— via laphamsquarterly

— via laphamsquarterly

Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.

— letter, Peter Abelard

Then there is no more left but this, that in our doom the sorrow yet to come shall be no less than the love we two have already known.

You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you.

— letter to Peter Abelard, from Heloise D’argenteuil

via toadustyshelfweaspire

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It’s perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn’t belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?

— Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
via toadustyshelfweaspire

I’ve been robbed of sense. I’ve been made without resource. I have become inflexible in a flux. When I was on the Good Ship Lollipop, I was held there by wind and sea. When I was on the raft, there was nobody there but me. On this rock I’m fast. Held. I can’t do more than hold on. And wait. Or plunge like a diver to the ocean floor where it is as dark as a fish’s gut and there’s nowhere to go but up. But do I have an alternative, yes. I can beg a lift can’t I? cling on to the coattails of a bird or a fish. If dogs are the friends of man, what are a sailor’s friends? Porpoises. They love us. Like to like they say, though when has a porpoise killed a man, and we have killed so many and for curiosity, not even for food’s or killing’s sake. A porpoise will take me to my love.

— Doris Lessing, Briefing For a Descent Into Hell

A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don’t stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. They look everywhere without finding anything to focus on.

— David Koker
Feb. 4, 1944
At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944

“Just a man — and yet he could do what he did, he could be what he was. That’s the wonder.”

There was a long silence; only the clock ticked and the flame rustled silkily in the grate. Anthony lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Everything was suddenly clear.

— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

On this voyage there were twelve men on board, with myself as Captain. Last time I played deckhand, and George was Captain. We were four days out from shore, the current swinging us along fair and easy, the wind coming from the North on to our right cheeks, when Charles, who was lookout, called us forward and there it was. Or, there they were. Now if you ask how it is we knew, then you are without feeling for the sympathies of our imaginations in waiting for just this moment. And that must mean that you yourselves have not yet learned that in waiting for Them lies all your hope. No, it is not true that we had imagined it in just such a form. We had not said or thought, ever: They will be shaped like birds or be forms of light walking on the waves. But if you have ever known in your life a high expectation which is met at last, you will know that the expectation of a thing must meet with that thing — or, at least, that is, the form in which it must be seen by you. If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes then if there is such a creature in that sea you will not see anything less, or more — that is what you are set to see. Armies of angels could appear out of the waves, but if you are waiting for a one-eyed giant, you could sail right through them and not feel more than a freshening of the air. So while we had not determined a shape in our thoughts, we had not been waiting for evil or fright. Our expectations had been for aid, for explanation, for a heightening of our selves and of our thoughts. We had been set like barometers for Fair. We had known we would strike something that rang on a higher, keener note than ourselves, and that is why we knew at once that this was what we had been sailing to meet, around and around and around and around, for so many cycles that it might even be said that the waiting to meet up with Them had become a circuit in our minds as well as in the ocean.

We knew them first by the feeling in the air, a crystalline hush, and this was accompanied by a feeling of strain in ourselves, for we were not strung at the same pitch as that for which we had been waiting.

— Dorris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell

In a fever or a great strain of exhaustion, or in love, all the resources of the body stretch out and expand and vibrate higher than in ordinary life. . . . I am describing the sensation, for I cannot say what was the fact.

— via laphamsquarterly

Let yourself be silently drawn

By the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray.

— Rumi

And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult generation that is their burden.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
(via toadustyshelfweaspire)

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely — a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some “thou shalt.” Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only “strength of the will” that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant — which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes “a believer.” Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

These are my words. Press them against your gums.

In the beginning God Sr. made God Jr.
because everyone needs to come
from somewhere.

That means God Sr. just appeared
& that wouldn’t make any sense.

Know this book doesn’t make any sense,
but neither did the first one.

Still, follow me.

Tucking God Jr. into bed, God Sr. tells him
I hope you dream about stupid zombies
instead of martyrs being eaten by lions.
God Jr. is scared of lions because thoughts
of the future are worse than thoughts of the past
when the past is just beginning, like fourteen
lines ago beginning.

You’ll never really love them that much anyway
God Sr. tells Him, words about the martyrs,
not the lions. They pretty much deserve that shit.

The sky is always bloated, constantly held up by strings.

That’s got to be uncomfortable.

God Jr., holding a ball of clay the size
of a lampshade, wishes for two brothers,
pieces of Himself that would be next to Him,
inside pieces of those who formed worse
versions of Him.

Figure that shit out.

The Holy Ghost feels so cramped trying to build
a house from something no bigger than a fist.
To Him, nothing will ever be bloated enough.

Does God Jr. feel the nails through His wrists
while the second part of Him feels it, too?

Does He wish for more pills
while I wish no more pills, please?

I am quitting every drug that doesn’t get wet
when turned on.

There is nothing natural about a disaster.

Elephants, I am sorry you only have a little while left.

Eventually Kentucky will be beachfront property.

The biggest thing I am wondering is, how did space
gas get so goddamn beautiful?

— Gregory Sherl

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum