06.03.2026 11:43
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The violet hour grows later with every passing day.
(@avecsesdoigts.bsky.social 🌸)
and somehow, Proust again:
“…since each of us sees clarity only in those ideas that have the same degree of confusion as our own.”
(trans. Charlotte Mandell 🌸)
In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.
— John Ashbery (“The Explanation”)
“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents… We cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.”
— Walter Benjamin (1916)
from “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 1916; trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Currently rereading some of Benjamin’s early writings.)
“In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.”
— Walter Benjamin
A great one.
And I was hoping he'd finally get his Nobel next year.
“Our real kin are those we have chosen.”
(from Guy Davenport’s journals)
“Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.”
(Lispector, Too Much of Life)
“I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists.”
— Gerald Murnane, “The Interior of Gaaldine”
Tried to organize my bookshelf…
ended up rereading this 🐰
My copy of Silence by John Cage - the front cover and the blank spine.
After moving house I spent a long time searching for this. It turned up yesterday. Missed it I believe because the spine is blank... blank...
“One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all…”
(Bernhard, The Loser)
“She preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding.”
(Lispector, An Apprenticeship)
“Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.”
(Wittgenstein, On Certainty)
Read an excerpt from my translation of Mathias Énard's The Deserters at @thebookerprizes.com:
thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...
“Joy is not something that can be found and gathered up. Joy is in the mourning for joy.”
— Jean-Luc Nancy, “Hyperion’s Joy”
“I wanted what I wrote to be the pleasure concealed within misery. My debt of joy to a world I do not find easy.”
— Lispector, Too Much of Life
and that only in the inexperienceable can courage, hope, and meaning be given foundation? Then the spirit would be free. But again and again life would drag it down because life, the sum of experience, would be without solace.”
(from “Experience,” 1913; trans. Spencer and Jost)
even if no one has done so yet. Such will cannot be taken from us by experience.
Yet—are our elders, with their tired gestures and their superior hopelessness, right about *one* thing—namely, that what we experience will be sorrowful… (2/3)
Walter Benjamin, writing as a student at 21 (under a pseudonym):
“We, however, know something different, which experience can neither give to us nor take away: that truth exists, even if all previous thought has been an error. Or: that fidelity shall be maintained, (1/3)
I love the boom! as it hits the seawall.
Thinking of Bolaño.
“…all horrors are dulled by routine.”
(By Night in Chile, tr. Chris Andrews)
. . . and Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries.
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
Etel Adnan-
“…goes to language, wounded by reality, seeking reality.”
(“…zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und wirklichkeitssuchend.”)
— Paul Celan, “Bremen Speech”
“A new language is what responds to reality where a moral, epistemological jolt has occurred.”
— Ingeborg Bachmann
(from the first Frankfurt lecture)