Unlabelled Passage Of The Day

Another day at TLO?


"In the end, we go down where you would like to go if you were here, to that ancient garden where all those who think, or worry, or talk to themselves, go down towards evening as water goes to the river, and gather necessarily together. They are scholars, lovers, old men, priests, and the disillusioned; all dreamers, of every possible kind. They seem to be seeking their distances from each other. They must like to see but not know one another, and their separate sorts of bitterness are accustomed to encountering each other. One drags his illness, another is driven by his anguish; they are shadows fleeing from each other; but there is no other place to escape the others but this, where the same idea of solitude invincibly draws each of all these absorbed souls. In a few minutes we shall be in that place worthy of the dead. It is a botanical ruin."

-- Paul Valéry, "A Letter from Madame Emilie Teste" (trans. Jackson Mathews)
 
"The Italian who, in a fit of rage, falls upon his aggressor wherever he finds him, and dispatches him without any ceremony, acts, at any rate, consistently and naturally : he may be cleverer, but he is not worse, than the duelist. If you say, I am justified in killing my adversary because in a duel, because he is in at the moment doing his best to kill me, I can reply that it is your challenge which has placed him under the necessity of defending himself. And, so, I am led to conclude that it is *the human hand* which is to be faulted in these instances almost exclusively." Arthur Schopenhauer, "Counsels and Maxims"
 
"What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with -- in the museums, the galleries, the art schools, and the art magazines -- is a weakening of convictions, an unwillingness ever to take a stand, a refusal to champion, or even surrender to, any first principles. More than anything else, what laissez-faire aesthetics threatens, with its insistence that anything goes, is the disciplined imagination without which the artist is rudderless, a wanderer in the wilderness. Some will say that what has finally been eclipsed is the modernist adventure, with its celebration of a well-defined set of artistic principles and values: purity, progress, formalism, abstraction. This is not necessarily to be regretted. The way art is understood will necessarily change over time. But what is now in doubt is much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the freestanding power of artistic experience, which we discover in works of every time and place, from the Tanagra figurines and the Romanesque manuscripts to the paintings of Rembrandt, Poussin, Corot, and Mondrian. There is nothing laissez-faire about any of these masterworks. When we contemplate them in all of their particularity -- in the insistent singularity of their poetry and in the almost delusional extremism of their endlessly various visions -- we see that they are anything but easygoing, that they are, each in its own way, relentlessly, triumphantly intolerant. An artist's vision is always a solitary kingdom."

-- Jed Perl, "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics" (from Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture)
 
"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent."

David Foster Wallace
 
"Did you hear the drunks? Did you hear them after midnight?" he said. "I lay awake all night. Walked up and down. I even opened the window and let the air pour in, that terribly cold air. But it didn't do any good. I thought I might go down and complain. But there's no sense in that. I'd only encounter incomprehension. The thing that makes me most indignant is the incessant door-slamming. Like continually being beaten about the head! There's nothing worse than incessant door-slamming in a house. People slam doors without the least thought. It's a trait of inferior humanity. Habitual door-slamming is even capable of killing someone. My whole day is wrecked if someone slams the door. But here they slam them all the time. Imagine yourself forced to live somewhere where they continually slam the doors! A place inhabited by habitual door-slammers! You're up against it, I tell you . . ."

-- Thomas Bernhard, Frost (trans. Michael Hofmann)


I really hate living in an apartment building.
 
"Of all forms of literature, the prose poem was Des Esseintes' favourite. Handled by an alchemist of genius it should, he maintained, contain within its small compass and in concentrated form the substance of a novel, while dispensing with the latter's long-winded analyses and superfluous descriptions ... every adjective ... would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on its meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end."

J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature
 
The Shadows of Angels

"We are the shadows of angels," someone tells me, and disappears into the crowded room. "we are the dark souls of the perfected ones," another whispers in my ear. I turn to find him, but no one is there. Across the room a man motions in cryptic hand gestures, signaling the phrase: "Our thoughts are the static of a bioelectrical storm." A note is pressed into my hand. I open it. "Distorted reflections of a faceless god," it reads, "That is us." I pulled away from the others in the room. I found a quiet corner, sat down, and opened a newspaper. The headline screamed at me: "Humanity revealed as animate material." It looked kind of interesting, but the story was continued on page six and some joker had taken that page.
I don't know how it turned out."

"Mr Templeton's Toyshop",
Thomas Wiloch
 
"No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist paradox: grant that expressiveness — expression as lament — is the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might germinate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair — not betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief. For listen to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the high G of a cello, the last word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is so no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night."
-- From Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Other quotes from this book: Doctor Faustus - By Thomas Mann - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK
 
My signature, from Hellboy: The Fury by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo:

"Hellboy, your fall should be like the fall of mountains. But I was before mountains. I was in the beginning, and shall be forever. The first and the last. The world come full circle. You think you can fight me, kill me, as you would a beast? I am not the wheel. I am the hand that turns the wheel. I am Time, the Destroyer. We are bound together in that. I was the wind in the stars before this. Before planets. Before Heaven and Hell. And when all is done I will be wind again, to blow the world as dust back into endless space. To me the coming and going of Man is as nothing. And you, because you made this choice to live like a man, in the end you also will be nothing. Here now, with me, this is your only moment. Your glory. When the universe marks your passing, it will only be for this."
 
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"As far as I'm concerned, I don't consider myself outside of anything. I just consider myself not around."

--Bob Dylan, from a 1966 interview
 
“We’re all gonna wind up in a very bad position one day sooner or later. The only way to deal with it as an artist is to try to come up with something to explain to people why life is worth living. You can’t really do that without conning them because in the end it has no meaning. Everything you create or do is going to vanish. The sun is burning out and the universe will be gone. Everything that Shakespeare or Beethoven created will all be gone no matter how much we cherish it. So it’s very hard to sell people a bill of goods that there’s any good to this.”

And in the same interview:

The only solution, said Allen, was distraction. For him this meant either viewing films – “watching Fred Astaire for an hour and a half is a way of not thinking about my death, my decaying body and that I will be old one day in the very distant future” – or shooting them. “Movie-making is like giving inmates in an institution basket-weaving. It keeps you occupied.
 
A juxtaposition:

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." -V. S. Naipaul

"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser." -E. M. Cioran
 
"Forgetting actually fascinates me more than remembering. Scraps of memory always surface from an ocean of oblivion. With Proust, the entire past emerges in a brutal way, like a tiered cake. In Search of Lost Time doesn’t grant any free space to the reader. Proust’s cobwebs are fascinating but they surround you; it’s a bit suffocating. More than in the continuity and length of time, I’m interested in the abyss of time elapsed, the smell of time."

--Patrick Modiano, from this interview.
 
There are three smiles that have something in common: the smile of a corpse, the smile of a gratified woman, and the smile of a decapitated beast.

-- Henry de Montherlant, The Girls: A Tetralogy of Novels (1954), trans. by Terence Kilmartin
 
"...no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed! The longing I feel when I think of the past I've lived in real time, when I weep over the corpse of my childhood life- this can't compare to the fervour of my trembling grief as I weep over the non-reality of my dreams' humble characters, even the minor ones I recall having seen just once in my pseudo-life, while turning a corner in my envisioned world, or while passing through a doorway on a street that I walked up and down in the same dream."

Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
 
"If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization - possibly the whole of mankind - have become 'neurotic'?"

- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
 
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

-Woody Allen, Love and Death
 
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