Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
[2.168-172]
For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature.
— Proust, Time Regained
For melancholy, take a ram’s head that never meddled with a ewe . . . boil it well, skin and wool together . . . take out the brains, and put these spices to it, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves. . . . It may be eaten with bread in an egg or broth.
— Robert Burton
But above all — and one saw this the moment one set eyes on him — the significance of his physiognomy had been altered by a formidable monocle. By introducing an element of machinery into Bloch’s face this monocle absolved it of all those difficult duties which a human face is normally called upon to discharge, such as being beautiful or expressing kindliness or intelligence or effort. The monocle’s mere presence even absolved an interlocutor, in the first place, of asking himself whether the face was pleasant to look at or not, just as, when a shop-assistant has told you that some object imported from England is “the last word in chic,” you no longer dare to ask yourself whether you really like it. In any case, behind the lens of the monocle Bloch was now installed in a position as lofty, as remote and as comfortable as if it had been the glass partition of a limosouine and, so that his face should match the smooth hair and the monocle, his features never now expressed anything at all.
— Proust, Time Regained
Dear Henry
I got you last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you a naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you. Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I have such a bad headache. today. and write by return to you longing
Martha
P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to know.
x x x x
[5.241-259]
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; not yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go —
Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery!
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
— John Donne
An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach. Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside. The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl or liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.
[5.313-317]
[C]onsidering the length of time that had elapsed she had not changed very much, that is to say her face was not too utterly demolished for the face of a human creature subject, as we all are, to deformation at every moment of her trajectory into the abyss towards which she had been launched, that abyss whose direction we can express only by means of comparisons that are all equally invalid, since we can borrow them only from the world of space and their sole merit, whether we give them the orientation of height, length or depth, is to make us feel that this inconceivable yet apprehensible dimension exists.
— Proust, Time Regained
Encompass’d with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors. . . .
I . . . in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground
— William Cowper
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]
Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
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
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]
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
It is time to take off the amber
Time to change the words,
Time to put out the lamp
Above the door . . .
— Marina Tsvetaeva
The Floating Library 