue today.

This is who runs this account.

Kranichrufe im Dunkeln, so kurz nur, als hätte man es geträumt

“Kings know nothing of irony.” (Mann, The Magic Mountain)

“Könige kennen keine Ironie.” (Mann, Der Zauberberg)

Don DeLillo, End Zone: “Most lives are guided by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. (1/2)

“And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.” (Faulkner, Light in August)

Teaching one of my favourite philosophy texts ever today: Karl Marx’s Fragment on Machines. The focus changes a bit every time I teach it, but this time I’m particularly excited to discuss capital as an “organic totality” and the different kinds of subsuming labour under capital.

“It’s fine, I’ll stay here dreaming poems and smiling in italics.” — Álvaro de Campos (Pessoa)

“But will I be able to carry into another world what I forgot to dream?” — Fernando Pessoa, writing as Álvaro de Campos (trans. Costa and Ferrari)

“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.” — from a letter to Hawthorne, a few months before completing Moby-Dick #MelvilleMonday 🐳

eeeeeeee hehe

amazing to think these will come in spring

New acquisition! Inspired by Joseph Brodsky and recent posts from @timesflow.bsky.social.

Writers who believed language could hold genuine complexity without reducing it to surface cleverness: feeling a pull towards Henry James‘s ‘The Golden Bowl’. The De Quincey-effect. Thomas Hardy shows you how much emotional weight a short poem can bear when every word is exactly right.

Pessoa, in a note describing his ideal: “The sensibility of Mallarmé in the style of Vieira; to dream like Verlaine in the body of Horace; to be Homer by moonlight.” (The Book of Disquiet, tr. M. J. Costa)

“Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds. The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. In me, this compulsion acted through words.” Walter Benjamin

“I was distorted by similarity to all that surrounded me. Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear?” — Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

Going around in a circle is not quite the same as a repetition

My ride is here.

“And dream of a way in a space with neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away?” — Beckett, “For to End Yet Again”

“Each present that happens drives into time like a wedge and lays a claim to eternity.” — Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Reality is a fabulous book in which everything happens when one least expects it. Everything that has never existed explodes into being from one page to the next.” — Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There

“Moments have a spicy aftertaste of eternity.” — Jabès, The Book of Questions

“The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real—that is, space-bound—form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without.” — Benjamin, “The Image of Proust”

„Das Gute an einer Tat ist, daß sie uns übersteigt.“ Clarice Lispector, Der Apfel im Dunkeln, 1961. [Übs. Curt Meyer-Clason, 1996]

It's crepe myrtle season.🌸

“Who are you, in us, disrupting our measure?” — Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

Jean-Luc Nancy: “Evil is precisely refusing the world, wanting to substitute an empire for it—whatever the sovereign may be… This may be the empire of money or ‘me’ or a god, or the empire of technology drunk on itself or piety drunk on itself.” (from a 2003 interview)

“Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.” — Walter Benjamin (1940)

“It is not through form [Gestalt] but rather through transformation that creatures can offer themselves inexhaustibly to poetry from this source.” — Walter Benjamin from an essay recently translated for the first time (shared by Winter Pallaksch): www.e-flux.com/journal/157/...

“Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine.” — J. H. Prynne

“Only in dreams, in poetry, in play […] do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.” — Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Hölderlin: “Don’t you also harbor a secret pain, when the eye of the heavens is taken out of Nature, and the wide earth thus lies there like a riddle whose solution is missing?”

(er sprach von den Symphonien und dasz in diesem taumelnden Schneebild der Symphonien die einzelnen Flocken nämlich das einzelne Kristall in seiner Zärtlichkeit usw.) 𝘸𝘦𝘪𝘭 𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘩𝘵 13.1.2010 (Von den Umarmungen, S. 10)

*Nommant* le possible, *répondant* à l’impossible. (Maurice Blanchot)

The secret decision of every essential speech in us: *naming* the possible, *responding* to the impossible. — Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

Jen Craig in 2016 on "The sometimes pride of your invisible writing" (thanks to Reuben Mackey for the heads-up!) absurdenticements.blogspot.com/2016/09/invi...

“The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing, and in this case the absence of any description of external surroundings is tantamount to a description of an internal state.” — Proust, The Guermantes Way (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

“Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned— Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind.” — Clarel (IV, xxxv, 27‒28) #MelvilleMonday 🐳

'Milton is credited with coining more new words even than Shakespeare (630 to Shakespeare's 229), and "freaked" is one of them, denoting the untidy-looking black blotch on a pansy's petals.' John Carey, 'A Little History of Poetry'

Now in Toronto. A snowstorm worthy of a Tomas Tranströmer poem

“In you I fall apart, and outwardly am a single fragment, a puzzle to itself. But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.” — John Ashbery

“One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another.” — John Keats (in his marginal notes on Paradise Lost)

“Other people, who are our deepest plunge!” (Lispector, The Apple in the Dark)

“It’s through a feeling of respect for each human being, in every corner of the Earth…” — Clarice Lispector (trans. Costa and Patterson)

Keeping warm.

“…in spite of despair. No: with despair.” (Duras, Writing)