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but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.
What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.
He had quite decided that she wouldn’t have been able to see the romance of the bathroom as he could.
THE THRESHOLD
“As for ourselves,” said they, “you must take us as you find us, and judge of us as you see us, what we are, or what we may be to you, as all men must, who have a high courage and a clear vision.”
But you must know now, that it turned out as it must turn out, must you not? Such is the power of necessity in tales.
THE CORRESPONDENCE
METAMORPHOSIS
PSYCHE
“ambages and sinuosities”
The impulses to religion might be the need to trust—or the capacity for wonder—and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter.
Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself from our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways—now so far away from us—or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis—have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance—and is this necessity health or sickness?
Mrs Lees—Now Mrs Lees is convinced that the phenomena of Déjà-Vu—whereby the experient is convinced that a present experience is only a Repetition of what has already, perhaps frequently, been lived through before—is Evidence of some circularity of inhuman time—of Another Adjacent World where things eternally are with no change or decay.
if I construct a fictive eyewitness account—a credible plausible account—am I lending life to truth with my fiction—or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination?
Do you know—the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination.
So I speak to you—or not speak, write to you, write written speech—a strange mixture of kinds—I speak to you as I might speak to all those who most possess my thoughts—to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats—and find myself unpardonably lending you, who are alive, my voice, as I habitually lend it to those dead men—Which is much as to say—here is an author of Monologues—trying clumsily to construct a Dialogue—and encroaching on both halves of it.
Speak to you as you have possessed my thoughts
Jonathan liked this
I was just asserting—I am no Creature of your thought, nor in danger of becoming so—we are both safe in that regard.
I could call you, with even greater truth—my Love—there, it is said—for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely.
All of which casuistry is only to say, my very dear, come back to the Park, let me touch your hand again, let us walk in our decorous storm together.
The true exercise of freedom is—cannily and wisely and with grace—to move inside what space confines—and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. But we are human—and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means.
SWAMMERDAM
I ask myself, did Galileo know Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space, Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me— Not the chill glory of Heaven’s Infinite— But all the swarming, all the seething motes The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice, We cannot see, but are in their degrees
From smallest as from greatest?
What is a House?
We are a Faustian generation, my dear—we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.
“Literary critics make natural detectives,”
“Narrative curiosity
And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man Saw answering lights in Embla’s lapis eyes The red blood Loki set to spring in them Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she Was like himself, yet other; then she saw His smiling face, and by it, knew her own— And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled To see their goodly work, so fair begun In recognition and in sympathy. Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore And touched the woman’s hand, who clasped fast his. Speechless they walked away along the line Of the sea’s roaring, in their listening ears. Behind them, first upon the level
...more
And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with—something?
The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally.
myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm.
Like many biographies, she judged, this was as much about its author as its subject, and she did not find Mortimer Cropper’s company pleasant.
It is my belief that at this point in time Randolph had reached what we crudely call a “mid-life crisis,” as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles.
“Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?
Everything relates to us and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor—”
Self possessed
She was puckered but wholesome, like an old apple,
They say that women change: ’tis so: but you Are ever-constant in your changefulness, Like that still thread of falling river, one From source to last embrace in the still pool Ever-renewed and ever-moving on From first to last a myriad water-drops And you—I love you for it—are the force That moves and holds the form. —R. H. ASH, Ask to Embla, XIII
Beautiful
Jonathan liked this
I cannot describe the air to you. It is like no other air. Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air; it runs the risk of a meaningless lyricism or inexact metaphors—so I will not write of it in terms of wine or crystal, though both those things came into my mind.
“Sometimes I feel,” said Roland carefully, “that the best state is to be without desire.
“At my life, at the way it is—what I really want is to—to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. Some of that is to do with—my personal circumstances. But some of it’s general. I think.”
“It wouldn’t matter. I just want to look at something, with interest, and without layers of meaning. Something new.”
Something new
“Life is so short,” said Roland. “It has a right to breathe.”
And is love then more Than the kick galvanic Or the thundering roar Of Ash volcanic Belched from some crater Of earth-fire within? Are we automata Or Angel-kin? —R. H. ASH
Kick gavanic
The nose was clearcut and the mouth firm and settled—a face, one might think, that knew itself and had a decided way of taking in the world.
He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him; nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide.
So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her.
He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression—an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm.
But he had known immediately that she was for him, she was to do with him, as she really was or could be, or in freedom might have been.
“Le dégoût, c’est voir juste. Après la possession, l’amour voit juste chez les hommes.”
At the end, the hero had been left at the bedroom door by the writer, and then let in, as a kind of post scriptum.
