The Floating Library

What an extraordinary change takes place . . . when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality. – Kierkegaard When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G. E. [...]

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Who has not known a child like this, who sinks into a deeper level of his being, undisturbed by the swift turning of each brimming page? Even his own mother might wonder if it is really he who sits there saturated with his shadow. And we, can we know how much of him disappears, as [...]

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The eternal silence of these infinite spaces no longer makes me feel like Pascal. – David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

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The world is everything that is the case. I have no idea what I mean by the sentence I have just typed, by the way. For some reason I seem to have had it in my head all day, however, although without the vaguest notion about where it might have come from. Such things can [...]

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The island. A last effort. The islet. The shore facing the open sea is jagged with creeks. One could live there, perhaps happy, if life was a possible thing, but nobody lives there. The deep water comes washing into its heart, between high walls of rock. One day nothing will remain of it but two [...]

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For others the time-abolishing joys of disinterested speculation. I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded. They hope things will change one day, it’s natural. That one day on my windpipe, or some other [...]

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But space hemmed him in on every side and held him in its toils, with the multitude of other faintly stirring, faintly struggling things, such as the children, the lodges and the gates, and like a sweat of things the moments streamed away in a great chaotic conflux of oozings and torrents, and the trapped [...]

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The tendency of people to be fearful of those experiences they call apparitions or assign to the “spirit world,” including death, has done infinite harm to life. All these things so naturally related to us have been driven away through our daily resistance to them, to the point where our capacity to sense them has [...]

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At the ball, Marcel Proust sat down in front of me on a little gilded chair, as if coming out of a dream, with his fur-lined cloak, his face full of sadness, and his night-seeing eyes. – Marthe Bibesco

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When you feel no commonality between yourself and other people, try to be close to Things, which will not abandon you. Nights are still there and winds that blow through the trees and over many lands. Amidst the things and beings of this world so much is happening that you can take part in. And [...]

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May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning, I will sing you as no one ever has, streaming through widening channels into the open sea. – Rilke, From [...]

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Why, then, do we have to be human and keep running from the fate we long for? Oh, not because of such a thing as happiness – that fleeting gift before loss begins. Not from curiosity, or to exercise the heart. . . . But because simply to be here is so much and because [...]

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And I hear also, there we are at last, I hear a choir, far enough away for me not to hear it when it goes soft. It is a song I know, I don’t know how, and when it fades, and when it dies quite away, it goes on inside me, but too slow, or [...]

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This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. – Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 16

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Don’t be confused by the nature of solitude, when something inside you wants to break free of your loneliness. This very wish, when you use it as a tool for understanding, can illumine your solitude and expand it to include all that is. Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. It [...]

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