“The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.”
—Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929)
Virginia Woolf outside a summerhouse with her house guests, economist Maynard Keynes (right) and Angelica Bell, Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell.
Reading books, in public, by or about Thomas Pynchon; organizing a local version of the W.A.S.T.E. postal network, as described in The Crying of Lot 49; take a hot-air balloon trip in honor of the Airship Boys in Against the Day—openly carry a copy of the book as you do so; pledge to begin writing a Pynchon-influenced novel or short story; calling local radio stations, requesting they play Gravity’s Rainbow by the Klaxons and other Pynchon-themed songs; launching model V-2 rockets in an appropriate safe open area.
“
| — | What the website for “Pynchon in Public Day”—which is today, in honor of Thomas Pynchon’s 75th birthday—recommends as celebration. (via classicpenguin) |
Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and avow it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
shunted aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new
containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.
Speak and avow it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
shunted aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new
containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.
“
| — | (Rilke, from the The Ninth Elegy, trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann) |
Certainty
If it is real the white
light from this lamp, real
the writing hand, are they
real, the eyes looking at what I write?From one word to the other
what I say vanishes.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.—Octavio Paz, from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 1987)
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
“
| — | Emily Dickinson, from “Life: XXXVII” (via litverve) |
Went and looked at the stars, but could not get quite the right sense of amazement, the thrill of emotion (I can get this really well at times) because L said: “Now come in. It’s too cold to be out.
“
| — | Virginia Woolf, Diary Entry, 5 September, 1926. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf) |
