…in the sad disarray of my confused emotions…
A twilight sadness made of fatigue and false renunciations, a tedium of feeling anything at all, a pain as of a choked sob or a discovered truth… A landscape of abdications unfolds in my oblivious soul: walkways lined by abandoned gestures, high flower beds of dreams that weren’t even well dreamed, incongruities like old pools whose fountains are broken. It all gets entangled and squalidly looms in the sad disarray of my confused sensations.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet(Untitled Fragment)
Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.
M. Danielewski, from House of Leaves
The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it’s that I survived to do more…I have a low opinion of this expression, Hang in there.
– from What Is the What -D. Eggers
Whether the wave is ascending or descending, the ocean is always there. You are a fish in the ocean of time, you are a constant in an ocean of change, you are nothing and everything at one and the same time. Was the dinner good? Was the grass green? Did the water slake your thirst? Are the stars still in the heavens? Does the sun still shine? Can you talk, walk, sing, play? Are you still breathing?
– Henry MillerA Stone by Okkervil River: I’m a huge sucker for beautifully written + melancholy.
Orchard and Road
-by Rainer Maria Rilke
In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.
All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.
Remembering
-by Rainer Maria Rilke
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.
In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.
And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
A lovely little film that makes me miss my old JoJo. Can’t believe she’s been gone for five years as of this month.
