The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God;

T

—Is it all right to kiss a nun? —What do you mean, for Christ’s sake? —Sure it’s all right, as long as you don’t get into the habit.

N

Clarity’s essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough.

C

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.

C

black poodle

M

. every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.

N

America is the country of young men. —Emerson

E

Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.

C

everyone thinks he’s honest because he doesn’t know how to be clever.

H

—Yes, I don’t live, I’m . . . I am lived, he whispered.

L

Smoke and the human voice made one texture, knitting together these people for whom Dante had rejuvenated Hell six centuries before.

D

The conversation was of an intellectual intensity forgotten since Laberius recommended to a character in one of his plays to get a foretaste of philosophy in the public latrine.

L

one can never finish a work of art? one only abandons it?

V

the words of Saint Gregory (“the Contemplative Life is greater in merit and higher than the active”),

C

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of . . . recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn’t be sinful to want to have created beauty?

R

He stood numb, surrounded by ice, among the frozen giants of buildings, as though to dare a step would send him head over heels in a night with neither hope of morning to come nor heaven’s betrayal of its triumphal presence, in the stars.

B

The sea, romantic in books, or dreams or conversation, symbol in poetry, the mother, last lover, and here it was, none of those things before him. Romantic? this heaving, senseless actuality? alive? evil? symbolical? shifting its surfaces in imitation of life over depths the whole fabric of darkness, of blind life and death. Boundlessly neither yes or no, good nor evil, hope nor fear, pretending to all these things in the eyes that first beheld it, but unchanged since then, still its own color, heaving with the indifferent hunger of all actuality.

S