“Living is different. One doesn’t gather up sights in quite the same way. There’s no compiling of sights. I think it’s when people get old they begin to compile. They not only visit pyramids, they try to build a pyramid out of the sights of the world.”

“Travel as tomb-building,” I said.

2 days ago  /  1 note

And what of narrative flow? There is still movement, but in hyperspace’s dimensionless infinity, it is more like endless expansion ; it runs the risk of being so distended and slackly driven as to lose its centripetal force, to give way to a kind of static low-charged lyricism — that dreamy gravityless lost-in-space feeling of the early sci-fi films. How does one resolve the conflict between the reader’s desire for coherence and closure and the text’s desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed, what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer? If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?

1 week ago  /  0 notes

How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterflow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimations, and the star that no party member can ever reach.

1 week ago  /  0 notes

On Kafka’s side of the Tower of Babel, the heavens, the imperial palace, and the highest court still transmit the Old Testament double injuction whereby “the Law” invites entry or transgression and then renders itself inaccessible, as, by law, it must. Kafka’s response, however, as Deleuze has argued, was to marshal a “nomadic war machine,”, a “battering ram directed against itself,” and not to construct another “ivory tower.” As demonstrated by “The Great Wall of China”, any attempt to erect a “new Tower of Babel” yields a potentially endless series of isometric segments linked and separated by gaps such that the entire construction finds a kind of cohesion only through the delayed messages conveyed by persons traveling along its expanse.

3 weeks ago  /  1 note

Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtledly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. Muriel thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.

4 weeks ago  /  1 note

There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass.
So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers’ laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother’s, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

1 month ago  /  Notes