Quotes

by

tearing off, one by one, the petals of the idea

244

Fragments of an Autobiography

At first, metaphysical speculations amused me, then scientific notions. finally, sociological (…) attracted me. But in none of these stages of my quest for truth did I find assurance or relief. I read little about any of my concerns. But in the little I did read, I was worn out by seeing so many contradictory theories, all based on well-developed ideas, all of them equally probable and in accord with a certain school of facts that always had the air of being all the facts. If I raised my tired eyes from the books or if my perturbed attention wandered from my thoughts toward the exterior world, I saw only one thing, which contradicted any utility there might have been in reading and thinking, tearing off, one by one, the petals of the idea and the effort: the infinite complexity of things, the immense quantity (…), the prolix intangibility of the very few facts one could imagine as necessary for the foundation of a science.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

by

“I am the size of what I see!”

109

[3.24.1930]

Receiving what I felt to be an inspiration and a liberation, I passively reread those simple verses by Caeiro, his natural account of the results of the small size of his village. He says that because his village is small, it’s possible to see more of the world from it than from a city. Therefore, the village is larger than the city…

Because I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my own height.

Words like these, which seem to grow without there having to be a will reciting them, cleanse me of all the metaphysics I spontaneously add to life. After reading them, I walk to my window over the narrow street, gaze out at the huge sky and the myriad stars, and I am free, with a winged splendor whose vibration shakes my entire body.

“I am the size of what I see!” Every time I think these words with all the attention of my nerves, they seem to me more destined to reconstruct the universe in constellated fashion. “I am the size of what I see!” What a grand mental possession extends from the well of profound emotions to the high stars reflected in it, and which, in a way, are inside it.

And just now, aware of knowing how to see, I observe the vast, objective metaphysics of the entire sky with an assurance that gives me the will to die singing. “I am the size of what I see!” And the vague moonlight, entirely my own, begins to ruin the blue half-black of the horizon with vagueness.

I feel a desire to raise my arms and shout things of an unknown savagery, say words to the great mysteries, affirm a new, vast personality to the grand space of empty matter.

But I recover my senses and relax. “I am the size of what I see!” And the phrase becomes my entire soul, I invest all the emotions I feel in it, and above me, within, as if over the city outside, falls the undecipherable peace of the hard moonlight that begins broadly with nightfall.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

by

He had a kind of courtesy toward himself

Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man, — it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth — brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

by

Perception: a sympathetic magic

108

At times, not that I hope for it or should hope for it, the suffocation of the vulgar seizes my throat and I experience physical nausea because of the voice or face of a so-called fellow human being. Direct physical nausea, felt directly in my stomach and in my head, stupid miracle of my awakened sensibility… Each individual who speaks to me, each face whose eyes stare at me, affects me like an insult or like some filth. I make horror overflow from everything. I become stupefied from feeling myself feel them.

And it happens, almost always, in those moments of stomach desolation, that there is a man, a woman, even a child who appears before me like a real representative of the banality that agonizes me. Not a representative because of my subjective, thought emotion, but because of an objective truth, really conforming on the outside with what I feel within that arises by means of sympathetic magic and brings me an example for the abstract case I’m thinking of.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

by

Once you achieve body control you don’t need black magic

“Middletown is run by a magical brotherhood. You will hear about white and black lodges, the right-hand path and the left-hand path. Believe me, there is no such sharp line. However, the Middletown Brothers would not allow themselves to be placed in a position where they would need to use the usual methods of black magic. Once you achieve body control you don’t need that.

“There is no formal initiation into the Brotherhood. Initiation comes through dream guides. At the age of fourteen, when I began to have dreams that culminated in ejaculation, I decided to learn control of the sexual energy. If I could achieve orgasm at will in the waking state, I could do the same in dreams and control my dreams instead of being controlled by them.

“To accomplish sexual control, I abstained from masturbation. In order to achieve orgasm, it is simply necessary to relive a previous orgasm. So while awake, I would endeavor to project myself into sexual dreams, which I was now having several times a week. It was some months before I acquired sufficient concentration to get results.

“One day I was lying naked on my bed, feeling a warm spring wind on my body and watching leaf shadows dance on the wall. I ran through a sex dream like reciting my ABCs when suddenly silver spots boiled in front of my eyes and I experienced a feeling of weakness in the chest — the dying feeling — and I am slipping into my self in the dream and go off.

“Having brought sexual energy under control I now had the key to body control. Errors, fumbles, and ineptitudes are caused by uncontrolled sexual energy which then lays one open to any sort of psychic or physical attack. I went on to bring speech under control, to be used when I want it, not yammering in my ear at all times or twisting tunes and jingles in my brain.

“I used the same method of projecting myself into a time when my mind seemed empty of words. This I would do while walking in the woods or paddling on the lake. Once again, I waited some time for results. One day as I was paddling on the lake and about to put out fishlines, I felt the weakness in my chest, silver spots appeared in front of my eyes with a vertiginous sensation of being sucked into a vast empty space where words do not exist.”

— Wiliiam S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night

by

We have to break the old apart to make room for ourselves

Man finds himself on the earth whether he likes it or not, with nowhere else to go. What then is to become of him? Obviously we can’t stand still or we shall be destroyed. Then if there is no room for us on the outside we shall, in spite of ourselves, have to go in: into the cell, the atom, the poetic line, for our discoveries. We have to break the old apart to make room for ourselves, whatever may be our tragedy and however we may fear it.

We have to acknowledge at once in seeking a meaning involving the complex concerns of the world that the philosophic, the aesthetic, and the mechanical are likely to stem in their development from the same root. One may be much in advance of the other in its discoveries, but in the end a great equalizing process is involved so that the discovery of the advance in the structure of the poetic line is equated by an advance in the conception of physical facts all along the line. Man has no choice in these matters; the only question is, will he recognize the changes that are taking place in time to make the proper use of them?

— William Carlos Williams, “An Essay on Leaves of Grass“

by

The novelist is all of us, and we narrate when we see, because seeing is as complex as everything else

276

Literature — art wed to thought, attained without the stain of reality — seems to me to be the goal toward which every human effort ought to strive, if that effort were really human and not an animal superfluity. I think that to say a thing is to retain its virtue and throw out its terror. Fields are greener in the saying than they are in their own verdure. Flowers, if they are described with phrases that could define them in the air of imagination, will have colors of a permanence that cellular life does not permit.

To move is to live, to speak is to survive. There is nothing real in life that is not real because someone described it well. Critics from small houses usually point out that such and such a poem, finely rhymed, doesn’t, in the last analysis, mean anything more than it’s a nice day. But to say that it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes. So we have to save the nice day in a florid, prolix memory and thus constellate the fields or the heavens of empty and ephemeral exteriority with new flowers or new stars.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be for those who follow us in the diversity of time in accordance with how intensely we imagined it, that is, how intensely we had put it in our bodies with our imagination and really been it. I don’t believe that history is anything more, in its grand, faded panorama, than a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of distracted testimonies. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate when we see, because seeing is as complex as everything else.

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

by

the smell filled my nostrils, sweet, heavy, nauseating

The corpses were piled up in a big paved courtyard, in disordered mounds, scattered here and there. An immense, haunting buzzing filled the air: thousands of heavy blue flies were hovering over the bodies, the pools of blood, the fecal matter. My boots stuck to the pavement. The dead were already swelling up, I gazed at their green and yellowish skin, their faces gone shapeless, as if they’d been beaten to death. The smell was vile; and this smell, I knew, was the beginning and the end of everything, the very signification of our existence. This thought filled me with dismay. Little groups of soldiers from the Wehrmacht equipped with gas masks were trying to disentangle the piles and line up the bodies; one of them tugged on an arm, which came off and stayed in his hand; he tossed it with a weary gesture onto another pile. “There are more than a thousand of them,” the Abwehr officer said to me, almost whispering. “All the Ukrainians and Poles they’d been keeping in prison since their invasion. We found women, even children.” I wanted to close my eyes, or put my hand over my eyes, and at the same time I wanted to look, to look as much as I could, and by looking, try to understand, this incomprehensible thing, there in front of me, this void for human thought. At a loss, I turned to the officer from the Abwehr: “Have you read Plato?” He looked at me, taken aback: “What?” — “No, it’s nothing.” I did an about-face and left the place.

— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

by

The rest is optional

I want to be precise, as far as I am able. In spite of my shortcomings, and they have been many, I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink, and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

by

And then at last, happiness, or in any case peace, as the shreds of my flesh slowly dripped off the walls

For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And when time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae — what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn’t tempt me much. Of course I have thought about it over the years; and if I were to resort to it, here’s how I’d go about it: I’d hold a grenade right up against my heart and go out in a bright burst of joy. A little round grenade whose pin I’d pluch out before I released the catch, smiling at the little metallic noise of the spring, the last sound I’d hear, aside from the heartbeat in my ears. And then at last, happiness, or in any case peace, as the shreds of my flesh slowly dripped off the walls. Let the cleaning lady scrub them off, that’s what they’re paid for, the poor girls. But as I said, suicide doesn’t tempt me. I don’t know why, either — an old philosophical streak, perhaps, which keeps me thinking that after all we’re not here to have fun. To do what, then? I have no idea, to endure, probably, to kill time before it finally kills you. And in that case, writing is as good an occupation as anything else, when you have the time to spare.

— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

by

the dream of every consciousness sick of itself

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis — the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

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

by

nothing’s the matter, I’ve merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don’t know where to turn

“What’s wrong — what’s the matter with you?” Nothing, nothing’s the matter, I’ve merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don’t know where to turn, what to run for. . . .

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

by

In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror

In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.

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