“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)
“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*)
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”)
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)
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)
Yoon Kim@yoonkim.bsky.social · 4mo ago“Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles.” — Hölderlin, Fragment von Hyperion, 1793
“Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles.” — Hölderlin, Fragment von Hyperion, 1793
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.”
“neither bed nor body neither subject nor object neither time nor hands but something else… …not from anywhere I search to borrow words for this eternal letter but something trembling unnamed a grammar of flesh that cannot be conjugated only endured” 🖤 Christina Tudor-Sideri, An Absence of Sea
“The memories which two people preserve of each other, even in love, are not the same. […] For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies.” (Proust, Time Regained)
Richard Rorty: “Proust’s novel is a network of small, interanimating contingencies. […] Such contingencies make sense only in retrospect—and they make a different sense every time redescription occurs.” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)
Yoon Kim@yoonkim.bsky.social · 5mo agoProust, Time Regained: “No doubt life … prevented me from discovering their essence. For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies… …even her personal charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished as soon as I was near her, [+]
Proust, Time Regained: “No doubt life … prevented me from discovering their essence. For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies… …even her personal charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished as soon as I was near her, [+]
“Life is an April day, that both laughs and weeps in a breath.” — Babbalanja in Mardi (Vol. 2, Ch. 79) #MelvilleMonday 🐳
“To me the really wonderful thing about these insects [moths] is the way they perish.” — W. G. Sebald (interview, 1998)
“Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Correction)
Yoon Kim@yoonkim.bsky.social · 5mo ago“Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Korrektur)