Fiction
"I'd have thought that the signature image of our age might better be the NASA photograph of the earth taken from space. That beautiful blue sphere turning in the void."
- Interesting juxtaposition, isn't it?
"You don't find that photograph moving?"
- I find it frightening.
A strange, physical exhaustion was gaining mastery over him, growing as the time went by. His eyes were closing with weariness. At last the interrogation of the witnesses was over. They proceeded to the final drafting of the protocol. Mitya stood up, left his chair and went into the corner, over by the curtain, lay down on a large, rug-covered trunk that belonged to the landlord and in an instant fell asleep. He dreamed a strange dream, one quite inappropriate to the place and to the time. There he was, traveling in the steppes somewhere, in the place where he had served in the army long ago, in former days, and he was sitting in a car, drawn by a pair of horses, which a muzhik was driving into the sleet. Only Mitya was cold, it was the beginning of November, and the snow was falling in large wet flakes and falling to earth, instantly melting. And the muzhik was driving him cheerfully, brandishing his whip in marvelous style, his beard long and chestnut-colored, not really an old man, but perhaps about fifty, and wearing a grey muzhik zipun. And there not far away was a peasant village, one could see the izbas, black as black, and half of them had burned to the ground, only charred timbers stuck up here and there. And at the entry barrier there were peasant women standing along the road, many of them, an entire row, all of them thin and emaciated, with faces that looked somehow brownish. There, in particular, at the end of the row was one, a tall and bony woman who looked about forty, but might easily be no more than twenty, with a long, thin face and a baby crying in her arms, for her breasts must have withered and there was not a drop of milk in them. And the baby cried and cried, stretching out its bare little arms with pathetic small fists that were a kind of bluish color all over from the cold.
“Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” Mitya asked as they flew past the women in dashing style.
“It’s a bairn,” the yamshchik answered him, “it’s a bairn crying.” And Mitya was struck by the fact that the man had said it in his own, muzhik way: '“a bairn,” not “a baby.” And he liked it that the muzhik had said “bairn”: there seemed more pity in it.
“But why is it crying?” Mitya kept pressing, like one inane. “Why are its little arms bare, why is it not covered up?”
“Why, the bairn is chilled to the bone, its little clothes have frozen through, and don’t keep it warm.”
“But why has it happened? Why?” Mitya kept asking inanely.
“Why, they’re poor, burned out of everything, they’ve no bread, they’re begging for their burned-down site.”
“No, no,” Mitya said, still appearing not to understand. “What I want you to tell me is: why are those homeless mothers standing there, why is everyone poor, why is the bairn wretched, why is the steppe barren, why do they not embrace one another, kiss one another, why do they not sing songs of joy, why are they blackened so by black misfortune, why is the bairn not fed?”
And he felt to himself that although he was asking these questions wildly, without rhyme or reason, he could not prevent himself asking them in just that form, and that that was the form in which they must be asked. And he also felt rising within his heart a tender piety he had never experienced before, felt that he wanted to weep, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the bairn should not cry any more, so that the bairn’s withered, poverty-blackened mother should not weep, so that no one should have any tears at all from that moment on, and to do this immediately, without delay and without regard to any obstacle, with all the impetuosity of the Karamazovs.
“And I shall come with you, I shell never leave you now, I shall walk with you all my life,” the dear, heartfelt words of Grushenka sounded beside him.
'“What is it you say? Walk where?” he exclaimed, opening his eyes and sitting up on his trunk, every bit like someone who has recovered from a swoon, and smiling radiantly. Over him stood Nikolay Parfenovich, inviting him to attend the reading of the protocol, and sign it. Mitya realized that he had slept for an hour or more, but he paid no attention to Nikolay Parfenovich. He was suddenly struck by the fact that beneath his head there was a pillow that had not been there when he had subsided in exhaustion upon the trunk.
“Who put a pillow under my head? Who was that kind person?” he exclaimed with a kind of ecstatic, grateful emotion and in a voice that almost wept, as though God only knew what boon had been accorded him. The kind person remained unknown even later, though it was possibly one of the muzhiks, or possibly Nikolay Parvenovich’s little scribe who had found him a pillow out of compassion, but Mitya’s entire soul was as if shaken by sobs and tears. He approached the table and declared that he would sign whatever was required.
“I had a good dream, gentlemen,” he declared somehow strangely, with a face somehow new, as though illumined by joy.
- From Book IX of The Brothers Karamazov
“O brothers, love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort, purchased dearly, by long labour and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season.”
- The Elder Zosima, in “The Brothers Karamazov”
“I think that everyone has a duty to love life above all else in the world.”
“To love life more than its meaning?”
“Most certainly; to love it before logic, for only then will I understand its meaning.”
"I don’t care! Let us render praise unto nature: look at all the sun, the heavens so cloudless, the leaves all green, it’s still high summer, four in the afternoon and what silence!”
- Dmitry to Alyosha, from "Book III: The Confessions of an Ardent Heart. In Verse”
"...What is wrong? For the present you do not belong here. I give you my blessing for your great task of obedience in the world at large. You have much traveling yet to do. And you will have to get married, you will have to. You will have to endure everything before you return again. And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.”
“Before anything else I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was in no sense a fanatic, nor even in my opinion at any rate a mystic at all. I shall state in advance my complete opinion: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he had struck out along the monastery road it was only because it had at that time made a strong impression on him and presented itself to him, so to speak, as an ideal of deliverance for his soul, straining as it was out of the murk of worldly hatred unto the light of love.”
"I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn. As Grillparzer said in his travel journal, 'There may be nothing like it in the whole world.' He describes, enthralled, the succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one's expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier--whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans."
- From “Compass” - Mathias Enard
“The Easter holidays began happily. Paul was his own frank self. Yet Miriam felt it would go wrong. On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon. Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded.”
"I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was--like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country--not without its quaint charms. It was ideally located on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city's presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance….
Sunday afternoons, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my 'tapering-off' device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.”
- Frederick Exley, 1968
“The dazzling sun cleared his head a little, and by the time they were in a cab his sense of time had stabilized, but he was still so thoroughly suspended in the warm glow of the drugs that he experienced the sudden starting and stopping of the taxi while they inched their way east as a gentle rocking motion. He felt no pain, and only the awareness that his tongue was numb was vaguely uncomfortable, reminding him of the wounds packed with gauze. Had Liza been talking this whole time? He turned and faced her as they merged onto the F.D.R. Drive, and she looked beautiful, her arms raised to pull her light-brown hair into a ponytail; he watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed, saw the thin gold necklace she always wore against her perfect collarbone. Then without transition he was looking at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the buildings growing larger and more detailed as the taxi approached, though he was not aware of moving. Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling. Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn’t seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air. Then he was smoothing her hair back and she was laughing at this uncharacteristic intimacy, something he’d done only a few times in their six years. Now the view again, and it occurred to him with the force of revelation:
I won’t remember this. This is the most beautiful view of the city I have ever seen, the most perfect experience of touch and speed, I’ve never felt so close to Liza, and I won’t remember it; the drugs will erase it. And then, glowing with the aura of imminent disappearance, it really was the most beautiful view, experience. He wanted badly to describe this situation to Liza but couldn’t: his tongue was still numb; he couldn’t even ask her to remind him of what the drugs would erase. While he was distantly aware that Liza would tease him for it later, that he was being ridiculous, he felt tears start in his eyes as they merged onto the bridge and he watched the play of late-October sunlight on the water. That he would form no memory of what he observed and could not record it in any language lent it a fullness, made it briefly identical to itself, and he was deeply moved to think this experience of presence depended upon its obliteration. Then he was in his apartment; Liza gave him a couple of pills, put him to bed, and left.”
“…The room was cold, that had been warm for so long. Flowers, bottles, plates, all sick-room litter was taken away; everything was harsh and austere. She lay raised on the bed, the sweep of the sheet from the raised feet was like a clean curve of snow, so silent.”
"The four of us swam and then ate lobster and swam some more. In the morning the sun shone through the wooden shutters making stripes on Max and Ben and Keith. I sat up in bed, looking at them, with happiness.
Max would carry each boy to bed and tuck him in. Kiss him sweet, the way he had kissed his father. Max slept as deeply as they. I thought he must be exhausted from what we were doing, his leaving his wife, taking on a family.
He taught them both to swim and to snorkel. He told them things. Just things, about life, people he knew. We interrupted one another telling him things back. We lay on the fine sand on Caleta Beach, warm in the sun. Keith and Ben buried me in the sand. Max's fingers tracing my lips. Bursts of color from the sun against my closed sandy eyelids. Desire."
“Well, we must wait for the future to show,” said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.
“It’s almost too dark to see,” said Andrew, coming up from the beach.
“One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land,” said Prue.
“Do we have that light burning?” said Lily as they took their coats off indoors.
“No,” said Prue, “not if everyone’s in.”
“Andrew,” she called back, “just put out the light in the hall.”
One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr. Carmichael, who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest.
- Virgina Woolf
“One evening, directly after the parson’s visit, felling unable to bear herself after another display from her husband, she took Annie and the baby and went out. Morel had kicked William, and the mother would never forgive him.
She went over the sheep-bridge and across a corner of the meadow to the cricket-ground. The meadows seemed one space of ripe, evening light, whispering with the distant mill-race. She sat on a seat under the alders in the cricket-ground, and fronted the evening. Before her, level and solid, spread the big green cricket-field, like the bed of a sea of light. Children played in the bluish shadow of the pavilion. Many rooks, high up, came cawing home across the softly-woven sky. They stooped in a long curve down into the golden glow, concentrating, cawing, wheeling, like black flakes on a slow vortex, over a tree-clump that made a dark boss among the pasture.
A few gentlemen were practising, and Mrs. Morel could hear the chock of the ball, and the voices of men suddenly roused; could see the white forms of men shifting silently over the green, upon which already the under shadows were smouldering. Away at the grange, one side of the haystacks was lit up, the other sides blue-grey. A wagon of sheaves rocked small across the melting yellow light.
The sun was going down. Every open evening, the hills of Derbyshire were blazed over with red sunset. Mrs. Morel watched the sun sink from the glistening sky, leaving a soft flower-blue overhead, while the western space went red, as if all the fire had swum down there, leaving the bell cast flawless blue. The mountain-ash berries across the field stood fierily out from the dark leaves, for a moment. A few shocks of corn in a corner of the fallow stood up as if alive; she imagined them bowing; perhaps her son would be a Joseph. In the east, a mirrored sunset floated pink opposite the west’s scarlet. The big haystacks on the hillside, that butted into the glare, went cold.
With Mrs. Morel, it was one of those still moments when the small frets vanish, and the beauty of things stands out, and she had the peace and the strength to see herself.”
“Art’s not for the very young? For you it’s just ‘stuff.’ You have to have grown up and had a taste of loss. I’ll explain that later. Art’s just compensation? I’m not saying that either…But two people who in most other respects may be entirely mismatched can still thrill together to a third thing, a passion shared. The light falling round people in a painting which is like the light falling round real people too, except it can’t go out.”
“…It’s just another mystery to add to the roster. Leonardo cant be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then—knowing this perfect thing—took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.”
- Cormac McCarthy
Why do you let me bully you?
I don’t know. Do I?
It’s not important. The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.
[I]
The state of the times, which my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary for us to keep much within our own lands. After dark indeed, and the sun sets terribly soon in January, we have to be safe behind the hall Gates; my mother goes out as soon as the dark makes her embroidery too dim to see, with the great keys on her arm. ‘Is everybody within doors?’ she cries, and swings the bells out upon the road, in case any of our men may still be working in the fields. Then she draws the Gates close, clamps them with the lock, and the whole world is barred away from us. I am very bold and impatient sometimes, when the moon rises, over a land gleaming with frost; and I think I feel the pressure of all this free and beautiful place—all England and the sea, and the lands beyond—rolling like sea waves, against our iron gates, breaking, and withdrawing—and breaking again—all through the long black night. Once I leapt from my bed, and ran to my mother’s room, crying, “Let them in. Let them in. We are starving!’ ‘Are the soldiers there, child,’ she cried: ‘or is it your father’s voice?’ She ran to the window, and together we gazed out upon the silver fields, and all was peaceful. But I could not explain what it was that I heard; and she bade me sleep, and be thankful that there were stout gates between me and the world.
[II]
The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it. That, I confess, is part of my morning prayer.
