#theparisreview

[longislandblue]

Sometimes I feel more than, like I could lift a hand and touch the clouds and other times, I feel less, a vermin, a slave to instinct then I realized that is what it means to be human I aspire to greatness, knowing full well, I will be content with less, happy even….. I reach, eager to find the end of my potential, my natural limit and I recoil, afraid of what it means to jump, hoping to fly, but instead, falling…. How do I fight my own personal battle in this long-waged war against eventuality When, within me, something lies each day, waiting to surrender I drive myself, on swift race cars, on a bed of snails, but onwards always to the brink of death and by the skin of my nails, I pull myself from the edge, to live another day Meanwhile, the abyss calls, ever unrelenting and I draw closer, knowing that some cloudless day when all hooks that tether me to love, pull back I will willingly surrender to the pull of the void.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Image: Barbara Bloom; via theparisreview]

* * * *

What would the world be without poetry, he asked, and I listened.

-Robert Devlin, from “Maenad”

[insidewarp]

theparisreview

[livesanskrit]

Send from Sansgreet Android App. Sanskrit greetings app from team @livesanskrit .

It's the first Android app for sending @sanskrit greetings. Download app from https://livesanskrit.com/sansgreet

Peter Matthiessen.

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA officer. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979, category Contemporary Thought) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008). He was also a prominent environmental activist.

#sansgreet #sanskritgreetings #greetingsinsanskrit #sanskritquotes #sanskritthoughts #emergingsanskrit #sanskrittrends #trendsinsanskrit #livesanskrit #sanskritlanguage #sanskritlove #sanskritdailyquotes #sanskritdailythoughts #sanskrit #resanskrit #celebratingsanskrit #petermatthiessen #peter #novelist #naturalist #wildernesswriter #writer #zenteacher #ciaofficer #theparisreview #newyork #unitedstates #us #sagaponack #english

[mybookof-you]

舞踏会露西亜みやげの扇かな Butōkai Roshia miyage no ōgi kana At the ball a souvenir from Russia a fan

Mishima wrote a set of five haiku referring to the Rokumeikan and its age. He was sixteen, and he was prompted to write them, one is tempted to imagine, when he saw a Western dress and some paraphernalia—remnants from the youthful days of his grandmother Natsuko among the clothes taken out to air for mushiboshi, a seasonal word for “summer.”

...Other than mushiboshi, each of the four other haiku contains a summer kigo: kōsui, “perfume,” thought to help dispel the smell of perspiration; enrai, “distant thunder,” because there’s more thunder in the summer than in other seasons (there are about ten kinds of thunder listed as kigo); hotaru, “fireflies”; and ōgi, “fan.”

The fan here is obviously of a decorative variety, and that prompts me to add that before Japan defeated Russia in the 1904–1905 war during the period of global imperialistic expansion—has it ever stopped?—or even before the Russian revolution, Japan’s high society looked up to the Russian aristocracy like the aristocracy of any other European country, and treated things from that country as admirable exotica, although I must also add that those decorative fans may well have been made in Japan and exported.

theparisreview

[bintadnan]

-Excerpt from Simone De Beauvoir's interview with The Paris Review.

[explore-chat]

My Faithful Mother Tongue

by Czeslaw Milosz

Faithful mother tongue I have been serving you. Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch as preserved in my memory.

This lasted many years. You were my native land; I lacked any other. I believed that you would also be a messenger between me and some good people even if they were few, twenty, ten or not born, as yet.

Now, I confess my doubt. There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life. For you are a tongue of the debased, of the unreasonable, hating themselves even more than they hate other nations, a tongue of informers, a tongue of the confused, ill with their own innocence.

But without you, who am I? Only a scholar in a distant country, a success, without fears and humiliations. Yes, who am I without you? Just a philosopher, like everyone else.

I understand, this is meant as my education: the glory of individuality is taken away, Fortune spreads a ted carpet before the sinner in a morality play while on the linen backdrop a magic lantern throws images of human and divine torture.

Faithful mother tongue, perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you. So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors bright and pure if possible, for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.

The Paris Review, Issue no. 87 (Spring 1983) via their daily poem listserv

[confrontthefamiliar]

"It may become a field guide to certain shared experiences of Youth—allowing you both to observe, on a summer night when everyone around you is having Breakdowns, that this is exactly like Lives of the Saints.” Krithika Varagur on Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/09/15/the-entangled-life-on-nancy-lemann/#more-161597

[honeymooninthefridge]

Garth Greenwell - The Paris Review

[ramirollona]

P. Mary McCarthy ha dicho que es usted un utopista amargado. ¿Considera acertada esa caracterización? R.: Yo, cuando hablo, lo hago con la intención de que se interprete literalmente lo que digo, para que la gente tome conciencia de la criminalidad del tiempo en que vivimos, para que vean los indicios. Todo mi trabajo va dirigido contra aquellos que, por estupidez o predisposición biológica, se han propuesto volar el planeta o hacerlo inhabitable. Al igual que los publicistas de los que hemos hablado, me interesa la manipulación precisa de la palabra y la imagen para estimular una acción. Pero, en mi caso, no para que alguien salga a comprar una Coca-Cola, sino para provocar un cambio en la conciencia del lector. Una vez me preguntaron si seguiría escribiendo en una isla desierta; sabiendo que nadie iba a leer lo que escribo. Y la respuesta es sí, rotundamente: seguiría escribiendo para tener compañía, porque al escribir creo un mundo imaginario - siempre es imaginario- en el que me gustaría vivir. #williamsburroughs (1965) #theparisreview https://www.instagram.com/p/Chsty_GJUIF/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[ubiubiquitous]

There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel.

Frankie Thomas, “What Was It About Animorphs?,” The Paris Review

[docnad]

A George Plimpton Letter to Danny Shanahan buff.ly/3BskyHW #GeorgePlimpton #TheParisReview #DannyShanahan https://www.instagram.com/p/CU1Ppt-sd3b/?utm_medium=tumblr

[bardo1129]

#ismailkadere #distance #exile #outsider #seperate #distance by #theparisreview #writing #screenwriting #tvwriting #nycgratitude. (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLIRrNUBy9P/?igshid=1lawf6bdp4o1j

[mybookof-you]

Yukio Mishima

One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old, and it reads:

おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves

The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on to become a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Morocco and Portugal.

YUKIO MISHIMA AND A CAT.

theparisreview