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)

“There’s a point where despair is a light, a love.” (Lispector, Too Much of Life)

Deleuze on Wagnerian leitmotif and style: “Proust was among the first to underscore this life of the Wagnerian motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character (1/3)

“…and yet what we truly are is whatever the impossible creates inside us.” (Lispector, The Apple in the Dark)

“I write in words that hide others—the true ones. Because the true words cannot be named… My spectacular and ongoing failure proves that the opposite exists: success. Even if success is not granted me, I’m satisfied to know it exists.” — Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.” — Clarice Lispector (The Passion)

We suspect there is a secret in language, *the enigma of Babel*, not so much in what it says, but in what it constantly longs to say. — M. G. Llansol (diaries)

Lispector: “Everything could be fiercely summed up in never emitting a first scream—a first scream unleashes all the others, the first scream at birth unleashes a life, if I screamed I would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would loose upon the rooftops a chorus of screams and horror. (1/2)

Blanchot 🖤

Rereading Blanchot 🖤

Blanchot, The Space of Literature: “Just as to be an ‘artist’ is not to know that art already exists, that there is already a world, so reading, seeing, hearing the work of art demands more ignorance than knowledge. It requires a knowledge endowed with an immense ignorance (1/2)

“I can scarcely bid you good bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” — John Keats, from his last known letter

That's cute: there's a book of letters to the editor by, and about, Thomas Bernhard

“Ideas come to us as the substitutes for griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.” — Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)