Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
... that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many.
In his book After The Future, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the ‘the slow cancellation of the future [which] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.’ ‘But when I say ‘future’’, he elaborates,
I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.
My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. (After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19)
Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I’m saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is just this picture – with its assumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change – that is now out of date.
The future didn’t disappear overnight. Berardi’s phrase ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way in which the future has been eroded over the last thirty years. If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls ‘dyschronia’ has become endemic. This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls ‘retromania’ mean that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. Jameson’s postmodernism – with its tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche – has been naturalised.
If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.
A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.
“It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.”
You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.
As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.
Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.
An anonymous email address, a pill capsule, a padlocked warehouse door, a joyful look in a girl’s eyes – you just have to push blindly through to the space behind them and hope there’s no void there to trap you.
... as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised that life is meaningless.
Claiming that there are no longer social classes, only a single planetary petty bourgeousie in which all the old classes are dissolved, Agamben is dismayed at the level of nihilism to which this class has sunk, particularly in its refusal of any recognisable social identity or authentic discourse by which it might claim power.
"That which constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one anothe ron the earth - differences of language, of dialect, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person - has lost any meaning for the petty bourgeoisie and any capacity for expression and communication." - Agambon
You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
Silence creates its own violence.
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken. A stick becomes a flute when it's loved.
Imagine the clouds dripping
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
Give death announcements each time you move instead of giving announcements of the change of address. Send the same when you die.
Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movement of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed. —Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, 'Memory'
Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from confronting what we fear might be true – or what we would fear might be true – or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance – namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.
Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness
I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea
To be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!
Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.
I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped
The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...
...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
The best slogan for London would be, "It just gets worse."
No matter what you want to do in London, there's a million others who are in the queue ahead of you. Everything is always a hassle, because there is just so many people wanting to do the same shit at the same time. No matter what it is. And no matter what cool idea you've had, there's somebody else who's already done it. And they're usually younger, richer and more well-connected than you.
London is like any other kind of addiction, really. You get 5 per cent entertainment out of it, and that makes you suffer through the other 95 per cent of it.
London is actually a beautiful place when the weather's good; the mood is lighter and everybody's smiling. But for the other 350 days a year, it's miserable. You're standing there waiting for the bus in the rain or you're waiting for a train on a platform and it's freezing. Always a persistent drizzle - or if it's not drizzling, it's overcast and cold.
All evil originates here... I mean industrialisation, capitalism, imperialism, the whoel idea of enslaving people for their resources and turning everybody into zombies and robots and, you know, raping the earth and raping the world's population and... they all start here.
Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse - disguising, concealing, hiding, covering all that lies below the burning earth.
The whole, gathered here in pieces isn’t there, only the pieces are there, and the whole isn’t anywhere.
A return back to that place where nothing is, to the Radiant Empire of Light, the boundless plains of the Sky, for that is the place where I exist, although I am not, for this is where I may place my crown upon my head, and I can think to myself that Seiobo was there below.
That one whole will come to an end, and in the distance another shall begin, I am waiting for death...
A game master or teacher who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the "innermost meaning" would be a very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the "meaning" of music; if there is one it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the "meaning" but do not imagine that it can be taught.
There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Often on a wet day I begin counting up what I've read and what I haven't read.
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.
Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.
For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen.
The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window.
She had forbidden music. Grating her fingers in the bark, she damned the audience. Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour from her shoes. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails. Unable to lift her hand, she stood facing the audience.
And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse.
No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears. Tears. Tears.
A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.
For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored. We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about. Time would have no consequence.
I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.
Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor.
I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.
When John and Yoko took their clothes off for the Two Virgins picture, their sweet, normal bodies all naked and wobbly were shocking because they were so imperfect. It was an especially brave move for Yoko; her body was dissected and derided by the press. But I got it. At last, a girl being interesting and brave.
The first album I bought when I got back from Amsterdam was an Island sampler, Nice Enough to Eat. I only had about four records because they were so expensive, but samplers were much cheaper than a normal LP, only fourteen shillings so lots of people bought them, they were important. I listened very hard to all the tracks, I never skipped songs that weren’t immediately appealing to me because I wanted to make the experience of having a new record last as long as possible. This is when I became aware of a label as a stable of artists. I trusted Island’s taste. I saw Nice Enough to Eat in an Oxfam shop the other day, it made my heart skip a beat, like I’d unexpectedly come across a very old and dear friend that I hadn’t seen for thirty years. Someone I’d told all my secrets to. The blue cover with the jumbled-up sweets spelling the bands’ names was so familiar, it meant more to me than seeing a family photograph. I bought the record again of course. Couldn’t leave it sitting there.
Sid is into subverting signs and people’s expectations too, which is why he wears a leather jacket with a swastika marked out in studs. He isn’t so stupid as to think that persecuting Jewish people is a good idea, but he does want to upset and enrage everyone and question what they’re reacting to: the symbol, or the deed? Once we hailed a cab and the driver said he wouldn’t take us because he was Jewish and offended by the swastika on Sid’s jacket. As the cabbie drove away, Sid said to me, ‘The cunt should’ve taken us and overcharged, that would’ve been a cleverer thing to do.’ My attraction to shocking goes back to the sixties: hippies and Yippies used it a lot, comic artists like Robert Crumb, the underground magazine Oz, Lenny Bruce, Andy Warhol. I also studied history of art at school, and learnt how Surrealists and Dadaists used shock and irrational juxtaposition. All this influences my work and I try to shock in all areas of my life, especially in my drawings and clothes. Referencing sex is an easy way to shock. I walk around in little girls’ party dresses, hems slashed and ragged, armholes torn open to make them bigger, the waistline up under my chest. My bleached blonde hair is not seductive and smooth, but matted and wild, my eyes smudged with black eyeliner. I finish it all off with fishnet tights and shocking pink patent boots from the shop Sex. I’ve crossed the line from ‘sexy wild girl just fallen out of bed’ to ‘unpredictable, dangerous, unstable girl’. Not so appealing. Pippi Longstocking meets Barbarella meets juvenile delinquent. Men look at me and they are confused, they don’t know whether they want to fuck me or kill me. This sartorial ensemble really messes with their heads. Good.
“I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.”
"When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing."
"I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconut, chicken cooked in white water; fruit mold, rice, turnips; camphorated sausage, dough, cheese (white), cotton salad, and certain fish (skinless)."
"Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself."
"Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are."
"The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry."
“I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so.”
"As a person, I am neither good nor bad. I waver between the two, so to speak. So I have never really done harm to anyone — nor good, come to that. All the same, I have plenty of enemies — loyal enemies, of course. Why? For the most part, it is because they don't know me — or only know me secondhand, in short, through hearsay (lies worse than death). Man can never be perfect. I bear no grudge against them: they are the main victims of their ignorance and short-sightedness.... Poor folk! ... So I am sorry for them. Let us pass on. I shall come back to this subject later."
But he wouldn’t have been able to explain to his wife that the antagonism he felt toward her family was due not to ideological but to esthetic differences, the same silent antagonism he felt towards the inexhaustible Spanish ugliness of so many common place things, a kind of national depravity that offended his sense of beauty more deeply than his convictions regarding justice: the stuffed heads of bulls over bars in taverns; the paprika red and saffron-substitute yellow of bullfight posters; folding chairs and carved desks that imitated the Spanish Renaissance; dolls in flamenco dresses, a curl on their forehead, which closed their eyes when leaned back and opened them as if resuscitated when they were upright again; rings with cubic stones; gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children – he rose to heaven, he joined the angels – and their tragic white coffins; baroque moldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar facades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera; funeral announcements in the ABC or El Debate; photographs of King Alfonso XIII hunting, just a few days before he left the country, indifferent or blind to what was happening around him, leaning on his rifle beside the head of a dead deer, or erect and jovial next to a sacrifice of partridges or pheasants or hares, surrounded by gentlemen in hunting outfits and gaiters and servants in poor men’s berets and espadrilles and smiles diminished by toothless mouths.
Professor Rossman no longer had to wait for anything. He’d been buried with several dozen other corpses and hurriedly covered in lime in a common grave in Madrid, infected without reason or fault by the great medieval plague of Spanish death, spread indiscriminately by the most modern and most primitive means alike, everything from Mauser rifles, machine guns, and incendiary bombs to crude ancestral weapons: pocketknives, harquebuses, hunting shotguns, cattle prods, even animal jawbones if necessary, death that descended with the roar of airplane engines and the neighing of mules, with scapulars and crosses and red flags, with rosary prayers and the shouting of anthems on the radio.
Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell.
Allow me, beloved, to tell you the whole story from the beginning. I beg you, do not tire of listening to me for a quarter of an hour, when I have never tired of loving you all my life.
My child died yesterday — for three days and three nights I wrestled with death for that tender little life, I sat for forty hours at his bedside while the influenza racked his poor, hot body with fever. I put cool compresses on his forehead, I held his restless little hands day and night. On the third evening I collapsed. My eyes would not stay open any longer; I was unaware of it when they closed. I slept, sitting on my hard chair, for three or four hours, and in that time death took him. Now the sweet boy lies there in his narrow child’s bed, just as he died; only his eyes have been closed, his clever, dark eyes, and his hands are folded over his white shirt, while four candles burn at the four corners of his bed. I dare not look, I dare not stir from my chair, for when the candles flicker shadows flit over his face and his closed mouth, and then it seems as if his features were moving, so that I might think he was not dead after all, and will wake up and say something loving and childish to me in his clear voice. But I know that he is dead, I will arm myself against hope and further disappointment, I will not look at him again. I know it is true, I know my child died yesterday — so now all I have in the world is you, you who know nothing about me, you who are now amusing yourself without a care in the world, dallying with things and with people. I have only you, who never knew me, and whom I have always loved.
Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.
We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.
For someone as sensitive as he was to the passing hours of the day, the winter dusk was bound to have a meaning. But what was it? The meaning without a name, in other words: nothing. The meanings all fell away, or revealed how empty they had been from the start. Hardly anything happens, after all, in an individual life: most of the time is spent working to survive and then recovering from work. If someone added up all the time that individuals have spent achieving nothing, just to keep time ticking over, the sum total of centuries and millennia would be overwhelming. By comparison, history is miniature. But history is a condensation of facts, an intellectual contrivance that artificially gathers together the little that happened in the vast, half-empty expanses of real time.
It was so unexpected, and at the same time so horrifyingly opportune, that her whole being was seized by a spasm of terror, and she saw him as a bloodthirsty stegosaurus hoisting his rocky neck from a lake of oil, on the night of the end of the world.
Even in my bad luck I have always been lucky.
In this tank waist-deep in the cabin stood an officer of the Reich, with a black beret with the death's head badge and crossed bones on his head, and my grandfather kept on going steadily forward, straight toward this tank, with his hands stretched out, and his eyes spraying towards the Germans the thought: 'Turn around and go back!'
And really, that tank halted. The whole army stood still. Grandfather touched the leading tank with his outstretched fingers, and kept pouring out towards it the same suggestion: 'Turn around and go back, turn around and...' And then the lieutenant gave a signal with his pennant, and the tank changed its mind and moved forward, but grandfather never budged, and the tank ran over him and crushed his head, and after that there was nothing standing in the way of the German army.
"You should have sat at home on your arse..."
I ought to be brief, or as brief as possible, on the subject of the Olympic Site. Being based south of the river I try to avoid the place, but architectural correspondents who live and work in East London, like Douglas Murphy, Kieran Long, or Oliver Wainwright, have all written superb and detailed indictments of the place, have buried it time and again, although admittedly without managing to shame the Olympic Delivery Authority into the hoped-for mass resignation. By the time you read the book this passage comes from, it may all be over, the fireworks, the pageants, the unmanned drones, the stationing on-site of U.S. missiles, the enormous police and army presence, the medals or not-medals, the terrorist attacks or not-terrorist attacks. That doesn’t matter. It’s all about the Legacy. Ken Livingstone admitted as much several times–the point was not to have a sports event in London, the point was to extort some funding for the redevelopment of a massive swathe of derelict London, a light-engineering swathe along the river Lea that had long since gone to seed, a typical stretch of Thames Gateway post-industry.
And why not? Many writers have mourned the demise of the Lea Valley, London’s last great wilderness. I remember it well, the paths along the outfall sewer, the random collections of industrial waste, the abundant and unusual bird and plant life; there are still a few similar spaces on the other side of the Thames, and practically dozens outside of London. Nonetheless, there was a uniqueness to the Lea Valley Zone, and the effacement of it by an enormous project of speculation and imposed redevelopment is hard to conceive as a victory for the people of London. Just imagine, though, if the Greater London Authority was the Greater London Council: a well-funded, powerful body able and willing to stand up to the City and the government, and they proposed to redevelop this area. Imagine that they too used an Olympics as a pretext, and connected the new suburb to the Docklands Light Railway, the Jubilee Line, Crossrail, and even the railway to the Continent. Imagine that the country’s most famous architects were hired, by subterfuge or otherwise, to design its public buildings, while an immense landscaping project provided a new public park. Imagine that a rigorously planned new housing development with a secondary school as part of it was an integral part of this new district. I can’t say I’d protest. More than that, I can say I’d be the first to hail the bloody place as everything London desperately needs, especially impoverished, overcrowded, overstretched East London. I’d be declaring Ken Livingstone the greatest living Englishman: the man who used running, swimming and shot-putting as the pretext to build a magnificent new city for the masses of London. It isn’t a particularly useful thought experiment, as this isn’t what is happening. All of the above features in Olympian Stratford in some manner, but all of it is coming into being as an act against London–the creation of yet another security-obsessed, enclosed, gated enclave set up to mock the idea that we could become more rather than less equal.
I have been writing about myself dreaming. I have been writing only to confuse you, Gunnarsen. I have confessed nothing. Read on, Gunnarsen, and learn what kind of man I am in fact. Read the true story, forger.
… And at some point on my walk that lasted for nearly a year of Januarys, I learned what sort of man I would be for the rest of my life.
I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and deeming of how many things it might be.
Each person is more than one person. I am writing about a man who sits at a table in a room with books around the wall and who writes for day after day with a heaviness pressing on him.
I have found a way of watching a thing that shows me what I never see when I look at the thing. If I watch a thing from the sides of my eyes, I see in the thing the shape of another thing.
… A page of a book is not a window but a mirror.
On grasslands I almost forget my fear of drowning… I am not afraid of drowning in grass.
The events this chronicle was undertaken to relate began in the second minute of the second act. Nicolas Boehlmer, preparing to smoke his last cigarette before going onstage, heard a knock at his dressing-room door. “Come in,” he called out. He was to note later how difficult it was to deliver this unexpected line at a moment when he had already entered the imaginative universe of his character. In response to his invitation, a stranger entered — one wearing the same wig, makeup, and clothes as Boehlmer (the outfit — according to costume-designer Sylvie Plumkett — of “a careless intellectual”).
Too often in theater a line of dialogue is shoved forward like a reheated pizza instead of like something unique to its time and its place — a time that is none other than now, and a place that is none other than here.
But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!--so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.
What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!
And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.
Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.
My husband gets a new job.... The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing.”
He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky.
Then I met Linda and the sun rose.
I can't find a better way to express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.
Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.
I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write.
Many of the men and women looked vulgar, with hair dyed in the manner of Westerners, absorbing the effluence of decadent Western music, and consuming Western food and drink. There was even a man with an earring, as though he were a woman.
If there were just one sentence remaining at the end, as far as I am concerned, dear lady, it could only be that nothing, absolutely nothing made sense.
What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible.
... as aware of each other, of their precise positions, as of the enormous mass of dark sky above the smashed neon, the sky which might have glimpsed the reflection of its own enormous dark mass as it trembled with stars in the vista of railway yards spreading below it, had there been some relationship between the trembling stars and the twinkling dull red semaphore of lights sprinkled among the rails, but there wasn't, there was no common denominator, no interdependence between them, the only order and relationship existing within the discrete worlds of above and below, and indeed of anywhere, for the field of stars and the forest of signals stared as blankly at each other as does each and every form of being, blind in darkness and blind in radiance, as blind on earth as it is in heaven.
...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.
It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated...
My feeling is that nothing follows it, said Korin quite unexpectedly after a long silence, then, without explaining what it was he was referring to or why the phrase just came to him, he looked out the window at the desolate rain and added, Only a great darkness, a great closing down of the light, and after that how even the great darkness is switched off.
I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it. Once not long before we had been boys and girls, and soon we would be middle-aged, thickening with rueful pleasure toward the thinness of old age.
All horsepower corrupts.
Paradox reconciles all contradictions.
At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.
Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.
He listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.
But love truly becomes love only when, no longer an embryo developing painfully in the darkness of the body, it ventures to confess itself with lips and breath. However hard it tries to remain a chrysalis, a time comes when the intricate tissue of the cocoon tears, and out it falls, dropping from the heights to the farthest depths, falling with redoubled force into the startled heart.
Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?
"In this late industrial capitalist inferno, honesty is a rare quality," said the professor. "It entails a kind of brutality. I've been saying that since the 1950s when the mixed economy and the welfare state were not a phantasm."
A giant inflatable dog turd broke loose from its moorings outside the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland and brought down power lines before coming to a halt in the grounds of a children’s home. The PaulMcCarthy sculpture, the size of a house, reached a maximum altitudeof 200 meters. Other civilizations had their chosen forms: from theObelisk of Luxor to Michelangelo’s David. The futurist poet Marinettifound his crashed motor car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but he might have balked at flying dog shit. In the twenty-first century, the insomnia of reason does not breed monsters, but pets.No wonder there are no longer any gods, when what is expected of them is that they descend from Mount Olympus with plastic baggiesand clean up.
Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
"I am the soul in limbo.”
Omega is a parameter that is very much needed to describe the universe, and Omega is the biggest riddle of them all. Omega is the parameter that tells us what will happen to the universe, what will happen to us, and there is something seriously wrong with the value of that parameter.
He fumes in silence. Then he explodes. "It is not my obligation, dear sir, to testify. My obligation is to forget. It is a misunderstanding that only living mouths can tell stories and that, just because I am one of the last survivors, it is my duty to get up on stage and speak. That is too much responsibility. That is too much to ask. Besides," says De Heer, "what do I have to say ? I do not believe the myth that society has made out of history. I cannot live up to the sainthood requirement. I hardly feel like any of this was real."
He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.
He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.
I've knitted myself a hat, it's plum red with an appealing lace pattern, I figured that a few air holes would be nice now that it's spring. I put it on and feel like a cranberry in the snow, and I wonder if they can see me from the moon. Me and the Great Wall.
“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”
Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt -- an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect -- to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hyprocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said.
The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.
I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands that were making the music when this decision was made simply disappeared and got real jobs, the ones that survived made different music that appealed to more people. The result was that when I listened to that music it felt a bit like travelling to the past or visiting ghosts, and this despite the undeniable fact that a very healthy portion of the music I listened to otherwise was created a far longer time ago, by people long-departed, yet produced no similar feelings.
I'm afraid to move for fear of getting some of the world on me.
But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction.
I know this is going to sound weird but this kind of love is almost too intense. It hurts a bit. It feels almost like loss.
When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide.
Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.
Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.
What was God doing with himself before the creation?
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.
"Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?"
One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.
There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.
If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.
Animal smell is beyond philosophy.
The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.
One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.
Right now you're about the least attractive Bird I've ever seen...But I'll sleep with you just the same. I haven't been fastidious about morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I'm sure I'll discover something genuine in no matter what we do.
You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else’s world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won’t result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I’m doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went mad!
Ohh. Yes. That Department of Agriculture book was an awful mighty good thing, laying there at her elbow on that hay. But it made their misery even bigger, and their biggest dream even plainer, and their biggest craving ten times more to be craved. A fireproof, windproof, dirtproof, bugproof, thiefproof house of earth. His penis had become limber, and her moving had forced it out of her hole. He felt the liquids from her womb smeared through the hairs on his stomach …
I'll give you the smoothest an' th' nicest rubbin' job that any shemale ever got since Jesus quit paintin' little red wagons!
It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.
As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.
The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.
Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.
Urban exploration can be read as a reactionary practice working to take place back from exclusionary private and government forces, to redemocratise spaces urban inhabitants have lost control over.
Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.
It would take her thousands of steps to get anywhere, but she would get there easily, and when she arrived, in the present, it would seem like it had been a single movement that brought her there. Did existence ever seem worked for? One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
After untangling a cord, then moving the MacBook to the floor, Paul lay beside Erin and meekly pawed her forearm three times, then briefly held some of her fingers, which were surprisingly warm. He lay stomach-down with his arm on her arm, thinking that if she woke, while he was asleep, this contact could be viewed as accidental. Maybe she would roll toward him, resting her arm across his back—they'd both be stomach-down, as if skydiving—in an unconscious or dream-integrated manner she wouldn't remember, in the morning, when they'd wake in a kind of embrace and begin kissing, neither knowing who initiated, therefore brought together naturally, like plants that join at their roots.
On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.
When she treads on my grave and feels as if she’s trampling on that doting old man’s bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I’m dead I’ll be aware of that. I can’t believe I won’t. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha’s Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: “It hurts! It hurts! … Even though it hurts, I’m happy—I’ve never been more happy, I’m much, much happier than when I was alive! … Trample harder! Harder!
It’s odd, but even when I am in pain I have a sexual urge. Perhaps especially when I am in pain I have a sexual urge. Or should I say that I am more attracted, more fascinated by women who cause me pain?
After looking at myself in the mirror, I looked at Satsuko. I could not believe that we were creatures of the same species. The uglier the face in the mirror, the more extraordinarily beautiful Satsuko seemed. If that ugly face were only uglier, I thought regretfully, Satsuko would look even more beautiful.
When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate.
“Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian.
But he is really wondering about this.
I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that.
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.”
Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.
For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return.
They really don't amount to much, anyway, human relationships.
Flowers are only sexual organs, brightly coloured vaginas decorating the surface of the world, open to the lubricity of insects.
What can you reply, in general, to human questions?
It was conceivably true, he thought, that France was a marvelous country - at least from the tourist's point if view.
It doesn't amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.
Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.
"Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world."
A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.
Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside - there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.
Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party
"One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
