Month: June 2009

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Bloomsday Countdown

Take a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upwards, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

[5.565-572]

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The reader of his own self

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

— Proust, Time Regained

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4,000 year old Egyptian suicide note

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than the odour of carrion
On summer days when the sky is hot.

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than the odour of crocodiles,
More than sitting under the bank of crocodiles.

Lo, my name is abhorred,
Lo, more than a woman
Against whom a lie is told her husband.

. . . .

Death is before me today
As the odour of myrrh,
As when one sitteth under the sail on a windy day.

Death is before me today
As the odour of lotus flowers,
As one sitteth on the shore of drunkenness.

Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity.

[From Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast]

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Sorrows are Servants

Sorrows are servants, obscure and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, dire and dreadful servants whom it is impossible to replace and who by subterranean paths lead us towards truth and death.

— Proust, Time Regained