Prose

On Madame Psychosis, From "Infinite Jest" - David Foster Wallace

“She’s mostly alone in there when she’s on-air. Every so often there’s a guest, but the guest will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/Bunuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-garde digital cartridges, anticonfluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. Also highly literate on U.S. sports, football in particular, which fact the student engineer finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show, at random. Mostly she solos. The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes she seems very sad.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage.” 

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry.”

Herman Hesse, from "Steppenwolf"

“…As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbour was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

Deborah Love, from "Annaghkeen"

“…When I was a child I rode my horse to the top of the mountain where the sun shone down on me, and the valley green in meadow grass lay far below. I looked to the sky and waited, filled with longing. Nothing sounded. In sorrow I lay down on the earth, my arms outstretched to hug it. O Earth, warm and just right, everything just right, the shape of bark, and smell of grass, and sound of leaves brushing the wind, I wanted to be just right too.”

From "A Silent Treatment" - Jeannie Vanasco

“I think back to that first example. I remember unloading the plants Chris and I had picked out from Home Depot (clematis, honeysuckle, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum), some of which would attract the hummingbirds [my mother] enjoyed watching. I’d also bought two birdbaths. I hid those in the garage because they were her Easter gift. I then went inside to call downstairs, but her door was locked.

She must have seen the plants on the deck—maybe when she walked [her dog] or took out her trash—and assumed we’d ignored or forgotten her.

I texted: We couldn’t fit everything in the car in one trip. We still planned to take you today.

I repeated this in a letter that I left in her private entryway: I’m sorry I didn’t explain our plans first. We still planned to take you to Home Depot.

It’s easy to say how ridiculous she was being, but it’s harder, and almost unutterably heartbreaking, to see Home Depot’s significance through her point of view. For Chris and me, it was another errand. She looked forward to the trip all week.”

From "The Return of Faraz Ali" - Aamina Ahmad

“He walked out into the garden, which was small but well tended. There were new trees, and the lawn was lush and green. Swept up in the celebration of his return, he’d forgotten how foul, how filthy he was from the travel, the camp. He felt it now. He took off his shoes. In the camp, he had spent a long time wondering what he would do when he got home. What is the first thing, the men liked to ask one another. Food, sex. And it was true, in prison you recognized the appetites you were denied; you longed for those things above all because after a time you got used to not having them, your longing declining, and in that decline you recognized you were not the man you were before. You feared you would never be that man again. What had he thought of? The same, yes, of course, but also this: the outline of the trees in the evening, the cool grass against his feet, an open door, and walking through it and back in again as he pleased.”

Arthur Schopenhauer - from "On Human Suffering"

“This is the mystery…it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’

However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same people who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.”

John Berger, from "Ways of Seeing"

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.
And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things.’”

Rene Magritte - “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1935

Agnolo Bronzino - “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love” - 1545

Johannes Vermeer - “Maid with Milk Jug” - 1657

Paul Tillich on Courage (From, "The Courage to Be")

“…The aristocratic element in the doctrine of courage was preserved as well as restricted by Aristotle. The motive for withstanding pain and death courageously is, according to him, that it is noble to do so and base not to do so. The courageous man acts ‘for the sake of what is noble, for that is the aim of virtue.’ ‘Noble,’ in these and other passages, is the translation of kalós and “base” is the translation of aischró, words which usually are rendered by ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly.’ A beautiful or noble deed is a deed to be praised. Courage does what is to be praised and rejects what is to be despised. One praises that in which a being fulfills its potentialities or actualizes its perfections. Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of.’ It includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment. This sacrifice may include pleasure, happiness, even one’s own existence. In any case it is praiseworthy, because in the act of courage the most essential part of our being prevails against the less essential. It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualized in it. Therefore it is noble.”