9 posts tagged “excerpt”
excerpts from City of Glass:
"New York was an inexhaustable space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know the streets, it always left him with a feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, an dby giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutory emptiness fom within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself,and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again."
"Thirteen years, they said. That is perhaps a long time. But I know nothing of time, I am new everyday. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before."
"Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little, these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remianed the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, everytime we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It's made a mess of everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change. The problem is how to demonstrate this... Consider a word that refers to a thing - "umbrella," for example. When I say the word "umbrella" you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function -- in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think about it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. now, my question is this: What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? ... At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me, this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. the word, however, has remained the same... It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing that it supposed to reveal. And if we cannot name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us?"
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).
Even your books are no longer on the stands. Is that a good or bad thing, you think? Everyone has moved on. I am still here. Who would've thought?
Today, I made a point of reading about the place where you are.You should be proud of me.
Any feeling from you is actually welcome.
Wikipedia says:
The name Indonesia derives from the Latin Indus, meaning "India", and the Greek nesos, meaning "island".The name dates to the 18th century, far predating the formation of independent Indonesia. In 1850, George Earl, an English ethnologist, proposed the terms Indunesians—and, his preference, Malayunesians—for the inhabitants of the "Indian Archipelago or Malayan Archipelago".In the same publication, a student of Earl's, James Richardson Logan, used Indonesia as a synonym for Indian Archipelago.However, Dutch academics writing in East Indies publications were reluctant to use Indonesia. Instead, they used the terms Malay Archipelago (Maleische Archipel); the Netherlands East Indies (Nederlandsch Oost Indië), popularly Indië; the East (de Oost); and even Insulinde.
This I ask you: If the day comes that you see me, suddenly, walking on the street toward you -- an apparation of a dead feeling -- what would be the first thing that you could possibly say?
From Kafka on the Shore:
"At any rate, you--and your theory--are throwing a stone at a target that's very far away. Do you understand that?"
I nod. "I know. But metaphors can reduce the distance."
"We're not metaphors."
"I know," I say. "But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."
A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. "That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard."
"There’re a lot of odd things going on---but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth."
"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?"
"Either way, I don’t think I can stand the sadness I feel right now," I tell her.
"I feel the same way."
after an angry discussion, AVS sent this to me when we parted May last year. when i first read this, i admit, it made me angry. i have vehemently denied it 'til today. 'til today.
people who love you think that you are damned because you fear many things. things like loss, rejection, deception. things that everyday people concern themselves with. they think that you shut them out because of this fear, this constant need to doubt every thinkable circumstance that you encounter in that singular shadowbox that you call your life.
but here's a truth for your cold palate: you use this fear. to fend off people, to resist their importance in your life. you have relationships with people who are 'emotionally unavailable" to you because you know that you are safe with them. they’ll never really lay down all the cards, am i right? they’ll never bother to read what you read, to know who you really are. they’ll never really ask you to spend the rest of their lives with them or engulf you in every single story that makes them who they are. but if they get too close or strike a chord in that drowned heart of yours, you scrounge endlessly for imperfections. your escapes/ exits are all believable, all sound and are evident repercussions. how elaborate your ruses are, i must say.
the possibility of the existence of the Other - the elusive One - is lost to you. you keep everyone at arms length and they think it’s the fear that makes you do all these atrocities. but it’s really all that paneling; your burying yourself in endless layers of other people’s concept of you. and that, my dear, will be your frightful end, when the time comes. god forgive me, but my anger drives me to wish it, to curse you.
what, or, more appropriately, who are you preparing yourself for, little girl?
what if I tell you that there is someone who might one day just lay down those cards and say, my life for yours? would you even blink, my ice queen? would you even recognize it when it happens?
this is the reason why we no longer talk. but if you read this, i’d like to apologize for not recognizing that you have spoken honestly and from an open heart. a heart that is closed to me now.
he was right. i am estella.
He Said Discipline is the Highest Form of Love
All three girls were in love with their music teacher. At a lesson, he told one: You wear your heart on your sleeve. Then the other came in, dark hair parted in the middle like a black book. She had the longest most promising fingers, but he did not love her. The third girl did not come until the next day. In the night she dreamed that he spread his arms out behind her and then wrapped his left arm to hers holding the instrument, and folded her fingers so they touched the strings. His right arm crooked with her arm holding the bow. They were just one violin.
Every time she practiced after that she felt his limbs on her limbs, his breast at her back, like a man-shadow cast by her small girl body. An hour would go by like an arrow. That's what was hardest: what love did to time. The Brahms fell apart like a glass. His shoulders over her shoulders. Even when she grew up, which happened in a night, and was happy, she could still conjure him, this love skin.
This whole petal of him.
When she came to her lesson the next day he tapped the lip of her music stand with a baton, tic-tic-tic, four-four time. She felt—a bit, a bit of his ankle in her ankle, and then the knee above that, floating. She wondered what he was like with the book-haired girl. She knew he loved those long fingers. Maybe that was enough. In time.
--Beckian Fritz Goldberg
The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.
*******
The peculiar thing about such obsessions is their specificity... All fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite in one direction.
(From Zadie Smiths' The Autograph Man, one of the best books I have read to date.)
"It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the island with an X. It seems to me its too late in the day for all that."
"What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's historical shit all over the place. They're not constantly making the same old mistakes. They're not always hearing the same old shit. They don't do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I'm telling you. The biggest trauma in their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they will tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers... Because it doesn't fucking matter. As far as they're concerned, it's the past. This is what it's like in other families. They're not self-indulgent. They don't run around relishing, relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional. They don't spend time trying to find ways to make their lives more complex. They just get on with it. Lucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers."
Some excerpts from my favorite Auden piece, Prospero to Ariel, from The Sea and the Mirror, a collection of poems that serves as a commentary for Shakespeare's The Tempest.
This is easily one of my favorite Auden pieces. I hope that you'll manage to come across it someday soon.
I am glad I did not recover my dukedom till I do not want it.
I am glad I have freed you so at last I can really believe I shall die/For under your influence, dying is inconceivable
The lonely and unhappy are very much alive.
I surrender this fascinating counsel/To the silent dissolution of the sea/Which misuses nothing because it values nothing/Whereas man overvalues everything
And seducers are sincerely puzzled at being unable to love/What they are able to possess/So long ago, in an open boat, I wept at giving a city/Common warmth and touching substance/for a gift in dealing with shadows
It is only that youth is still able to believe/It will get away with anything, while age/Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing
Now, Ariel, I am that I am, your late and lonely master/ Who knows what magic is:- the power to enchant/That comes from disillusion
What the books can teach one is that most desires end up in stinking ponds...
Thick-headed goodness for once is not a bore
And no one but you is reliably informative on hell/ As you whistle and skip past the poisonous/ Resentments scuttle over your unrevolted feet/And even the uncontrollable vertigo/Because it can scent no shame, is unobliged to strike
Today, I am free and no longer need your freedom: You, I suppose, will be off now to look for likely victims; Crowds chasing ankles, lone men stalking glory, Some feverish young rebel among amiable flowers
A fly-weight hermit in a dream/Of gardens that time is forever outside.
Are you malicious by nature? I don't know/Perhaps only incapable of doing nothing or of being by yourself/And, for all your wry faces, may secretly be anxiousand miserable without a master to need for the work you need.
Are all you tricks a test? If so, I hope you find, next time, Someone in whom you cannot spot the weakness Through which you will corrupt him with your charm
TO HATE NOTHING AND TO ASK NOTHING FOR ITS LOVE.
We did it, Ariel, between us/ You found on me a wish for absolute devotion/ Result- his wreck that sprawls in the weeds and will not be repaired
I SHALL GO KNOWING AND INCOMPETENT INTO MY GRAVE.
Now our partnership is dissolved, I feel so peculiar As if I had been on a drunk since I was born And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober, With all my unanswered wishes and unwashed days stacked up all around my life; as if through the ages I had dreamed about some tremendous journey I was taking... And now, in my old age, I wake and this journey really exists, And I have actually to take it, inch by inch, Alone and on foot, without a cent in my pocket, Through a universe where time is not foreshortened, No animals talk, AND THERE IS NEITHER FLOATING NOR FLYING.
Can I learn to suffer without saying something ironic or funny On suffering?
Perhaps by the time death pounces his stumping question, I shall be getting to know the difference between moonshine and daylight...
I see you starting to fidget. I forgot. To you That doesn't matter... O Ariel, Ariel, How I shall miss you. Enjoy your element. Goodbye.
