I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or — I know it now — even kill another. I could kill a woman, or wound a man. I think I could. I gritted to control my hands, but had a flash of bloody stars in my head as I stared that sassy girl down, and a blood-longing to [rush] at her and tear her to bloody beating bits.
— Sylvia Plath
“Be honest, my friend, you yourself once propounded a theory to me about things existing only in virtue of a creation which is perpetually renewed. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, you said, it is, of necessity, taking place every day. Well, if you are sincere, you cannot except war from this theory. . . . [T]he truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not forsee all its horrors.”
[Proust, Time Regained]
As we, our mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelly says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
[9.376-385]
For the novel reality of a danger is perceived only through the medium of that new thing, not assimilable to anything that we already know, to which we give the name “an impression” and which is often, as in the present case, epitomised in a line, a line which defines an intention and possesses the latent potentiality of the action which has given it its particular form, like the invisible line of this falling bomb . . . .
[Proust, Time Regained]
After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
[3.365-369]
No doubt, my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of my work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion.
[Proust, Time Regained, 163]
Words let us say the things we want to say and also the things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also the things we wish we didn’t. Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we’re exposed to an infectious world.
[From Steve Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought]
“I am alone,” said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
He was caught in the enchantment of a sacredly distorted world full of Panic life — and he dreamed delicate legends.
“The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.”
Nothing is stranger and more delicate than the relationship between people who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled, by force of custom of their own caprices, to say no word or make no move of acknowledgment, but to maintain the appearance of an aloof unconcern. There is a restlessness and a surcharged curiousity existing between them, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed desire for acquaintanceship and interchange; and especially there is a kind of tense respect. Because one person loves and honors another so long as he cannot judge him, and desire is a product of incomplete knowledge.
He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlink says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of the world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
[U 9.1041-1052]
For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me, the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses. Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, shoudl appear to us through the sense? Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus? Thus, beauty is the sensitive man’s access to the spirit — but only a road, a means simply, little Phaedrus. . . . And then this crafty suitor made the neatest remark of all; it was this, that the lover is more divine than the beloved, since the god is in the one, but not in the other — perhaps the most delicate, the most derisive thought that has ever been framed, and the one from which spring all the cunning and the profoundest pleasures of desire.
If it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life — (and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).
“Tadziu! Tadziu!” He turned back; beating the resistent water into a foam with his legs, he hurried, his head bent down over the waves. And to see how this vital figure, virginally graceful and unripe, with dripping curls, and lovely as some slender god, came up out of the depths of sky and sea, rose and separated from the elements — this spectacle aroused a sense of myth, it was like some poet’s recovery of time at its beginning, of the origin of forms and the birth of gods. Aschenbach listened with closed eyes to this song ringing within him, and he thought again that it was pleasant here, and that he would like to remain.
The Floating Library 