Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials

“I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...”


She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.


“Seems to me-" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed....”


“The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.”


“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”


“Finally, and almost simultaneously, the children discovered what it was like to be drunk. “Do they like doing this?” gasped Roger, after vomiting copiously. “Yes,” said Lyra, in the same condition. “And so do I,” she added stubbornly.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Reticence

Already on the first day, after remaining undecided all afternoon in my hotel room, I’d realized it was more complicated than I’d thought it was going to be to make up my mind to go see them. To a certain extent of course that was why I’d come to Sasuelo, but ever since I’d felt this initial reticence at going to see them I could very well imagine that my trip to Sasuelo, although initially meant as an occasion to see the Biaggis, would in fact end without my having resolved to contact them.

It had rained a lot the night before, and nearby on the ground a large puddle of water dimly reflected the trees and rooftops of the neighboring houses in the darkness. A light gust of wind occasionally sent a ripple over the surface of the water, blurring the reflections for a moment. Then, slowly, the image recomposed on the surface, trembling for another few seconds before stabilizing, and I saw that the center of the puddle mirrored the silvery shape of the old gray Mercedes, around which, however, by I don't know what play of perspectives or blind spots, there was no trace of me at all.


Walking past the large wooden mirror in the entrance, I saw a furtive silhouette pass by in the blackness.


Before moving on I lingered for a moment on the jetty looking at the dead cat, which continued to drift slowly back and forth in the harbor, first to the left then to the right, following the imperceptible flux and reflux of the current on the surface of the water.

Antoine Volodine: Radiant Terminus

He always recovers. He hasn't been dead or alive since he was born. The radiation doesn't do anything to him.


This awful kolkhoz matchmaker, this reviver of cadavers, this horrible shadow, this giant impervious to radiation, this shamanic authority from nowhere, this president of nothing, this vampire in the form of a kulak, this strange man sitting on a stool, this abuser, this dominating man, this sleazy man, this unsettling man, this nuclear-reactor creature, this godless and lordless hypnotizer, this manipulator, this monster belonging to who knows what stinking category.


We never fill it up with fuel, Ilyushenko suddenly thought. We never stock up. We go on as if we were outside reality. The locomotive could keep going like this for years.


What's for sure is that he was the complete master of Radiant Terminus. Nobody was permitted to exist in the kolkhoz unless he'd gotten control over them in the heart of their dreams. No one was allowed to struggle in his or her own future unless he was part of it and directing it as he wished. He transformed everyone ito something like puppets, and, so as not to be bored, he created puppets that resisted him or who could deceive him or cause problems, but, in the end, he was the one with the final say on everything. Radiant Terminus wasn't really a kolkhoz, it was more a theater to keep him from spending eternity yawning and waiting for the world to break down and, for those who lived in the village, it was a filthy dream they could never escape.


— It's just theatrics, Myriam Umarik said. It's just a dream. His head skewered or not, doesn't matter. We're all neither dead nor living in Radiant Terminus. We're all bits of Solovyei's dreams. We're all ends and pieces of dreams or poems in his head. What we do to him doesn't matter to him. What Samiya Schmidt did to him that night is like a scene from a book. It doesn't count for anything. It's nothing. It'll pass.

Franco Bifo Berardi: On Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility

Fundamentally, I think that we have to meditate on his experience and acknowledge that democracy is over, that political hope is dead. Forever.


Srnicek and Williams suggest that we should ‘demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand reduction of the work week’. But they do not explain who the recipient is of these demands. Is there any governing volition that can attend to these requests and implement them?

No, because governance has taken the place of government, and command is no longer inscribed in political decision but in the concatenation of techno-linguistic automatisms. This is why demands are pointless, and why building political parties is pointless as well.


While I write the last pages of this book, a dark landscape is emerging, and to my perception and understanding the suicidal trends of the modern world seem unstoppable. However what I see and what I know is far from the whole picture. What escapes my grasp, what I cannot see, what I cannot imagine, what I cannot even conceive is the means of escape.

Every day we experience the sense that opposition to the mounting wave of racism, fanaticism and the ensuing violence is pointless. In fact, this wave is not a political decision, the result of ideological and strategic elaboration, but the effect of despair, the reaction to long-lasting humiliation. The perfect rationality of the abstract computational machine, the inescapability of financial violence has jeopardized the consciousness and sensibility of the social organism, and frustration has reduced the general ability to feel compassion and to act empathically.

Madness? Although the genealogy of despair and aggression can be retraced to a social cause, I think that at the end of the day political reasoning is itself impotent. The only way to healing such emotional distress would be an emotional reactivation of the hidden potencies of the social organism: the Occupy! movement that deployed in 2011 has been the main attempt of our recent moment to summon all the energies of solidarity of which the social organism is capable. The outcome, however, of that movement was so poor that deception has destroyed any lingering sentiment of human solidarity, and the social organism is behaving like a beheaded body that still retains its physical energies but no longer possesses the ability to steer them in a reasonable direction.

I’m not sure that we can judge in psychopathological terms the dismantlement of modern social civilization. The economic interests of the corporations and the cynicism of politicians with no culture and no dignity have paved the way to the present explosion of madness.

Impotence is surely a symptom of disproportion: reason, that used to be the measure of the world (ratio), can no longer govern the hyper-complexity of the contemporary network of human relations.

This kind of disproportion may be labelled madness, in the sense of disorder, chaos, or mental mayhem. However, we must distinguish between different points of view when it comes to the definition of madness.

Is madness an exceptional occurrence that looms at the margins of the rational and reasonable daily business of life? Is it an inescapable disturbance of the ongoing conversation that holds society together?

If we reduce madness to a marginal, unavoidable disturbance that must be managed, that we have to placate and heal, we miss the point. Madness should not be seen as an accident to hide or to fix. Madness is the background of evolution, the chaotic matter that we are modelling and transforming into a provisional order.

Order means here a shared illusion of predictability, of regularity; a projective illusion that can hold for a short or a long period of time, a few minutes or perhaps centuries. An illusion that gives birth to what we call civilization.

We must distinguish two faces of madness: one is the factual meaninglessness of the world, the surrounding magma of matter, the uncontrollable proliferation of stimuli, the dazzling whirl of existence. This madness is the precondition of the creation of meaning: the groundless construction of knowledge, the invention of the world as a meaningful whole.

Then there is the subjective side of madness: the painful sentiment that things are flying away, the feeling of being overwhelmed by speed and noise and violence, of anxiety, panic, mental chaos.

Pain forces us to look for an order to the world that we cannot find, because it does not exist. Yet this craving for order does exist: it is the incentive to build a bridge across the abyss of entropy, a bridge between different singular minds. From this conjunction, the meaning of the world is evoked and enacted: shared semiosis, breathing in consonance.

The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation.

When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.

There is something obsessional in this attempt to narrow the range of vibration out of which emerges possibility, and to reduce the unpredictability of future events.

I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime! When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence . . . the swarm, the roar, the river . . . nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! For a split second this word took me by surprise like a wild beast in a dark forest, but it soon sank into the hurly-burly of the seven people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on. 1
‘De remi facemmo ala al folle volo’, says Ulysses in Canto XXVI of The Divine Comedy.

 To the dawn
Our poop we turn’d, and for the witless flight
Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left.



The flight that leads to knowledge is foolish (witless), as it defies the established limits of reason.
The modern world comes out of the imprudence of the geographical explorations, from the desire to answer the question: where are the borders of the world?

The painful research of the picaresque swindler, who seeks to answer the unanswerable: who am I? Whence do I come?

The modern world results from the research of a non-theological order, and this research leads to the establishment of the bourgeois order whose measure (ratio) is time, labour and value accumulation.

This order was based on the semiotic organization and coding of the energies unchained by the explosion of the old Medieval theocratic order and by the enhancement of human experience that followed the technical innovations of printing books and traversing oceans. This order is the result of an act of nomination that gives meaning and scope to the evolving flows of information and discovery and technology.

Then entropy came and slowly dissolved that order: at the end of the capitalist cycle, the richness produced by labour is turned into misery and the freedom of knowledge is restricted by a new theology based on economic dogma. But the enforcement of dogma cannot replace the old bourgeois convention based on measure. When labour time and value start diverging, when the speed of info-stimulation is too fast for rational elaboration, then madness becomes the general language of the social system.

Capitalism is a dead dog, but society is unable to come out from under the rotting corpse, so the social mind is devoured by panic and furious impotence, until finally it turns to depression.

The social mind looks for a new form of semiotization which might better adapt to the mutating composition of the world, but the vibration of its creation takes the form of a spasm, a frantic painful jolt of the soul and body itself.

Signs of the spasm can be detected all around, and the reaction to it assumes a variety of paranoid guises: Donald Trump boasts about the past glory of America and of reclaiming the legal use of torture. The European Union is torn apart by financial absolutism and nationalist aggression, and is building concentration camps for migrants on the coasts of Turkey, Egypt and Libya. An army of Muslim zealots behead innocent people, for God’s sake. In the Philippines, a self-proclaimed murderer is elected president and calls for mass violence against social drop-outs.

Seventy years after Hitler’s defeat, Hitler is back, multiplied by a dozen imitators, some of them are endowed with nukes.

The contours of the social convention have been swept away and unfiltered flows of imagination invade the social mind. The schizo runs in many directions as she sees the horizon of possibility, but she is unable to give shape to her pursuit of this horizon, so it forever eludes her.

In the last decades, the social mind has been taken in by a vortex of bipolar disorders: a long succession of euphoria and sadness have led to the present secular stagnation and to a state of steady depression.

The horizon of possibility is perceived as an infinite sprawl of connecting, flashing points. This perception generates anxiety and panic: the paranoid obsession with order tries to reduce the horizon to repetition, belonging and identity.

Power is based on the hypostatization of the existing relations of potency, on the surreptitious absolutization of the necessity implied in the existing rapport de force. Force crystallizes in a paranoid fixation to re-compact the world through rituals of identification. The relative necessity of the rule is arbitrarily transformed into absolute necessity: absolute capitalism is based on this deceptive trick of logic. Accumulation, profit and growth are surreptitiously turned into natural laws, and the field of economics legitimises this deception.

When society enters a phase of crisis or approaches collapse, we can glimpse the horizon of possibility. This horizon itself is hard to distinguish, and the territory that borders this horizon is hard to describe or to map.

The horizon of possibility can be best described by the words of Ignacio Matte Blanco in defining the unconscious: ‘The unconscious deals with infinite sets that have not only the power of the enumerable but also that of the continuum.’2

The explosion of the semiotic sphere, the utter intensification of semiotic stimulation, has provoked simultaneously an enhancement of the horizon of possibility and a panic effect in the social neuro-system.

In this condition of panic, reason becomes unable to master the flow of events or to process the semio-stimulations released into the Infosphere. A schizophrenic mode spreads across the social mind, but this distress is double edged: it is painfully chaotic, but can also be seen as the vibration that precedes the emergence of a new cognitive rhythm.

According to D.E. Cameron, schizophrenia may be defined as an over-inclusive mode of interpretation.3 Schizophrenic thought, in fact, appears to ‘over include’ various irrelevant objects and environmental cues in the interpretation of an enunciation: the schizo seems to be unable to limit attention to task-relevant stimuli because of an excessive broadening of the meaning of signs and of events.

This is why Guattari sees the schizo as the bearer of paradigmatic change (of ‘chaosmosis’, in Guattari’s parlance). The schizo in fact is the person who has lost the ability to perceive the limits of metaphoric enunciation and tends therefore to take the metaphor as a description. The schizo, then, is the agent of a trans-rational experiment which may lead to the surfacing of an entirely new rhythm.

We may call this dimension ‘chaotic’ because it does not correspond to the existing laws of order, nevertheless the possible emerges from this sphere of chaos.

The intuition of an infinity of possibility is the source of contemporary panic, what can be described as a painful spasm. In Guattari, however, the spasm has a chaosmic side: from chaotic hyper-intensity, a new cosmos is poised to emerge.

----------

1. Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos: A Novel, trans. Danuta Borchardt (2005), pp. 54-5
2. Ignacio Matte Blanco, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-logic (1975), p.17
3. D.E. Cameron, 'Early Schizophrenia', American Journal of Psychiatry 95: 3, pp. 567-82

Philip K. Dick: Ubik

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.


“I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.”


We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.”


From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.


It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class wind-up toy.


Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone.


The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately--and against ordinary experience--vanished. The man contains--not the boy--but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.

Shusako Endo: Deep River

At the core of her senseless actions, she vaguely perceived that she yearned for something. A something that would provide her with a sure sense of fulfillment. But she could not fathom what that something might be.


“The smell of death was thick in the city of Vārāṇasī. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs.

Donald Fagen: Eminent Hipsters

You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say.


Tonight the crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers. By the end of the set, they were all on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking.... So this, now, is what I do: assisted living.

Gerald Murnane: The Plains

A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.


Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.


Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud . . . The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.


the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grass-blades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.


I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.

Shaun Prescott: The Town

Losing towns has been occurring since the arrival of Europeans.


"Just admit that you're a fuckwit."


Each year the town had its own special day. On this day the main street was cordoned off from the bottom petrol station all the way to the top petrol station, and market stalls lined the streets selling Pluto Pups and other types of deep fried food, or else novelty t-shirts and cheap toys. At one end of the street near the top petrol station, a band played in the park, and there was a jumping castle too.

The day celebrated the fact of the town being a town. For one day in autumn, just before the biting morning frosts set in, people were invited to acknowledge that they lived in the town. It was an opportunity to feel warmly towards the town, and given the festivities, and the coloured lights that criss-crossed the main street at night, and the thousands of litres of beer involved, few could resist being part of the occasion.

I attended the town’s day because I was having trouble writing my book about disappearing towns. Adult couples, teenagers and troublemakers milled the streets, browsing keepsakes they could purchase at one of the dozen or so stalls set up in the area. The stalls sold shirts, stubby holders, flags, stickers, plush koala bears and car decals, all decorated with the Australian flag and the name of the town. In the park there was a special cordoned-off area where people were permitted to drink beer from tin cans. It was necessary to line up to gain entry, but since few people left the special cordoned-off drinking area once they had entered, I was not able to enter, and so not able to have a beer. Instead, I bought a can of Coke and sat on the grass as the band played a cover of ‘Electric Blue’ by Icehouse.

Jenny from the pub eventually called over to me. She was serving beers inside the cordoned-off drinking area, and motioned that she could get me inside. Soon enough the security guard manning the entry waved me over and I was welcomed in.

In the cordoned-off drinking area customers lined up, bought their beer, and then joined the end of the queue again. As she opened beer cans for townspeople, Jenny explained to me that it was her biggest business day of the year. Her pub hardly did any business anymore, aside from mine, so it was lucky that her father was friends with an organiser of the festival. The money she made on this one day was enough to sustain the pub, so I should be grateful that the festival existed, she told me, since I was the only person who ever drank in the pub.

Jenny was always making comments to me like this. But I wasn’t about to complain—I was privileged that she spoke to me at all. Especially on this day—there was no need for Jenny to speak to her customers in the cordoned-off area, as there was only one variety of beer, and it was not permitted to buy more than two beers at once, as per council regulations. Jenny automatically served two beers to each customer. If asked for only one, Jenny would insinuate that this person had consumed enough for the day, and should get some fresh air, i.e., leave the cordoned off drinking area to make room for someone eager to buy and drink two beers at once.

I watched as Jenny served the beers. At one point Rob rattled at the fence nearby and motioned me over. He wanted to get inside the drinking area. He said he’d do anything to get in, and besides, I wasn’t drinking anything so there was no reason for me to be in there.

He was right that I wasn’t drinking any beer, but I liked watching Jenny work. Also, I did not want to exploit my privilege by requesting a swap. I told Rob that he might as well drink at one of the pubs on the street, two of which had a view of the stage, but he was not satisfied with this solution. The line into the cordoned-off drinking area was blocking the view of the stage, and besides, he really wanted to drink with his friends, who were already inside. I explained that it was impossible and he marched away.

At that time of evening, as the sun was starting to go down and the band were becoming a little more upbeat, the line to the drinking area was snaking around the perimeter of the park, to the extent that the whole park was enclosed by a wall of thirsty revellers, none of whom would ever have a beer this year in the cordoned off area – they would need to wait until next year.

But on closer inspection it was obvious they were all drinking. Many, if not all, of the queuing revellers were sipping from small flasks, and hidden cans and bottles, and probably becoming more drunk than anyone in the official drinking area. I explained the situation to Jenny, who was amused.

Of course they’re getting drunk, she said. No one was going to not drink, even if it was against council regulations to drink outside of the cordoned-off area.

I wondered aloud why the people wanted so badly to enter the area, since they were able to drink outside of it anyway, albeit illegally, and Jenny made a gesture with her head which suggested I had already made her point.

You’re exactly right, she told me. To be in the official drinking area was to be officially drinking. Then she waved vaguely at the queue, and suggested it would be safer for me to stay in the cordoned-off area.

The mayor was scheduled to give his speech at 8:30pm. When the time came he ascended the steps and waved to the audience at the front of the stage, which comprised only 20 or so men, women and children. Everyone else was lining up at the perimeter of the park. He stood in front of the microphone, tapped it, and made what must have been a joke, because he laughed loudly. And then he spoke at great length.


Someone always has to go too far, Rob said, suddenly by my side. He was drinking from a longneck of beer, but did not seem very drunk. He told me things went too far every year, each time in a different way. The year before someone had thrown a broken bottle at the band. Before that, someone had set a tree on fire. Ten years ago, someone had tossed a dog onto the roof of the petrol station. Rob waved towards the closest petrol station. Destruction and chaos is in their blood, he said as I took a sip from his beer. But mostly they’re a tranquil bunch.

Soon enough the park was deserted, save for those in the cordoned-off drinking area.

Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love

Levin thought that Abramović was definitely encouraging the young woman in some way, using her gaze, and the young woman sat up. Her shoulders straightened. Her head lifted. Her complexion seemed to glow. It was as if the girl knew, wholly, without any artifice, for the first time in her life, that she was beautiful.


"You looked as if you were growing right out of yourself, becoming this strong, courageous thing" The girl stared at Jane and her eyes filled with tears."Really?" she said. "That's exactly how it felt"


You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they're inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things - the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It's no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause.


The pavements convey people and dogs, the subway rumbles and the yellow cabs honk day and night. As in previous decades, people are coming to terms with the folly of their investments and the ineptitude of their government. Wages are low, as are the waistbands of jeans. Thin is fashionable but fat is normal. Living is expensive, and being ill is the most costly business of all. There is a feeling that a chaos of climate, currency, creed and cohabitation is looming in the world. On an individual basis, most people still want to look good and smell nice, have friends, be comfortable, make money, feel love, enjoy sex and not die before their time.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Self Portrait Abroad

Every time I travel,I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether.


I realized that time had passed since I'd left Kyoto. And if this affected me so deeply on that day, it was not only because my senses, numbed by the prevailing grayness and the alcohol in my blood, naturally put me in a melancholic frame of mind, it was also because I suddenly felt sad and powerless at this brusque testimony to the passage of time. It was hardly the result of conscious reasoning, but rather the concrete and painful, fleeting and physical feeling that I myself was part and parcel of time and its passing. Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote - until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches.


In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn't keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment's silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Naked

It was only now, more than seven months later in Paris…that I had gained the necessary distance to apprehend all the elements of the scene then underway…So where was I? Where—if not in the limbo of my own consciousness, freed from the contingencies of space and time, still and forever invoking the figure of Marie?


... an excuse to ditch everyone and slip out of the museum or even, if possible, to vanish from this story altogether, return to nothingness, from which it seemed he’d been plucked for a brief moment to beget, at his own expense, an evanescent ribbon of life, airborne, twirling, futile, and fleeting.


Developing a theoretical reflection on the very idea of haute couture, she had returned to the original meaning of the word couture as the sewing of cloth using different techniques, stitching, tacking, hooking, binding, which allow fabrics to be combined on models’ bodies, twinned to the skin, and joined together, to present this year in Tokyo a haute-couture dress without a single stitch.


Any true love and, more broadly speaking, any project, any undertaking, from the flowering of a bud to the growth of a tree to the realization of a work of art, has but one aim and intent, to persevere in being, doesn’t it always, inevitably, come down to chewing the same thing over? And a few weeks later, taking up this idea again of love as rumination or continual reprise, I would further refine my phrasing, asking Marie if the secret to lasting love was never to swallow.

Timothy Morton: Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?


The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place ‘at’ a certain ‘point’ in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.


The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One’s garbage doesn’t go ‘away’ – it just goes somewhere else.


Brushing against, licking or irradiating are ask access modes as valid (or as invalid ) as thinking.

Gerard Reve: The Evenings: A Winter's Tale

All is lost, everything is ruined. It’s ten past three.


“I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again."


“Age, gender and nature of bodily harm: please, do tell.”


"Eternal, only, almighty, our God, fix Your gaze upon my parents. See them in their need. Do not turn Your eyes from them."

Karl Ove Knausgaard: Autumn

The world is material. We are always in a certain place. Now I am here.


What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

"No one comes back from Vietnam: that, once you’ve been there, return is impossible."


"Don’t have any, because you’ll regret it; although if you don’t have any, you’ll regret that too."


"All love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.”


[a café]…converted into one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider American (from New York), but which are impossible to find in either New York or Rome.

Georges Simenon: The Carter of 'La Providence'

There are all kinds of bolt-holes. Some have the smell of whisky, eau de Cologne, a woman and the sounds of gramophone records…


But it fell back again weakly, gnarled, calloused, spotted with small blue dots which must have been the vestiges of old tattoos.


He cycled over 50 kilometres without once stopping for a beer.

Federico Campagna: The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure

Imagine growing up as a young atheist in a stiflingly Catholic
country. Imagine migrating to London, the Babylon of 'really existing
atheism'. Imagine the expectations.


When I first set foot on the cold, secular ground of the metropolis,
I felt that I couldn't have asked for more. A few empty churches,
scattered here and there. No Vatican City, no Pope. Charles
Darwin's face on banknotes. I could finally breathe freely.
Yet I realised quickly that something wasn't right. Somehow, the
smell of religion still lingered in the air, as sickening as always. I
found it on the trains coming back home from the office, filled
with exhausted workers. I smelt it on the benches on a Monday
afternoon, covered with the beer cans of the unemployed. Most of
all, I felt it surrounding me when I walked into the office every
morning, finding my colleagues already there, frantically typing
on their keyboards as if fiddling with digital rosaries. I had
walked in perfectly on time, why was everybody there already?
Why did they look so satisfied when they greeted me from their
desks? They were working hard, harder than they were expected
to. And in the evening, when the darkness of Northern Europe
enveloped the office blocks and young professionals' houses,
they were still at their desks, typing as fast as greyhounds race.
Looking at me packing up, as if I had been a weak opponent
abandoning the match before time. Why did they keep working
late, when no pay or praise was ever to be awarded to them by
anybody? What did they find in their silent, tragic sacrifice?
Once again I was surrounded by that smell. The same smell that
filled the churches of my childhood on a Sunday morning. It had
spread everywhere. Not just in churches, but all around the
office blocks. Not just confined to one day a week, but every day
- eight, nine ten hours a day. No longer accompanied by the
chanting of monks, but by the clicking march of a million ants on
the keyboard of one, immense metropolitan organ.
Religion had never left. I had never managed to escape it. Its
name had changed, but its believers remained the same. They
were just a little more honest, a little more self-sacrificing than
the old Catholics back at home. Possibly, a little more fanatical.

Qian Zhongshu: Fortress Besieged

Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.

Catherine Lacey: The Answers

The installation was intended to hasten Kurt's editing of The Walk by stimulating gamma waves, but it had taken several months of trial and error to sync the correct tracks with patterns in cloud coverage and atmospheric pressure, a process that had creatively derailed Kurt to the point that his meditation counselor, Yuri, suggested Kurt spend some time doing something repetitive and therapeutic to allow the psychological impact of the installation to set in so Kurt spent months constantly knitting, creating yards-long scarves and hats that grew wider and wider until they had no recogniseable use.


How sad our respective nothings had seemed at first, the cool absence in a bed, the dinners with a book. Then, even sadder, those nothings became preferable. The simplicity of being alone won out over the complexity of being together.


She did miss the comfort of his life drifting beside hers. She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.


Of course, it was just her job to care, to listen, and she was merely participating in the worldwide tradition f dreading one's work, but she felt a new difficulty in getting herself to cooperate, to go along with it all.

Herman Melville : Moby Dick

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.


Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.


"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

"Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.


How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.


I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.


Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.


America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.


There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.


She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.


All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.


And so it goes.

Jeff Vandermeer: Borne

t was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

China Mieville: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

One must always try to be as radical as reality itself. - Lenin


The position of the Bolsheviks I understood, because they preached 'Down with the war and immediate peace at any price,' but I couldn't understand at all the tactics of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who first broke up the army, as if to avoid counterrevolution, and at the same time desired the continuation of the war to a victorious end. - General Brusilov

M. Ageyev: Novel with Cocaine

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.


And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel


To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.

Antonio Tabucchi: Requiem: A Hallucination

This story, which takes place one a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as “I” was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I wrote this story in Portuguese, I would answer simply that a story like this could only be written in Portuguese; it's as simple as that. But there is something else that needs explaining. Strictly speaking, a Requiem should be written in Latin, at least that's what tradition prescribes. Unfortunately, I don't think I'd be up to it in Latin. I realised though that I couldn't write a Requiem in my own language and I that I required a different language, one that was for me A PLACE OF AFFECTION AND REFLECTION.


Personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

Elif Batuman : The Idiot

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.


I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.


But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.


But to me it seemed that one had always been midway the journey of our life, and would be maybe right up until the moment of death.


“Whenever I’m worried about anything,” said this guy Ben, “I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.” I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.

David Keenan: England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

COIL is the most important to me, especially because it’s more a vehicle for my personal ideas – through the lyrics and the ideas I put into songs – but Sleazy contributes so much in this respect too. As we live together, we know exactly what to do as COIL – it just happens.If we disagree then it never reaches the public. We cannot afford to dilute our ideas; we do everything we want. we record the music we would like to hear as far as you possibly can do that. When we work on a song we don’t think about – should we make it more so and so to try and please any particular type of person. Sometimes we play around with peoples expectations, I think, but to remain pure we indulge ourselves at the beginning. It’s the only way.
CURRENT 93 is essentially David Tibet 93’s group. When I work on stuff with him, I add my own ideas, but Tibet has the last,final – overall say; and I like to work like that sometimes as with COIL I feel so much responsibility at every stage , from soundsamples byse to the lettering on an album innersleeve or whatever. CURRENT 93 is essentially Tibets mind – in action – manifesting its dark and intricate interior outwards onto the European cultural arena. COIL is my vehicle for my perverted little nightmares which for some unexplained reason I feel I have to share with everyone I can get to listen. COIL is perhaps a more stable group. Now there are 3 of us.Me, Sleazy and Steve Wyndham (Thrower), who was a temporary member for SCATOLOGY but who has now joined properly. Not that we sign papers or anything. But we all feel more of a solid entity to confront people with.With common aims and ideals.
I like to collaborate with others i.e. Boyd Rice was great to work with on NIGHTMARE CULTURE. We like to introduce a few selected people because it makes for interest while you can actually record – and you get fresh viewpoints – a new colour scheme in the usual permutations!!
- John Balance

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”


“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”


“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”


“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.”


"It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed."


"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”


“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”


“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”


“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”


“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”


“You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”


“And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life”


“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”


He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.


He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

Takashi Hiraide: The Guest Cat

Looking back on it now, I’d say one’s thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death.


The word “to grieve” or “lament” in Japanese is actually made up of two different kanji characters — “sadness” and “resentment.”


The noble-minded do not thrust others aside in order to make their way in the world. But then they themselves are ultimately thrust aside by the advancing tide.


By late autumn the yard would grow thick with fallen leaves, causing the landlady to heave many deep sighs.

Cesar Aira: Ghosts

But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.

Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

China Mieville: This Census Taker

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.


You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.


A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it.


So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be finished soon, leaving us with those items of which we had a surplus, like dried mushrooms, which would far outlast anything else. I wondered if my father would simply refuse to address this. If he would make meals or have me make them with fewer and fewer ingredients so our diets would continue a while as they were but grow daily and weekly more thin, more flavorless, until for the months until the last jar ran completely out we would be dining on mushrooms, mushrooms for breakfast, soaked in water and salt, mushrooms crushed for lunch, fried in oil until the oil ran out and then simply seared and blackened in a pan over the fire for our suppers, or gnawed raw, until even they went and we would die, one after the other, the taste of mushrooms in our mouths. I couldn’t decide whether I, being smaller and eating less, would die more quickly than he in this mushroomless state or more slowly. I couldn’t decide which would be better or worse.


I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.

Kim Stanley Robinson: New York 2140

But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.


Capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid

Catherine Merridale: Lenin on the Train

“Human dignity is something one need not look for in the world of capitalists."
- V. I. Lenin


As modern tyrannies are swept away (and every honest heart delights), the quick-thinking servants of the world’s great powers still proffer plans to intervene, to jostle, scheme and sponsor factions that they barely understand.


“Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party precisely because he is a scoundrel."
- V. I. Lenin


Kerensky he dismissed in yet another snappy line, describing him as ‘a balalaika on which they play to deceive the workers and peasants’.


The history of Lenin’s train is not exclusively the property of the Soviets. In part, it is a parable about great-power intrigue, and one rule there is that great powers almost always get things wrong.

An oppressed class which does not strive to learn the use of weapons [the Russian word, oruzhiia, contains another wonderful long r], to practice the use of weapons, to own weapons, deserves to be mistreated … The demand for disarmament in the present-day world is nothing but an expression of despair.

Mark Frost: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.”


Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other.

Ryu Murakami: Almost Transparent Blue

“Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again.”


“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”


When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.


I put the thin fragment of glass, dripping blood, in my pocket, and ran out into the misty road. The doors and windows of the houses were shut, nothing was moving. I thought I'd been swallowed by a huge living thing, that I was turning around and around in its stomach like the hero of some fairy tale.

Shigeru Mizuki: Showa 1926-1939

Yasunari Kawabata: Thousand Cranes

“Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?"
"You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.”


“Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.”


“You've always been fond of understanding people too well."
"They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.”


In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.


“Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.”


“Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about.”