Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Most of all, beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

 

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. 

Lost

The things I've lost are countless, true:

Umbrellas, socks, my way and you.

Uncountable as leaves in spring

As stars above  - as anything.

That you wouldn't try to count sheep? 

I lose count

Every time 

I fall asleep

Pamela Haag, The Top 10 Relationship Words that Aren't Translatable into English

Published on February 24, 2012 by Pamela Haag, Ph.D. in Marriage 3.0

Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. 

Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.

From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the "binding force" that links two people together in any relationship. 

But interestingly, "fate" isn't the same thing as "destiny." Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, "have fate without destiny," describes couples who meet, but who don't stay together, for whatever reason

Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair.

Retrouvailles (French):  The happiness of meeting again after a long time.  

Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world's most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It's the "three strikes and you're out" policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each "strike." The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.

La Douleur Exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can't have.

Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love. 

This is different than "love at first sight," since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. 

Ya'aburnee (Arabic): "You bury me." It's a declaration of one's hope that they'll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them. 

Forelsket: (Norwegian):  The euphoria you experience when you're first falling in love.

Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a "vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist."

 

Margalo age 14

Stress is the biggest ugly.

E. B. White

Seneca, letter to his mother 4th c bce

I realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment. So I was waiting until your grief of itself should lose its force and, being softened by time to endure remedies, it would allow itself to be touched and handled.

[…]

[Now] I shall offer to the mind all its sorrows, all its mourning garments: this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.

Lawrence Weshler, letter to William Shawn after he solicited fiction [via Wondercab Mini]

...the part of my sensibility which I demonstrate in nonfiction makes fiction an impossible mode for me. That’s because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences, and consequences of consequences. The world-as-it-is is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. That’s what my reporting becomes about: taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands. If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, <https://substack.com/redirect/568ed66d-b92c-45e4-8a5d-ac0187da5624?j=eyJ1IjoiN2dueTIifQ.kl4KzAsqc2VOgMgVHh0d0xHCdE2eDfTFP_FYh7mBzUc> I wouldn’t know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full—there’s no room in it for any fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away. I wouldn’t be able to invent a fictional New York housewife, because the city as it is is already overcrowded—there are no apartments available, there is no more room in the phone book. (If, by contrast, I were reporting on the life of an actual housewife, all the threads that make up her place in the city would become my subject, and I’d have no end of inspiration, no lack of room. Indeed, room—her specific space, the way the world makes room for her—would be my theme.)

Louise Gluck, Telemachus' Detachment

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also i insane. Also very funny.

Tomas Transtromer’s “Sentry Duty,” Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly [via Lawrence Weschler]

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation does some work on itself.

…

 

Ursula K. Lee Guin, A Wizard of Earths [via @carsonellis]

"I am yours, by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant. When I am free to come back I will come back: till then farewell."

Ben Lerner, 10:04

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

 

Richard Feynman

Emily Dickinson, 686

They say that "Time assuages"—
Time never did assuage—
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age—

Quaker proverb

Proceed as the way opens.

Joan Didion quoting her therapist in Notes to John

Having to be right is like the Midas touch. You think it would be wonderful if everything you touched turned to gold, and then you find you've turned to gold yourself.

Barley Blair quoting ‘Goethe’, in John LeCarre - The Russia House

Some things are necessary evils. Some things are more evil than necessary.

Graeme Greene, The Quiet American

Sooner or later…One has to take sides if one is to remain human.

Gertrude Stein

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important. 

Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.

(Via Alan Jacobs)

Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

…in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

Joan Didion, “Why I Became a Cop Hater” (reporting on Chicago 1968)

I began to distrust the baroque obfuscation of language common among the police, began to see it not as an amusing foible but as a quite purposeful barrier between the cop and the enemy. I watched cops caught in stupid lies. I started hearing a tone in police voices, a tone that made no distinction between the criminal and the noncriminal, between the Mafia narcotics dealer and the college boy with two sticks of marijuana in his glove compartment. 'Move on, sister,' the tone said, and 'We aren't running a hotel, lady.' (I was told that by the desk sergeant in a jail where I was trying to arrange bail for a boy who had just been arrested for possession of marijuana. 'We aren't running a hotel, lady,' and then: 'I can give him a message if I feel like giving him a message, not otherwise.') It was a tone calculated—whether by deliberation or reflex—to threaten, to harass, to humiliate, to bully. I read not long ago that the police call this tone, this stance, 'aggressive prevention.' Perhaps all they are preventing is the possibility of their own credibility.

Rebecca Solnit, One Long Year Later: It’s Not Over and We Haven’t Surrendered (Meditations in an Emergency)

The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.

RAIZAN (来山) death poem in tanka form - 1716

Raizan has died
to pay for the mistake
of being born:
for this he blames no one,
and bears no grudge.  

Psychiatrist in Joan Didion, Notes to John

Don't make the mistake of telling her what to do, telling her what she should be doing. You can't teach by telling. Trying to teach by telling is very hard not to do. It seems counterintuitive. It seems to run against human nature. Which is to say it runs against the way we ourselves were taught. This is one of the hardest things to learn when you're being trained as a psychiatrist.

Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

…I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

…

Cormack McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Herman Hesse, from Stages

…Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give…

Walter Benjamin, “Post No Bills” from Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

THE WRITER'S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES

1.     Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2.     Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3.     In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4.     Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable. 

5.     Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6.     Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7.     Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8.     Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9.     Nulla dies sine linea ['No day without a line'] — but there may well be weeks.

10.   Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11.   Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12.   Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

13.   The work is the death mask of its conception.

Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Robert Ardrey to AJ Jacobs

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.

Alex Trebek to A.J.Jacobs

I'm curious about everything—even things that don't interest me.

Shakespeare, King John

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

- Constance, ACT III, Sc IV

 

Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"

…
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
...

Noah Davis (painter)

I'd rather fail at painting than be successful at anything else.

Semi Chellas, "Fugue" (1986)

I think about the word "drunk". It is almost onomatopoeic: "drunk" is the sound you make, falling down from being drunk. 

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

     Sundays too my father got up early

     and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

     then with cracked hands that ached

     from labor in the weekday weather made

     banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

     I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

     When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

     and slowly I would rise and dress,

     fearing the chronic angers of that house,

     Speaking indifferently to him,

     who had driven out the cold

     and polished my good shoes as well.

     What did I know, what did I know

     of love's austere and lonely offices?

Galway Kinnell, “Wait”

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Helene Cixous quoting Kafka in The Gagosian

HANS ULRICH OBRISTAre there any quotes you live by?

HÉLÈNE CIXOUSNo, but what comes to mind is "Man kann doch nicht nicht-leben" [One cannot not-live]. That's Kafka.

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, their rules for living from an interview with her

OK, so the first one is: Don't be afraid of anyone. If you can imagine: living your life, you're not afraid of anyone. That's number one.

Number two is you get a really good bullshit detector, and you learn how to use it. You know, just: "Is that really happening or not?"

Third is to be really, really tender. And with those, you're covered.

Marshall McLuhan

• I wouldn't have seen it, if I didn't believe it. 

André Alexis, “Houyhnhnms”

Most great things take time to happen. So do catastrophe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Franz Xavier Kappus

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they finally found out what it was?"

"I missed that," I murmured.

"I saw that," said Sandra. "About two days ago."

"What is the secret of life?" I aksed.

"I forget," said Sandra.

"Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein."

"Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."

Edna St Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

[via Austin Kleon]

Mary Oliver, "Don't Hesitate"

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that's often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

 

Goethe, Faust

I see my discourse leaves you cold;
Dear kids, I do not take offense;
Recall: the Devil, he is old,
Grow old yourselves, and he'll make sense!

Annie Ernaux, The Years

And one day we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren, and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. 

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Anne Sexton, "Yellow"

When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?