"IN THE BEGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could...
2025-03-25 10:18:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Etiology
This person is (pick one):
1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;
2. possessed by (pick one):
a) the gods,
b) God (that is, a prophet),
c) s...
“Practical advice.—People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to rea...
2025-03-24 10:03:30 +0000 UTC View Post
The world’s birds gathered for their conference
And said: ‘Our constitution makes no sense.
All nations in the world require a king;
How is it we alone have no such thing?
Only a kingdom can be justly run;
We need a king and mus...
I enter your night
like a darkened boat, a smuggler
These lanterns, my eyes
and heart are out
I bring you something
you do not want:
news of the country
I am trapped in,
news of your future:
soon you wil...
Two
A FEW WEEKS later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, market basket in hand, at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald monk of about fifty with a light odor of vinegar ab...
2025-03-23 09:50:38 +0000 UTC View Post
"The static blooms of Adonis provide us with an answer to our question 'What would the lover ask of time?' As Plato formulates it, the answer brings us once again to the perception that lovers and readers have very similar desires. And the desire ...
2025-03-22 10:41:52 +0000 UTC View Post
“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. Bu...
2025-03-22 10:41:27 +0000 UTC View Post
“All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing th...
2025-03-21 12:17:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Eleven
GIUSEPPE BALDINI had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit. The odor of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his ability to smell; he had carried it about with him for d...
2025-03-21 12:16:47 +0000 UTC View Post
“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
2025-03-20 09:46:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.'
Pastor Jón Prímus to hims...
“When a person begins to see all goodness as being the goodness of God, all the beauty that surrounds him as the divine beauty, he begins by worshiping a visible God, and as his heart constantly loves and admires the divine beauty in all that he...
2025-03-19 13:17:04 +0000 UTC View Post
“And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing t...
2025-03-19 13:16:43 +0000 UTC View Post
“I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it....
“The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are still just words. Words make our loves richer and more...
2025-03-18 07:47:52 +0000 UTC View Post
“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into conta...
2025-03-17 08:58:14 +0000 UTC View Post
“Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death.
There's no one alive
who can say if he wi...
“Dr. Syngmann: I am talking about the only quality that was worth creating the world for, the only power that is worth controlling.
Pastor Jón: Úa?
Dr. Syngmann in a tired, gravelly bass: I hear you mention once more that name wh...
“Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the atmosphere is true? But whoever ...
2025-03-15 12:39:59 +0000 UTC View Post
1
I celebrate myself, an
2025-03-14 12:02:33 +0000 UTC View Post
“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be...
2025-03-14 12:02:14 +0000 UTC View Post
“And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, le...
2025-03-13 07:48:50 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been a little while since I have done a poll and I was just deliberating something that I would love to hear your thoughts or at least gauge your views about.
I generally try to create images that have a genuine sense of intimacy abou...
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhau...
2025-03-12 09:46:12 +0000 UTC View Post
“Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using the...
2025-03-12 09:45:52 +0000 UTC View Post
“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigl...
2025-03-11 06:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Condemn'd by Fate to way-ward Curse,
Of Friends unkind, and empty Purse:
Plagues worse than fill'd Pandora's Box,
I took my leave of Albion's Rocks:
With heavy heart, concern'd that I
Was forc'd my Native soil...
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle ...
2025-03-10 08:25:36 +0000 UTC View Post
“I have always been fascinated to imagine the uncertain circumstance in which our ancestors – still barely different from animals, the language that allowed them to communicate with one another just recently born – in caves, around fires, on...
2025-03-10 08:25:18 +0000 UTC View Post