Gaurav Sagar > Recent Status Updates

We are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy. strength; and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.

And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and one whose memory will last longer, then see how, for the space of an hour, he sets loose in us all possible happiness and unhappiness...

We progress funeral by funeral.
-Max Planck

But later I understood that the startling strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes was due to the large place which the symbol occupied in them, and the fact that it was represented, not as a symbol, since the thought symbolized was not expressed, but as real, as actually experienced or physically handled, gave something more literal and more precise to the meaning of the work, something more concrete

I think Francoise did not believe me, for like those primitive men whose senses were so much more powerful than ours she could immediately discern, from signs imperceptible to us, any truth that we wanted to hide from her; she looked at the envelope for five minutes as if the examination of the paper and the appearance of the writing would inform her about the nature of the contents

Even the very simple act that we call 'seeing a person we knew' is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the total picture that we from for ourselves, these notions certainly have the greater part.

She was therefore always a little tempted to anticipate her desires, not because they were important to her, but in order to prevent them from becoming important.

But a thought is not exactly a person, even if it lives and acts like one. A thought demands a loyalty which makes any slyness difficult. Sometimes it is itself false, but behind this lie I still recognize something real, which I cannot betray.

Since you should have been dead two years ago, everything that remains of your life is a reprieve.

I can see how bitter she had felt when she heard me agree to her suicide.

But there was nothing for me. Now I was weary from having desired too much; I felt suddenly old. I would never recover from the disease implanted in my chest. The dream of tranquility which I dreamt a little earlier had appealed to me and tempted me only because it would never be fulfilled. And even if it were, I would dream another dream, for my heart too was a dream.

I stand up. I wander about my room. What am I? What am I? Oh, I must, I must find an answer to this question, because another question hangs from it like a threat: What is to become of me?

Nobody, nothing, has the right to exact expiation; besides, nobody can; vengeance is too far removed from the act and strikes so to speak another person. Expiation is therefore a word for which there is no possible use whatever.

The dying man had closed up and become hard and incredulous in the presence of this stranger with the vulgar face, on whose lips the word God and truth on a comic complexion, and who wanted him to open his heart to him.

'Happiness needs unhappiness; joy is partly composed of sadness; it is thanks to our crucifixion on time and space that our heart beats in the midst of it all. We mustn't dream of some sort of ridiculous abstraction; we must retain the link which chains us to the earth and the flesh. Remember: "Such as we are." We are a great amalgam; we are more than we think: who knows what we are ?'

As soon as everything escapes, one is alone.

Everything turns us in upon ourselves and condemns us to ourselves alone. You said that day: "There are things which you hide from me, and which I shall never know- even of you tell them to me." You showed me that love is only a short of celebration of our solitude, and you ended up by crying out to me, as you engulfed me in your arms: "Our love is me!"

All hearts are identical with their creation. The mind full of mystery, the blood of the night hours, and desire akin to darkness, utter their cry of victory. Lovers, when they clasp each other, fight each for himself and say: I love you; they wait, weep and suffer, and say We are happy; they let go of each other, already faltering, and say Always !

All these words are inert words which leave in existence the grandeur of what was, without being able to touch it, they are vain, futile noises; they are like the barking of a dog, the sound of branches moving in the wind.

It would be like forestalling the future and allowing the past to encroach upon me. I create each hour anew only by completely forgetting the past. I am never content simply to have been happy. I don't believe in dead things. For me, being no more is the same as never having been.

The Trial by Existence

And none are taken but who will,
Having first heard the life read out
That opens earthward, good and ill,
Beyond the shadow of a doubt;
And very beautifully God limns,
And tenderly, life's little dream,
But naught extenuates or dims,
Settling the thing that is supreme.

Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know?

All for me? And not a question
For the faded flowers gay
That could take me from beside you
For the ages of a day?
They are yours, and be the measure
Of their worth for you to treasure,
The measure of the little while
That I've been long away.

INTO MY OWN

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun's
Red kelson past the cape's wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix's breast-
My eyes pressed black against the prow
-They derelict and blinded guest

FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN

The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes.
Across the stacked partitions of the day-
Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

b FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN

The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes.
Across the stacked partitions of the day-
Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once and again; vermin and rod

No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

NORTH LABRADOR

A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently
Into eternity.

"Has no one come here to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush
Upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright ?"

Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
That journey toward no Spring-
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer.

PASTORALE

No more violets,
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasms.

That ritual of sap and leaves
The sun drew out,
Ends in this latter muffled
Bronze and brass. The wind
Takes rein.

If dusty, I bear
An image beyond this
Already fallen harvest,
I can only query, "Fool-
Have you remembered too long

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorus on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.