I don't want to die, me! I want to stop alive forever, if only to see the ships pass.
(GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer LePage)


...who spent his life dreaming of ships while none of the ships he owned ever lived up to his dreams
(Alvaro Mutis, "The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll")


Clea once asked him: "Do you not miss the sea, Scobie?" and the old man replied simply, without hesitation, "Every night I put to sea in my dreams."
(Lawrence Durrell, "Justine")

love is another thing altogether. it is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. on the contrary. love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. a paradox! besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.
(amos oz, "a tale of love and darkness")


i realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. the other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.
(lawrence durrell, "justine")

"
Aquarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a barren sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.

He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

"


(John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg)

Things she had never noticed much before began to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited. But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though she waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was afraid, and there was a queer tightness in her chest.

(Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)

+

...he would drop the rock back in place and stand, hands on hips, looking off to sea, where the round clouds piled up white with pink and black edges. And he would be thinking, What am I thinking? What do I want? Where do I want to go? There would be wonder in him, and a little impatience, as though he stood outside and looked in on himself through a glass shell. And he would be conscious of a tone within himself, or several tones, as though he heard music distantly.

(John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday)

"These were days when my heart was volcanic."

gram parsons, "in my hour of darkness"
big star, "kangaroo"
the ladybug transistor, "rushes of pure spring"
the mountain goats, "dirty old town"


just because.

does anyone have a copy of rex's waltz ep, from which they could send me an MP3 of willow garden? i would be eternally grateful...

some one had seven devils in him.

that love which gives up what it never had -- that penny's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infintesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved -- and yet i gave it. and not to him, to her; it was as though i said to her, 'here, take this too. you cannot love him as he should be loved, and though he will no more feel this giving's weight than he would ever know its lack, yet there may come some moment in your married lives when he will find this atom's particle as you might find a cramped small pallid hidden shoot in a familiar flower bed and pause and say, "where did this come from?"; you need only answer, "i dont know." '


absalom, absalom!

let us agree on one point: the lid of a can -- or let us say, of a can that is in good condition, whose edge curves in the same way as its own -- a lid like this should have no other wish than to find itself on top of its can; this would be the utmost that it could imagine for itself; an unsurpassable satisfaction, the fulfillment of all its desires. indeed, there is something almost ideal about being patiently and gently turned and coming to rest evenly on the small projecting rim, and feeling its interlocking edge inside you, elastic and just as sharp as your own edge is when you are lying alone. ah, but there are hardly an lids now that can still appreciate this. here it is very evident how much confusion has been caused among Things by their association with humans. for humans -- if it is permissible to compare them, just in passing, with tin lids -- humans sit upon their occupations ungracefully and with extreme unwillingness. some because in their haste they haven't found the right one; some because they have been put on in anger, crooked; some because the corresponding rims have been dented, each in a different way. let us admit in all sincerity that basically they have just one thought: as soon as they get a chance, to jump down and roll around and clatter. otherwise, where do all these so-called amusements come from, and the noise they make?

(rainer maria rilke, "the notebooks of malte laurids brigge")

this is perhaps an image of how we live. for reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.


anthony powell, a dance to the music of time, first movement, book 2.

it is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of winesburg. in the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. the apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. they have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. on the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. they look like the knuckles on doctor reefy's hands. one nibbles at them and they are delicious. into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. one runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.


(sherwood anderson, "winesburg, ohio")

my mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their "response" or "resistance." every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. it was no accident, she said, that hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. it was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.

(ibid.)

love is another thing altogether. it is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. on the contrary. love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. a paradox! besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.


(amos oz, "a tale of love and darkness")

i just found a turquoise smith-corona ghia by the curb in someone's trash. nothing wrong with it except that the ribbon was torn, but that was easy enough to fix. it has its case too, boxy & stylish with a black racing stripe.

what kind of luck is this. there are now 4 green (or blue-green) typewriters in my apartment. ridiculous. if that boy, and he knows who he is, ever comes back to this coast, maybe there's already a typewriter waiting for him. unless someone more local grabs it first.


now i've got ribbon ink on my fingers.
and a stack of lousy polaroids on my desk.
sometimes things are ok.

I sat leaning against a mailbox
Where years earlier I dropped a love letter.
It was still there whispering to me,
And then it wasn't.

("meditation in the gutter," charles simic)



He remembered not the Baths, the Damps, poor wretched Cowles, nor the rooms in Dreary Station, but a love note he had written at the age of twelve when the city was on fire. And remembering it he looked at Sybilline and saw in her eyes the eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hill.

("the lime twig," john hawkes)



We were young and in love
In a burning town
But the fire went out
I'm alone again now

("the dreaming moon," the magnetic fields)

It seems to me that what we carry inside us, what seems so familiar and ordinary, presents enough problems, enough vast, indecipherable spaces, without inventing others.

(Alvaro Mutis)



We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

(Robert Walser)

damn that honeysuckle i wish it would stop

at best a picture, a book are only open doors inviting you into an empty house, & once inside you just have to make the rest up as well as you can.



(richard flanagan, gould's book of fish)

but bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. his first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. and it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. the law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. we need much more than psychoanalysis. under the law established by the posessor of the greatest number of devices, sickeness and the sick will flourish.

perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. when poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. and another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. there will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.


italo svevo, zeno's conscience, 1923.