Noted: Coleman Dowell

From his 1976 novel, Island People:

"Look," she had said, commending the day to him, "how beautifully new." Sulky, he replied, "I've seen it before." She told him — peculiar that he could recall each word, perhaps because the words were peculiar in such quantity from her, but he imagined later that she had known she was to die in a matter of days ("Be precise if you can"—"Yes, Mother"), in four days' time. She told him, "You have never seen this place before," and when he looked at her, frightened, for it was their own woodland they walked in, she said: "Never, never, never have the leaves bent precisely so in the wind; never has the sedge faced us from just that angle of the bog; never has decay been at this particular point visible on the wood of the fence, tree; never has this peculiar collection of detritus edged the road; never have so many, so precisely many, leaves hung dead at the same time, nor has the illusion of blue between been so precisely this blue, never." But it was not hindsight that told him of her impending death. It was language, her use of language, the mystery of language itself. She had, in an odd way, herself become a Bach structure, knowing that she would not, with woefully inadequate ghost hands, be able to find particular oblivion. He, surely her instrument on that day, as later, responded to her sureness by learning all that he was meant to know in his persona as sonata verging on nocturne.

Noted: Thoreau

From The Journal, an entry from July 25, 1839, when he was 22:

I confess I have no little sympathy with the Indians and hunter men. They seem to me an distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man.

[...]

The Indian, perchance, has not made up his mind to some things which the white man has consented to; he has not, in all respect, stooped so low; and hence, though he too loves food and warmth, he draws his tattered blanket about him and follows his fathers, rather than barter his birthright. He dies, and no doubt his Genius judges well for him. But he is not worsted in the fight; he is not destroyed. He only migrates beyond the Pacific to more spacious and happier hunting grounds.

Noted: Spinoza

"The endeavor to live in a shared, peaceful agreement with others is an extension of the endeavor to preserve oneself." — Spinoza, quoted in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

Noted: Willa Cather

From Death Comes for the Archbishop:

After he had laid aside his vestments, Father Latour went over the church with Jacinto. As he examined it his wonder grew. What need had there ever been for this great church at Ácoma? It was built early in sixteen hundred, by Fray Juan Ramirez, a great missionary, who laboured on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more. It was Father Ramirez, too, who made the mule trail down the other side,--the only path by which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is still called "El Camino del Padre."

The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who followed him, was not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than according to the needs of the Indians. The magnificant site, the natural grandeur of this stronghold, might well have turned their heads a little. Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labour for this great work without military support. Every stone in that structure, every handful of earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was carried up the trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the great carved beams of the roof--Father Latour looked at them with amazement. In all the plain through which he had come he had seen no trees but a few stunted piñons. He asked Jacinto where these huge timbers could have been found.

"San Mateo mountain, I guess."

"But the San Mateo mountains must be forty or fifty miles away. How could they bring such timbers?"

Jacinto shrugged. "Ácomas carry." Certainly there was no other explanation.

Noted: Thomas Bernhard

This is "Impossible", one of the 104 one-page-or-less stories in Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, translation by Kenneth J. Northcott:

A playwright whose plays have been performed in all the major theaters made it a matter of principle not to go to any of these productions, and for years, enjoying greater and greater success, he was able to hold fast to this principle. He had resolutely rejected all invitations from theater managements to see their productions, leaving most of their requests unanswered. Besides, there was nothing he hated mroe than theater managers. One day he broke with his principle and went to the Düsseldorf theater--considered at the time one of the best houses, which, in the nature of things, means that the Düsseldorf theater was in fact one of the best theaters in Germany--and saw his latest play being performed there, not, in the nature of things, on the opening night but at the third or fourth performance. After he had seen what the Dusseldorf players had made of his play, he filed a complaint in the Düsseldorf court that had jurisdiction over such matters, and this was enough to have him committed, before the trial took place, to the famouse Bethel lunatic asylum in nearby Bielsfeld. He sued the manager of the Düsseldorf theater for the return of his play, which meant nothing short of demanding that everyone involved in his play in any manner whatsoever produce and return anything that had the least connection with his play. Of course he also demanded that the people in the audiences, nearly five thousand of them, who had already seen his play return to him what they had seen.

Noted: Maurice Blanchot

From "Dreaming, Writing", in Friendship:

Let us in turn dream about the supposed kinship between dreaming and writing--I will not say speech. Certainly, the one who awakens experiences a curious desire to talk about himself; he is immediately in search of a morning auditor whom he would like to have participate in the wonders he has lived through and is sometimes a little surprised that this auditor is not filled with wonder as he is. There are dark exceptions--there are fatal dreams--but for the most part we are happy with our dreams, we are proud of them; we have a naive pride befitting authors, certain as we are that we have created original works in our dreams, even if we refuse to claim any part in them. One must nonetheless ask oneself if such a work truly seeks to become public, if every dream seeks to be told, even while veiling itself. In Sumerian antiquity, one was advised to recount, to recite one's dreams. This was in order to release their magical power as quickly as possible. Recounting one's dreams was the best way to escape their bad consequences; or one might decide to inscribe their characteristic signs on a slab of clay, which one then threw into the water: the slab of clay prefigured the book; the water, the public. The wisdom of Islam nonetheless seems more reliable, which advises the dreamer to choose carefully the one in whom he will confide, and even to keep his secret rather than give it away at the wrong moment: "The dream," it is said, "belongs to the first interpreter; you should tell it only in secret, just as it was given to you....And tell no one your bad dream."

We recount our dreams out of an obscure need: to make them more real by living with someone else the singularity that belongs to them and that would seem to address them to one person alone; and further still, to appropriate them, establishing ourselves, through a common speech, not only as master of the dream but also as its principal actor and thus decisively taking hold of this similar, though eccentric, being that was us during the night.

Noted: Alfred North Whitehead

From "The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline", in The Aims of Education:

We must take it as an unavoidable fact, that God has so made the world that there are more topics desirable for knowledge than any one person can possibly acquire. It is hopeless to approach the problem by the way of the enumeration of subjects which every one ought to have mastered. There are too many of them, all with excellent title-deeds. Perhaps, after all, this plethora of material is fortunate; for the world is made interesting by a delightful ignorance of important truths.

Noted: Evelyn Scott

Also from Part VI of Escapade:

Manoel felled a tree in which was an owl nest and when he showed me the small blinded bird I asked him to let me keep it. I cut one of the owl's gray-brown wings and I have allowed him to run loose while we sleep. All night long I hear his hunting moan in the dark. I imagine him free; a gray cloud of feathered quiet drifting, his low cry, and his claws clinging to a young bird--clinging, clinging like an unlifting shadow. From a moral standpoint death, which is most inimical to human relations, should be hideous. But the owl has convinced me of the superficiality of moral judgments. He is the cruelest of creatures and the most innocent. In the morning he sits on my knee and I give him bits of our maggot-laden meat. He is resigned to me utterly. When I call to him in the daylight he always comes feebly toward the sound. And he stares, stares at me with his great helpless eyes, feeling perhaps, because I have given him meat, that I have become a part of his sightless world.

It is different with the hawk. Tilting himself back against the side of his cage, his claws, at the end of his thin stick-like legs, clutch tensely at the air, and when I attempt to feed him his terrible eyes select unerringly my moving finger. More than once he has dragged at it with his beak and torn my flesh. He was wounded when he was captured and it would be useless to free him. Nothing will free him but starvation. He sees us too plainly. His vision has placed us outside him forever. He recognizes our antithesis. He also reminds me of a child. He is another Death.

Noted: Evelyn Scott

From Part VI of Escapade, wherein Evelyn (named but once in the book) and John have bought some land in the mountains, hoping to make a living raising sheep and various crops--things don't go well and they are living in unbelievable poverty, alarming at times even to the locals (who are themselves very poor):

I love the rich purplish color of the floor where a sun spot moves on it. I lie here. I am better today. I have had my dinner of our unvarying food, boiled red beans and mandioc mush, with a red pepper to make it tolerable and large crystals of salt like gray-white rock. How warm and comforting food is. How entirely worth while to live to be able to eat. Life seems to me so sweet, so precious, that I wonder that everyone is not kind like John. When there is this awful impersonal Enemy to fight why are not people gentle to each other? Why do they not always stand together protecting themselves against it? I feel that I ought to warn them, to tell them of the danger they are in. It is, almost, that I have a mission to the race. I must make others realize what I alone seem to know, that all of us are subject to the obscure attacks of misfortune, that we have nothing to waste in unnecessary struggles which we ourselves precipitate. But, of course, I only mean that I want people to accept my view of life, my way of looking at marriage and at everything else. I have no wish to force myself on the world, but I want at least a tolerance which will allow me to exist. And at home John and I are actually considered dangerous. Do you not see how pitiful we are? I want to say. But in this also they will misunderstand me, for I love myself entirely, completely, and I will not accept from them any criticism of my acts.

I think sometimes that my pride is as strong as my pain--not quite, perhaps, but very nearly so. If I were the only one made to suffer I should accept everything out of pure defiance. It is through John and Jack [their child] that my self-respect can be subjugated. My pride affects me as an exaggeration of myself. Protest expands all of my being. My self-righteousness is much more intense than anything which I can intellectually define or encompass. Because I alone of all the world can understand and pity myself, I am God. I alone of all the world can offer equality to myself.

Noted: Maurice Blanchot

From the essay "Idle Speech", found in Friendship (translation Elizabeth Rottenberg):

In the end, once the work is finished, the one who has finished it finds himself expelled from it, thrown outside it, and thereafter incapable of finding access to it--no longer having, moreover, any desire to accede to it. It is only during the task of realization, when the power of reading is still completely internal to the work in progress, that the author--who still does not exist--can split himself off from himself into a reader yet to come, and can seek to confirm, through the indirect means of this hidden witness, what the movement of the words would be if grasped by another, who would still only be himself--that is, neither one nor the other, but only the truth of the splitting.

Noted: Franz Kafka

From the Diaries (translation by Joseph Kresh):

I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.

Noted: Peter Handke

From Across (translation by Ralph Manheim):

Now I had time. Facts and questions crystallized. This having-time wasn't a feeling; it was a resolution: the resolution of all my contradictory feelings. It was a jolt and a widening; disengagement and devotion; defenselessness and the ability to resist; quiescence and enterprise. Its occurrence was rare. Perhaps what is commonly called a "state of grace" should be called a "state of having time." It had its counterpart in a traditional paraphrase of the threshold concept as a "transition between privation and riches." In a state of having-time, a murmur spread over the countryside, colors shone, grasses trembled, moss cushions puffed up.

Noted: Peter Handke

From "The Long Way Around" section of Slow Homecoming (translation by Ralph Manheim):

He had never thought of himself as a scientist, but at the most (occasionally) as a conscientious describer of landscapes. As such, to be sure, he sometimes felt as excited as if he had invented the landscape--and as an inventor he knew that he could not possibly be wicked or selflessly good but was, in his work, an ideal human being. But then it might occur to him that perhaps he was doing good after all, not by giving something to others but by not betraying them. And this non-betrayal was not a failure to do something; it was a strenuous activity. At times he felt that his study of landscape was a science of peace.

Noted: Henry David Thoreau

From the "Higher Laws" section of Walden:

John Farmer sat at his door one Septemeber evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard someone playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him,--Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

Noted: Henry David Thoreau

From the section titled "The Ponds", in Walden (italics in original):

Flints' Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that he had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show not title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow,--there was nothing to redeem, forsooth, in his eyes,--and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose tree no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

Noted: Ingeborg Bachmann

From the story "A Wildermuth", collected in The Thirtieth Year (translated from the German by Michael Bullock):

So far as I can remember, my father, who was responsible for the education of so many children, did not bother much with my sister and myself; but he was perfectly willing to stop reading the newspaper or correcting exercise books when one of us had something to tell or our mother tactfully informed him of some piece of naughtiness, a quarrel or something of that sort, and then he would inevitably ask us: 'Is that true?' He was the inventor of the word 'true' with all its possible combinations. 'Truthful', 'truthfulness', 'truth', 'the true', 'love of truth', 'truly'--these words came from him and he was the author of the wonder which these words aroused in me from an early age. Even before Icould understand these words they acquired for me an overpowering fascination. As other children at that age try laboriously to fit bricks together exactly to a pattern, so I made the greatest possible effort to reproduce the pattern of 'telling the truth', and I guessed that by this my father meant that I should relate 'exactly' what happened. Naturally I did not know the purpose of this, but so far as a little brain like mine could manage it, I soon made a practice of always telling the truth, less out of fear of my father than out of a sombre desire to do so. For this I was called 'an honest child'. But soon what satisfied my father was no longer enough for me--for example to say that I had loitered on my way home from school or was late for lunch because of a fight; I began to tell the even truer truth. For suddenly I understood--it may have been during my first or second year at school--what was being asked of me, and I realized that I was justified in what I was doing. My desire encountered another desire, a good desire distinguished from all other desires, which was directed towards me by adults. An easy, wonderful life stood in front of me. I was not only permitted, but obliged to tell the truth under all circumstances! So if my father asked why I had come home so late from school, I had to say that the teacher had kept us in for a quarter of an hour for talking and making a noise. I had to say that on top of this I had met Frau Simon on my way home and this had made me later still.

[...]

Then I tried to remember the exact wording of the sentence the teacher had spoken, and I repeated word for word precisely what Frau Simon had said, how she had taken hold of my sleeve as she talked, how she had suddenly been standing in front of me on the bridge. But after I had related everything in the minutest detail, I started all over again, because with great agitation I noticed that what I had said still wasn't completely accurate, and moreover everything I spoke of was linked up with a fact, a subject, that lay outside the subjects I had mentioned. It was so difficult to report everything in every particular, but the important thing was to want to, and I certainly wanted to, I went on trying to do so and was ardently keen on this task that was so much finer than the tasks set as school homework. I wanted the truth, and at the time this meant above all to tell the truth.

[...]

Not until much later did it occur to me that there were many things about which I was not asked, was never called to account--that I had not told the truth about everything.

Later:

Yes, what then is the truth about myself, about anyone? [...]

Or the truth about the world, since I cannot work out the sum of myself and since I alone am able to see, feel and understand so variously. For instance a desk, a single object like my writing-desk. Often, without recognizing it indifferently, I have sat down at it or touched it; I have felt my way past it in the dark; I have sketched it in a letter to a friend, then it amounted to a few pencil lines; I sometimes smell it--it smells of long hours of work; I look at it in amazement when the papers have all been cleared away and it stands in front of me free, a different desk--and what about all the other things this massive desk is? A quantity of firewood, a shape that bespeaks a particular style, it has a weight as freight, it had a price and will have another today or after my death. There is no end to the truth concerning this desk. A fly will see it differently from a budgerigar, and has Gerda ever seen it as I see it? I don't know, I'm only sure that she knows the spot where I burnt a hole in the top with a cigrette. To her it is my desk, the one with the burn; apart from this, she knows about its turned legs because they are 'dust catchers'. Only through her do I know it is a dust catcher, on the other hand I know what she does not know: what a feeling of wellbeing it gives you when you rest both elbows on it, and how your eyes get caught up in its grain as you sit and think, and what it is like to sleep on this desk, for I have several times fallen asleep over my work, letting my head drop forward onto the top of the desk.

Noted: Saul Bellow

From The Adventures of Augie March:

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marché department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreoever, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Noted: Marguerite Duras

In The Square, a young woman and an older man, a traveling salesman, are talking:

"It's true that we're talking of different things. Travel or cities by the sea are not the things I want. First of all I want to belong to myself, to own something, not necessarily something very wonderful, but something which is mine, a place of my own, maybe only one room, but mine. Why sometimes I even find myself dreaming of a gas stove."

"You know it would be just the same as traveling. You wouldn't be able to stop. Once you had the gas stove you would want a refrigerator and after that something else. It would be just like traveling, going from city to city. It would never end."

"Excuse me, but do you see anything wrong in my wanting something further perhaps after I have the refrigerator?"

"Of course not. No, certainly not. I was only speaking for myself, and as far as I am concerned I find your idea even more exhausting than traveling and then going on traveling, moving as I do from place to place."

"I was born and grew up like everyone else and I know how to look around me: I look at things very carefully and I can see no reason why I should remain as I am. I must start somehow, anyhow, to become of consequence. And if at this stage I began losing heart at the thought of a refrigerator I might never even possess the gas stove. And anyway, how am I to know if it would weary me or not? If you say it would, it might be because you have given the matter a great deal of thought or perhaps even because at some time you very much disliked one particular refrigerator."

"No, it is not that. Not only have I never possessed a refrigerator, but I have never had the slightest chance of doing so. No, it's only an idea, and if I talked of refrigerators like that it was probably only because to someone who travels they seem especially heavy and immobile. I don't suppose I would have made the same remarks about another object. And yet I do understand, I assure you, that it would be impossible for you to travel before you had the gas stove, or even perhaps, the refrigerator. And I expect I am quite wrong to be so easily discouraged at the mere thought of a refrigerator."

"It does seem very strange."

"There was one day in my life, just one, when I no longer wanted to live. I was hungry, and as I had no money it was absolutely essential for me to work if I was to eat. It was as if I had forgotten that this was as true of everyone as of me. That day I felt quite unused to life and there seemed no point in going on living because I couldn't see why things should go on for me as they did for other people. It took me a whole day to get over this feeling. Then, of course, I took my suitcase to the market and aterwards I had a meal and things went on as they had before. But with this difference, that ever since that day I find that any thought of the future--and after all thinking of a refrigerator is thinking of the future--is much more frightening than before."

Noted: J.M. Coetzee

From Coetzee's memoir, Youth:

He pages through it. It is printed in the same fullbodied serif type as Pound's Selected Poems, a type that evokes for him intimacy, solidity. He buys the book and takes it back to Major Arkwright's. From the first page he knows he has hit on something. Propped up in bed with light pouring through the window, he reads and reads.

Watt is quite unlike Beckett's plays. There is no clash, no conflict, just the flow of a voice telling a story, a flow continually checked by doubts and scruples, its pace fitted exactly to the pace of his own mind. Watt is also funny, so funny that he rolls about laughing. When he comes to the end he starts again at the beginning.

Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of [Ford Madox] Ford when Beckett was around all the time? In Ford there has always been the element of the stuffed shirt that he has disliked but has been hesitant to acknowledge, something to do with the value Ford placed on knowing where in the West End to buy the best motoring gloves or how to tell a Médoc from a Beaune; whereas Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself would prefer to be.

Noted: Søren Kierkegaard

From the preface to Fear and Trembling (in the translation by Alastair Hannay):

Even if one were able to render the whole of the content of faith into conceptual form, it would not follow that one had grasped faith, grasped how one came to it, or how it came to one.