____________________
Kate and Anna McGarrigle
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
From MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
Episode 9 (1969)
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This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Monday, August 29, 2022
Sunday, August 28, 2022
One Hundred Years of Solitude
____________________
It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Saturday, August 27, 2022
"An Evening Roam in the Forest"
____________________
It is too bright, it is too bright
Where moonlight casts its glow; --
My heart is, by this calm of night,
Transfused and trembles so;
On every bloom, each leaf that curls
Rests evening is string of dew-drop pearls
And quivers to my gaze! --
It is too bright, too bright the glow
Here by the water is brink! --
Behold the waves too-silent flow,
And mirrored stars that sink
Till in the watery deep they're bathed
Seem like forget-me-nots grief-swathed,
Like eyes that sorrow shrouds.
Far yonder, to the distant North
Where fir-trees darkly press,
Where Hulders in the fell hold forth
(You might well call it wilderness)
There I possess a cherished place,
There I'll direct my steps apace,
My sanctuary is there!
Behold the mountain peaks abrupt
That muffling clouds enclose; --
An autumn storm will soon erupt,
Night is wind already blows! --
-- O, sweet; -- as though I were inspired
I feel by this same tempest fired
To journey through the night! -- --
Deep in the woods, away, away!
O, further still from here,
Until the soul falls wholly prey
To this wild, panic fear, --
Till you're convinced the wraiths of night
Attend you on your headlong flight
However swift you speed! --
Hush, silence now; -- this is the spot! --
Amidst the forest bound
Hark, owls are shrieking, -- mark you not? --
Ah, how sublime they sound!
Theirs is a merry melody, --
Let not one note neglectfully
Escape you; -- ah, how sweet! -- --
The spruces, standing black and tall,
The tarn is dour verges crowd;
-- As through the air the storm-winds squall,
Observe the misty shroud, --
It glides aloft and then glides down,
Now wraps about the forest crown
Now covers the black depths.
Here may the heart find such content
Amid the raging storm;
Here Nature is visage can present
My breast in mirrored form,
An image of my given doom:
No peace in life nor in the tomb,
No peace eternally! --
Friday, August 26, 2022
Thursday, August 25, 2022
T. S. ELIOT
From "East Coker"
The Four Quartets
________________________
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
Wednesday, August 24, 2022
ELIAS CANETTI
Crowds and Power
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The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny.
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
JAMES JOYCE
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
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Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.
Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
Monday, August 22, 2022
MARCEL PROUST
Le Côté de Guermantes, Part 1
____________________
It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge
of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
Sunday, August 21, 2022
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Friday, August 19, 2022
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Thursday, August 18, 2022
TOM STOPPARD
Travesties
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I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the third thing.
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"Phantom"
____________________
All look and likeness caught from earth
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass'd away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais'd beneath the rifted stone
But of one spirit all her own;
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Monday, August 15, 2022
Sunday, August 14, 2022
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DAVID CRONENBERG
On The Fly and The Metamorphosis
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Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon. They articulate that universal sense of empathy for all life forms that we feel; they express that desire for transcendence that every religion also expresses; they prompt us to wonder if transformation into another living creature would be a proof of the possibility of reincarnation and some sort of afterlife and is thus, however hideous or disastrous the narrative, a religious and hopeful concept.
Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon. They articulate that universal sense of empathy for all life forms that we feel; they express that desire for transcendence that every religion also expresses; they prompt us to wonder if transformation into another living creature would be a proof of the possibility of reincarnation and some sort of afterlife and is thus, however hideous or disastrous the narrative, a religious and hopeful concept.
Saturday, August 13, 2022
ANNE CARSON
"Her Beckett"
____________________
Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by
Beckett.
You know that sense of sinking through crust,
the low black oh no of the little room
with walls too close, so knowable.
Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory
but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated
on a page of pain,
Worse
she says when I ask.
And as in Beckett some high humor grazes
her eye—
“we went out rowing on Lake Como”—
not quite reaching the lip.
Our love, that half-mad firebrand,
races once around the room
whipping everything
and hides again.
Friday, August 12, 2022
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
ELIAS CANETTI
The Tongue Set Free
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What a man touches upon, he should take with him. If he forgot it, he should be reminded. What gives a man worth is that he incorporates everything he has experienced. This includes the countries where he has lived, the people whose voices he has heard. It also takes in his origins, if he can find out something about them... not only one’s private experience but everything concerning the time and place of one’s beginnings.
The words of a language one may have spoken and heard only as a child imply the literature in which it flowered. The story of a banishment must include everything that happened before it as well as the rights subsequently claimed by the victims. Others had fallen before and in different ways; they too are part of the story. It is hard to evaluate the justice of such a claim to history... We should know not only what happened to our fellow men in the past but also what they were capable of.
We should know what we ourselves are capable of. For that, much knowledge is needed; from whatever direction, at whatever distance knowledge offers itself, one should reach out for it, keep it fresh, water it and fertilize it with new knowledge.
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Monday, August 8, 2022
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