Category: Lit & Crit
“The expectation that cats can be made to change their nature, like wayward teens in a Scared Straight course, is a new development in feline-human relations. Humans bred dogs to be loyal and companionate; cats domesticated themselves. Biologists call them ‘commensal domesticates,’ meaning that they can live with humans, and yet, unlike most other domesticated species, they can revert at any time to feral status. What you glean from the general feline vibe is evolutionary truth: cats can take us or leave us.” — Ariel Levy, “Living-Room Leopards”
“In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.” – John McPhee, “Draft No. 4″
“A fundamental coward is not afraid of the putative cowardice-betraying things, like physical danger. Those things are cosmetic cowardice. In deep cowardice you are afraid of life itself, and you learn to wear a coat of bluster and cheer that hides the fear.” – Padgett Powell (interview with Jacob White in “Having It Together”)
now does our world descend
the path to nothingness
(cruel now cancels kind;
friends turn to enemies)
therefore lament,my dream
and don a doer’s doom
create is now contrive;
imagined,merely know
(freedom:what makes a slave)
therefore,my life,lie down
and more by most endure
all that you never were
hide,poor dishonoured mind
who thought yourself so wise;
and much could understand
concerning no and yes:
if they’ve become the same
it’s time you unbecame
where climbing was and bright
is darkness and to fall
(now wrong’s the only right
since brave are cowards all)
therefore despair,my heart
and die into the dirt
but from this endless end
of briefer each our bliss–
where seeping eyes go blind
(where lips forget to kiss)
where everything’s nothing
–arise,my soul;and sing.
– E.E. Cummings, “62” from 73 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
annie died the other day
never was there such a lay—
whom,among her dollies,dad
first(“don’t tell your mother”)had;
making annie slightly mad
but very wonderful in bed
—saints and satyrs,go your way
youths and maidens:let us pray”
– E.E. Cummings, “22” from 73 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
“I like writing sad songs, it’s a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It’s a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist.” — Paul McCartney
dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
– E.E. Cummings, “60” from 95 Poems
what Got him was Noth
ing & nothing’s exAct
ly what any
one Living(or some
body Dead
like
even a Poet)could
hardly express what
i Mean is
what knocked him over Wasn’t
(for instance)the Knowing your
whole(yes god
damned)life is a Flop or even
to Feel how
Everything(dreamed
& hoped &
prayed for
months & weeks & days & years
& nights &
forever)is Less Than
Nothing(which would have been
Something)what got him was nothing
– E.E. Cummings, “30” from 95 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose:higher than have
—but beauty is more each than living’s all
multiplied with infinity sans iff
the mightiest meditations of mankind
cancelled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)
or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)
death,as men call him,ends what they call men
—but beauty is more now than dying’s when
– E.E. Cummings, “LII” from 1 X 1 (punctuation and spacing as in original)
“When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” – Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)” (ed. Gay)
“If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,the Making obsession has disadvantages;for instance,my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately,however,I should prefer to make almost anything else,including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives(not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagra Falls)that my ‘poems’ are competing.” – E.E. Cummings, is 5 (punctuation and spacing as in original)
“My wife had opened a bottle of liqueur, on which the word ‘Ananas’ appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has a habit of making presents on every possible occasion. It has to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to cure him of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong smell of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I—with even greater prudence—vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropic spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either.” – Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (emphasis in original; ed. Gay)
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” – David Foster Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech, 2005″
“Satan has one pure pleasure: waiting until you have forgotten him, moved on with your life, feeling, if not a certain variety of cheerfulness, precisely, then at least the deficiency of immediate despair, and stepping up beside you on the street, nestling up behind you in your bed, to remind you in his hissy whisper of just who and what you are not.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Travel shows you what you already know in ways you don’t recognize. How little you understand when you begin your journey. How much less when you end it.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Our entire popular culture is in essence about high school: about reliving it, about its social relations, about the fears it hammers into your plans.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that the reason the earth-ball is swarmy with transgression lies not in the fact that Man has foundered, failed, fallen, but that he has never risen, flourished, revised his basic constitution in the slightest, has always been, in a word, exactly what he is now: sin lodged in skin.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“One must learn to stay put in order to see.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We hardly find any persons of good sense, save those who agree with us.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“To be a great man one should know how to profit by every phase of fortune.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“If there be men whose folly has never appeared, it is because it has never been closely looked for.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“It is as proper to be boastful alone as it is ridiculous to be so in company.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We may forgive those who bore us, we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)