If I were so inspired, I could challenge any one of my classmates to a debate on any of the daily lessons. I would call his name, he would stand up, I would announce my challenge and ask him a question. The language of these jousts was strictly medieval: “Contra te! Super te!” (Against you! […]
Monday, February 10, 2014
I suffered from several indefinable illnesses and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all. Deep down in my consciousness, I can recall my actual condition, the stench of my body’s secretions, the damp chafing clothes, the soft glow of the nightlight, the door into the next room just ajar, the nursemaid’s […]
We have another classical text, Lucretius’ De rerum natura where personal immortality is denied. The most memorable of the arguments given by Lucretius is this: A person complains that he is going to die. He thinks that the future will forget him. As Victor Hugo said, “He will go alone in the middle of the […]
Thursday, January 30, 2014
“Then, in a dirty alley in the poorest quarter of the town, he had got into conversation with an old blind man, a very old beggar who crouched at a street corner and held out his shaking hand in the hope that someone would drop something into it. This seemed an odd thing in a […]
I’m the soul in the body of the man named Nijinsky. Gaunt, I eat little, only what the spirit feeds me. I hate having a bloated stomach. It inhibits dancing. I’m afraid of crowds, of dancing for them— they demand a joyful jig but joy is death. They feel nothing but want my life to […]
Saturday, January 18, 2014
WITH SORROW IN MY HEART AND MUCH PITY FOR THE WEAK WHO PUT STUMBLING BLOCKS IN MY PATH AND WISHED MY LIFE A PERPETUAL SLOUGH OF DESPOND, I RESPECTFULLY DEDICATE THIS VOLUME THE AUTHOR —Sue Greenleaf, dedication of Liquid from the sun’s rays
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Declared or not, the prejudice, sweetened by different vocabularies and adopted by successive dialectics, is the prejudice of realism. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, the guarantee of its ideology, assumes a reality outside the text, outside the literalness of writing. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, […]
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
One summer, Sophia was suddenly afraid of small animals, and the smaller they were, the more afraid she was. This was altogether new. Ever since the first time she trapped a spider in a matchbox in order to make it her pet, her summers had been full of caterpillars, tadpoles, worms, beetles, and similar uncompanionable […]
Thursday, November 7, 2013
For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of […]
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy… whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. —first sentence of E.M. Cioran’s […]
Also filed in
|
|