A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
— William Butler Yeats (From “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”)
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sins of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
[2.67-76]
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
["Suicide Note," a poem by Langston Hughes]
A tiny blade will sever the sutures of the neck, and when that joint, which binds together head and neck, is cut, the body’s mighty mass crumples in a heap. No deep retreat conceals the soul, you need no knife at all to root it out, no deeply driven wound to find the vital parts; death lies near at hand. . . . Whether the throat is strangled by a knot, or water stops the breathing, or the hard ground crushes in the skull of one falling headlong to its surface, or flame inhaled cuts off the course of respiration — be it what it may; the end is swift.
— Seneca
The people who are least capable of judging the worth of individuals are also the most inclined to adopt fashion as a principal by which to classify them; they have not exhausted, or even grazed the surface of, the talented men of one generation, when suddenly they are obliged to condemn them all en bloc, for here is a new generation with a new label which will be no better understood than its predecessor.
[Proust, Time Regained]
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr. Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr. Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
[2.377-386]
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 Floating Library 