Quotes

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the sum of all the things which were refused us

The substance of a work is the impossible — what we have not been able to attain, what could not be given to us: the sum of all the things which were refused us.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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that void is consciousness

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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Letter to Mário de Sá-Carneiro :: Fernando Pessoa

[3.14.1916]

I’m writing to you today out of sentimental necessity — I have an anguished, painful need to speak to you. It’s easy to see that I have nothing to tell you. Just this: that I find myself today at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me.

I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. The other bank of the river, because it is the other bank, is never the bank we are standing on: that is the intimate reason for all my suffering. There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful; nor is there any port of call where it is possible to forget. All of this happened a long time ago, but my sadness began even before then.

On days of the soul like today, I feel, with all the awareness in my body, that I am a sad child abused by life. I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony. Today, March 14, at 9:10 P.M., my life knows just how much all that is worth.

In the garden I can just make out through the silent windows of my cell, someone has thrown all the swings over the branches they hang from; they’re tangled up, high and out of reach; the result is even the idea I have in my imagination of myself running away cannot have swings to play with.

And that is, more or less, but without style, the state of my soul at this time. Like the woman who waits in “The Sailor,” my eyes burn from having thought about weeping. Life pains me bit by bit, in sips, through interstices. All this is printed in very small type in a book whose binding is already coming apart.

If I weren’t writing to you, I would have to swear to you that this letter is sincere and that the hysterically linked things in it spring spontaneously from what I feel. But you must sense that this unstageable tragedy is of a rigorous reality — full of the here and now — and taking place in my soul just like the green on the leaves.

It was for that reason the Prince did not rule. This sentence is entirely absurd. But in this moment I feel it’s the absurd sentences that really make me want to cry.

If I don’t mail this letter today, it may be that when I reread it tomorrow, I’ll make a typescript of it, so I can insert sentences and expressions from it into The Book of Disquiet. But that would not deprive it of any of the sincerity with which I’m writing it, nor the dolorous inevitability with which I feel it.

This is the latest news. So is our being at war with Germany, but even before that, pain made me suffer. From the other side of Life, all this must seem like the caption for some caricature.

This is not exactly madness, but madness must bestow a relaxation on the person who suffers it, the astute pleasure of the soul’s bounces, not very different from these.

What color can feeling be?

Thousands of hugs from yours truly, always truly yours,

Fernando Pessoa

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P.S.– I wrote this letter in one rush. Rereading it, I see that I will definitely copy it over tomorrow before sending it to you. I have rarely written out my state of mind — with all its sentimental and intellectual attitudes, with all its essential hysterico-neurasthenia, all those interstices and corners in its self-awareness that are so characteristic of it — so completely…

You think I’m right, don’t you?

.

Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a major Portuguese avant-garde poet who collaborated with Fernando Pessoa on numerous occasions, committed suicide in Paris in 1916, at the age of twenty-six. [editor's note]

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How little joy there was in this sterile lucidity!

Lucidity without the corrective of ambition leads to stagnation. It is essential that the one sustain the other, that the one combat the other without winning, for a work, for a life to be possible.

— E. M. Cioran

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The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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a fatal gift

It is hard to say how beautiful he was; and Aschenbach was distressed, as he had often been before, by the thought that words can but praise sensuous beauty, not match it.

He had not prepared for this precious spectacle; it came unhoped for. He had no time to entrench himself behind an expression of repose and dignity. Pleasure, surprise, admiration must have shown on his face as his eyes met those of the boy — and at this moment it happened that Tadzio smiled, smiled to him, eloquently, familiarly, charmingly, without concealment; and during the smile his lips slowly opened. It was the smile of Narcissus bent over the reflecting water, that deep, fascinated, magnetic smile with which he stretches out his arms to the image of his own beauty — a smile distorted ever so little, distorted at the hopelessness of his efforts to kiss the pure lips of the shadow. It was coquettish, inquisitive, and slightly tortured. It was infatuated, and infatuating.

He had received this smile, and he hurried away as though he bore a fatal gift. He was so shaken that he had to flee the light of the terrace and the front garden; he hastily hunted out the darkness of the park in the rear. Strangely indignant and tender admonitions wrung themselves out of him: “You dare not smile like that! Listen, no one dare smile like that to another!” He threw himself down on a bench; in a frenzy he breathed the night smell of the vegetation. And leaning back, his arms loose, overwhelmed, with shivers running through him, he whispered the fixed formula of desire — impossible in this case, absurd, abject, ridiculous, and yet holy, even in this case venerable: “I love you!”

— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

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devouring the possible

When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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I am haunted by waters

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

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The Write Stuff: writers discuss writing . . . and stuff

“[Writing is] observing, telling stories, performing this magic trick of being the conduit for experiences for other people.” — Susan Orlean

“Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you’re not quite there and you’re redoing it and redoing it and there’s a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It’s a job of tremendous anxiety for me.” — Elizabeth Strout

“For me the idea of writing not for publication is a little like drinking alone. To me, drinking is sort of a social experience. [Writing] is like coming home from a great trip and sitting around a dinner table and saying, I’ve got to tell you about this.”– Susan Orlean

“I think of it very much as a relationship. It has different stages when I’m first putting it down, but it’s a relationship, and it’s a very intimate relationship, which is what’s sort of mysterious and wonderful about it. It’s solitary—obviously we all know that we work alone—and yet there’s this voice. You’re trying to reach another person with this voice.” — Elizabeth Strout

“It’s a constant juggling of how can I tell something that I feel so intensely but that can be received with, not joy every minute or anything like that, but in a way that’s truthful to you.” — Elizabeth Strout

“I will leave pages around the apartment to come upon by surprise. Like, what does this look like if I’m putting my earrings in and it’s on the bureau and I have to turn. What does it look like if I come upon it? I’ve done that for years.” — Elizabeth Strout

“I don’t understand the great fear of e-readers. Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you can look at iPods and music and, you know, it was a shift to a different form that I actually think encourages people buying more music, because you don’t have to build yet another shelf in your house to have those CDs.” — Susan Orlean

“Also [e-reading] will no longer enable people to have books on their shelves as signifiers of how smart they are. There’s no reason to download a book unless you intend to read it. There’s no need to show off.” — Kurt Anderson

“I don’t think anybody really expects e-books to supplant printed books, because I don’t think that they’re ever going to be that much more enjoyable a way to read a book. It was different with downloads and iPods; that’s a better way to hear music than a CD is. I think that what e-books will do is enable people to carry a few hundred books with them on a trip rather than struggling with a suitcase to take five along. But I don’t think it will be the same transformative thing that audible downloads have been.” — Lawrence Block

“I’m much more willing to buy a novel electronically by someone I don’t know. Because if halfway through I think, I don’t really like this, I can just stop. I can’t throw books out, even if I think they’re crummy. I feel like I’ve got to give it to the library, I’ve got to loan it to somebody, or I keep it on my shelf. It’s like a plant.” — Susan Orlean

“Just so I know that I’ve said it, I want to say here that I think, no matter what form books take, I think the basic purpose of writing, serious writing, the kind of writing we all do, is going to be the same: to examine the great questions. I don’t think that’s going to change at all.” — Robert A. Caro

[Excerpts from a Newsweek interview (“The Write Stuff,” by Jon Meacham) published on June 27, 2009]

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Always I hear corrupt murmurs;

The pear was as hard as stone. She looked down at the cracked flags beneath which the roots spread. “That was the burden,” she mused, “laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember: what we would forget.”

She looked up. The gilt hands of the stable clock pointed inflexibly at two minutes to the hour. The clock was about to strike.

“Now comes the lightning,” she muttered, “from the stone blue sky. The thongs are burst that the dead tied. Loosed are our possessions.”

Voices interrupted. People passed the stable yard, talking.

“It’s a good day, some say, the day we are stripped naked. Others, it’s the end of the day. They see the Inn and the Inn’s keeper. But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music. . . .”

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts