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zbigniew herbert

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all the “ironic,” “funny,” “witty” takes / comments / commentary etc. in light of recent events (and broadly speaking the entire u.s. political discourse in general) seems to me part of a disturbing trend of wry, congratulatory defeatism that masks cowardice behind an increasingly masturbatory celebration of inaction, an easy yet socially acceptable method we have, throughout the years, communally constructed to justify an intellectual distance between ourselves and action so that when “doom” comes a part of us is glad that we were “right.”

This jolt of sinister pleasure is a dangerous distraction. Internet-humor-twitterspeak is not, as we so often want to tell ourselves, a coping mechanism from reality. It has become a coping mechanism from the crushing guilt we can feel from our inaction as well as a justification for it, because the “truth” we sell ourselves is that we are powerless and our actions pointless. But isn’t that just Pilate washing his hands?

We cannot buy into the easy, cheap lie that we have no power. It’s weak and wrong in the highest sense—we all must, now, more than ever, reclaim our sense of agency and authority as fully incarnated beings. We cannot let fear castrate us from life. Especially when the worst are full of passionate intensity. Enough with the defeatism!

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“I denounce our weakness, I denounce the maddening horror of dying — and I respond to all this infamy with — exactly this that now will be written — and I respond to all this infamy with joy. Purest and lightest joy. My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

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can’t remember the last time a novel scared me as much as wharton’s custom of the country…..downright terrifying.

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William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

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“As far as words go, ‘crying’ is louder and ‘weeping’ is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of ‘cried’, the velvet cloak of ‘wept’. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted ‘dreamt’ was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which ’d’ has never dreamt.”

— Heather Christle, from The Crying Book

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YK Kim

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“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”

— Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (via malavermelha)

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“ … to associate the rhythm of the life of the body with that of the world, to feel this association constantly, and to feel also the perpetual exchange of matter by which the human being bathes in the world.”

Simone Weil