“Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
Category: Lit & Crit
“Think of poetry as a beautiful lie that hits a bullseye.” – Tom C. Hunley, “The Fact That There’s a Snake Tunneling Through My Grass Doesn’t Make the Parting of the Blades Any Less Beautiful”
“Something tells me that if all our world leaders read poetry, wrote poetry, or were involved deeply in any of the arts, we’d have a far better chance at achieving world peace.” – Wendy Videlock (quoted in Rattle 65)
“The melancholy of the adult state arises from our dual, conflicting experience that, on the one hand, our absolute, youthful confidence in an inner voice has diminished or died, and, on the other hand, that the outside world to which we now devote ourselves in our desire to learn its ways and dominate it will never speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal. The heroes of youth are guided by the gods: whether what awaits them at the end of the road are the embers of annihilation or the joys of success, or both at once, they never walk alone, they are always led. Hence the deep certainty with which they proceed: they may weep and mourn, forsaken by everyone, on a desert island, they may stumble to the very gates of hell in desperate blindness, yet an atmosphere of security always surrounds them; a god always plots the hero’s paths and always walks ahead of him.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“In lyric poetry, only the great moment exists, the moment at which the meaningful unity of nature and soul or their meaningful divorce, the necessary and affirmed loneliness of the soul becomes eternal. At the lyrical moment the purest interiority of the soul, set apart from duration without choice, lifted above the obscurely-determined multiplicity of things, solidifies into substance; whilst alien, unknowable nature is driven from within, to agglomerate into a symbol that is illuminated throughout. Yet this relationship between soul and nature can be produced only at lyrical moments. Otherwise, nature is transformed— because of its lack of meaning — into a kind of picturesque lumber-room of sensuous symbols for literature; it seems to be fixed in its bewitched mobility and can only be reduced to a meaningfully animated calm by the magic word of lyricism.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. The given structure of the object (i.e. the search, which is only a way of expressing the subject’s recognition that neither objective life nor its relationship to the subject is spontaneously harmonious in itself) supplies an indication of the form-giving intention. All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means. Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they are seekers. The simple fact of seeking implies that neither the goals nor the way leading to them can be directly given, or else that, if they are given in a psychologically direct and solid manner, this is not evidence of really existent relations or ethical necessities but only of a psychological fact to which nothing in the world of objects or norms need necessarily correspond. To put it another way, this ‘givenness’ may be crime or madness; the boundaries which separate crime from acclaimed heroism and madness from life-mastering wisdom are tentative, purely psychological ones, although at the end, when the aberration makes itself terribly manifest and clear, there is no longer any confusion. In this sense, the epic and the tragedy know neither crime nor madness. What the customary concepts of everyday life call crime is, for them, either not there at all, or it is nothing other than the point, symbolically fixed and sensually perceptible from afar, at which the soul’s relationship to its destiny, the vehicle of its metaphysical homesickness, becomes visible. The epic world is either a purely childlike one in which the transgression of stable, traditional norms has to entail vengeance which again must be avenged ad infinitum, or else it is the perfect theodicy in which crime and punishment lie in the scales of world justice as equal, mutually homogeneous weights. In tragedy crime is either nothing at all or a symbol— it is either a mere element of the action, demanded and determined by technical laws, or it is the breaking down of forms on this side of the essence, it is the entrance through which the soul comes into its own. Of madness the epic knows nothing, unless it be the generally incomprehensible language of a superworld that possesses no other means of expression. In non-problematic tragedy, madness can be the symbolic expression of an end, equivalent to physical death or to the living death of a soul consumed by the essential fire of selfhood. For crime and madness are objectivations of transcendental homelessness—the homelessness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of a soul in the ideal order of a supra-personal system of values.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“The totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cells the right to dominate it. Only when a subject, far removed from all life and from the empirical which is necessarily posited together with life, becomes enthroned in the pure heights of essence, when it has become nothing but the carrier of the transcendental synthesis, can it contain all the conditions for totality within its own structure and transform its own limitations into the frontiers of the world. But such a subject cannot write an epic: the epic is life, immanence, the empirical.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“Loneliness is the very essence of tragedy, for the soul that has attained itself through its destiny can have brothers among the stars, but never an earthly companion; yet the dramatic form of expression—the dialogue—presupposes, if it is to be many-voiced, truly dialogical, dramatic, a high degree of communion among these solitaries. The language of the absolutely lonely man is lyrical, i.e. monological; in the dialogue, the incognito of his soul becomes too pronounced, it overloads and swamps the clarity and definition of the words exchanged.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“It is one thing when the lifeimmanence of meaning vanishes with catastrophic suddenness from a pure, uncomplicated world, and quite another when this immanence is banished from the cosmos as though by the gradual working of a spell: in the latter case the longing for its return remains alive but unsatisfied; it never turns into a hopelessness rooted in certainty: therefore, the essence cannot build a tragic stage out of the felled trees of the forest of life, but must either awaken to a brief existence in the flames of a fire lit from the deadwood of a blighted life, or else must resolutely turn its back on the world’s chaos and seek refuge in the abstract sphere of pure essentiality.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)
“Researchers ask parents if they’re happy, but that’s the wrong question; it’s like asking a cow if it can fly. Evidently there’s something we prize above happiness, and that’s a good story, especially if it stars us.” – David Kirby (quoted in Rattle 64)
“Poetry is that ocean of fire I step into every time I’m desperate for some logic. It’s obviously hopeless. But for those moments when it seems to almost work, I keep on trying.” Maya Tevet Dayan (quoted in Rattle 66)
“The blood clot is doing // its job, / it’s doing exactly what // it was made to do / and the only thing you // need to do / when you are dying // is to die. / Nothing else. // You don’t need to / fold the laundry // or clean / the kitchen floor, // you don’t have to / pick your children up // from school. / Unlike // the rest of your life, / there is only this one // thing. You don’t even // have to be good at it, // you just have to / do it. A list of chores // with just one / chore.” – Matthew Dickman, “Stroke”
“If I were in your bedroom, would you pick me up and say, Oh my god you’re so light I could throw you across the room? Like a toy you want to break? Because you wouldn’t be the first. Would you do it? Throw me? Does that turn you on? Do you know what it’s like to be in bed with someone you’re also afraid of? Do you know what it’s like to walk home in the dark and wish you could grow claws?” – Arielle Moss, “Damn, You’re Tiny” (emphasis in original)
From the Sanskrit, there comes this: ‘Vinasa kale vibareetha pudthi’ which means, ‘When the time for your destruction is at hand you take strange decisions.’ (courtesy Abraham Sukumar at Quora)
“Have you ever met a god? It’s like this. They just can’t help themselves. They’re very sorry, the gods, but they are going to fuck you up. Like the child-eating goddess who would very much like to but just cannot, cannot stop herself from guzzling your little daughter.” – Adam Thirlwell, “Slow Motion”
“When we went to the district-commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish any scheme of life. We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe. With our young, awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants—salutes, springing to attention, parade-marches, presenting arms, right wheel, left wheel, clicking the heels, insults, and a thousand pettifogging details. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (trans. Wheen)
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“The writers from the provinces are usually rescued from their dream of becoming writers, a terrible dream, difficult to abandon, when their parents die in the provinces and leave them an apartment or a small factory or, in the worst case, a widow and a few mouths to feed, and the writer from the provinces must return to his province, where invariably he ends up establishing a literary workshop; there, he preaches the goodness of the capital and convinces his students that there, in the capital, something really happens, and sooner rather than later, the students end up leaving for the capital, and so the whole cycle repeats itself, like the life cycle of frogs.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)
“I no longer wanted to write; in fact, I didn’t even try. It was like I knew I’d wasted time at the station and the train had passed, and now I had to walk to the fucking end of the world, to arrive there with my feet destroyed and discover that everyone else had left a while back and they’d left the bill on the table without paying and a few dirty plates that I’d have to wash in the kitchen to cancel the bill.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)
“I have no qualifications in the career or, rather, pursuit I chose for my journey through life, and I’ve long ceased to think of it in those terms, although I suppose I got off to a pretty good start. In the end, though, I lost sight of my fellow runners, the ones you’re so conscience of at first, when you’re in your twenties or thirties and keep glancing out of the corner of your eye at those behind, intent (or so you believe) on overtaking you, meanwhile calculating how big a lead the runners ahead have over you and conserving your energies as you imagine the best way of getting past them for the final sprint. But there are no sprints, and certainly no final sprints. Indeed, I stopped running a long time ago. There’s no point. Just walk at the pace that suits your feet and you’ll end up arriving at the place you set out for. Or else keep quite still: lately, I’ve had the feeling that it’s simply a matter of sitting and waiting, that it isn’t us who do the walking, but the things around us, and they won’t fail us; they never do, because nothing ever fails and everything ends up happening anyway.” – Javier Montes, “The Hotel Life” (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“What a proletarian organ, the ass, the organ you sit on, and even though it seems to work and have working-class awareness, it’s really just waiting to die.” – Pola Oloixarac, “Conditions for the Revolution” (trans. Mara Faye Lethem)
“is it hard to be you? is it nice to be you? how does it feel to be you?” – Rodrigo Hasbún, “The Place of Losses” (trans. Carolina de Robertis)
“She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman—for she had never thought of them as being very bright—seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“Don’t fear the dog that barks, but fear the dog that’s quiet.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“When women feel that they are in the right, they scold and shed tears; when they are conscious of being in fault, they shed tears only.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” – James Baldwin, Another Country (emphasis in original)
“Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” – James Baldwin, Another Country