“But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul…”
(Moby-Dick, Ch. 29)
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
On his birthday, remembering Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). A regular in my reading ever since I read Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude two decades ago.
“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.”
(opening line, Wittgenstein’s Mistress)
“Whenever a few pages of Kant had tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard. … This book [Either/Or] confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited me more than any other book.”
— Walter Benjamin (at 21, in a letter)
…accordingly how thinking in its absoluteness follows upon a seeming reality.” (Penguin, 1996)
In a later version, still Hannay:
“…thus on how thinking in its absoluteness takes over from a seeming reality.” (Princeton, 2007)
In Hannay’s translation:
(September 4, 1837)
“A remarkable transition occurs when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, because here for the first time one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it is thought, …
“What an extraordinary change takes place … when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.”
— Kierkegaard
(an epigraph to *Wittgenstein’s Mistress*)
“Hugely, spring exists again.”
— John Ashbery, “Grand Galop”
Walter Benjamin:
“Just as Proust begins the story with an awakening, so must every presentation of history begin with awakening; in fact, it should treat of nothing else. This one [The Arcades Project], accordingly, deals with awakening from the nineteenth century.”
“There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.”
— Benjamin, The Arcades Project
“Primal poetry, poetry that allows us a taste for our inner destiny, is an adherence to the invisible. […] True poetry is a function of awakening.
It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.”
— Bachelard, Water and Dreams (tr. Edith R. Farrell)
another opening line came to mind:
“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”
— the first line of Beckett’s first critical essay (“Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”)
from *Essai sur la connaissance approchée* (1928; based on his 1927 thesis)
Gaston Bachelard:
“Connaître, c’est décrire pour retrouver.”
[To know is to describe in order to retrieve.]
— the opening line of the first chapter of his first book
“As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul.”
(Jabès, The Book of Questions)
“Written words could tell him who he was. […] The only way to be in the world was to write himself there.”
(Don DeLillo, Mao II)
“Syntax is a faculty of the soul.”
(Paul Valéry, Analects)
And now that I am reading Proust, I was shocked to discover there the very same expression I had used in The Chandelier, in the same sense, with the same words. This expression is nothing much, but even in the ordinary it is impossible not to come upon others.”
(trans. from French)
trembling to the measured steps of frail and melancholy young girls.
The devil has it that I always arrive last, so that I always find myself faced with what has already been done. I have often felt a certain discouragement because of this. […] (3/4)
one of those little things to which he gives so much meaning without, however, granting them the slightest supernatural value.
If I had been listening to Chopin, my chandelier would evoke that of a grand salon, with delicate and transparent pendants, (2/4)
Lispector on *The Chandelier* (letter, 1944):
“Perhaps you find the title Mansfieldian because you know that I recently read Katherine’s letters. But I don’t think so. […]
If I had been reading Proust at the time, it would have made one think of a Proustian chandelier, (1/4)
vielleicht lebe ich in einem
Gäszchen. Von Sprache
wunderbarer Sprache.
(24.3.18 | da ich morgens ..., S. 70)
“We are eternal travelers of ourselves, and the only landscape that exists is what we are. We possess nothing, because we do not even possess ourselves...
The universe is not mine: it is me.”
— Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“We are nothing; what we seek is everything.”
(Friedrich Hölderlin)
“Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles.”
— Hölderlin, Fragment von Hyperion, 1793
epigraphs to *An Absence of Sea*
🩶
Happy Birthday, Anthony! 🥂💖
💗💗💗
Imagine this: The hand no longer finding itself in the dark. There would be no humanity if the body did not reflect itself, writes MMP. If the chiasmatic structure were to collapse—“It would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being.”