Prose

John Cheever, from "The Bus to St. James's"

“Lois Bruce, like a great many women in New York, spent a formidable amount of time shopping along Fifth Avenue. She read the advertisements in the newspapers more intently than her husband read the financial section. Shopping was her principal occupation. She would get up from a sickbed to go shopping. The atmosphere of the department stores had a restorative effect on her disposition. She would begin her afternoon at Altman’s—buy a pair of gloves on the first floor, and then travel up on the escalator and look at andirons. She would buy a purse and some face cream at Lord & Taylor’s, and price coffee tables, upholstery fabrics, and cocktail glasses. “Down?” she would ask the elevator operator when the doors rolled open, and if the operator said “Up,” Lois would board the car anyhow, deciding suddenly that whatever it was that she wanted might be in the furniture or the linen department. She would buy a pair of shoes and a slip at Saks, send her mother some napkins from Mosse’s, buy a bunch of cloth flowers at De Pinna’s, some hand lotion at Bonwit’s, and a dress at Bendel’s. By then, her feet and her head would be pleasantly tired, the porter at Tiffany’s would be taking in the flag, the lamps on the carriages by the Plaza would be lighted. She would buy a cake at Dean’s, her last stop, and walk home through the early dark like an honest workman, contented and weary.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, from her notes on "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“I left for Taos, in New Mexico, taking with me the blank sheets for a fresh start on the book (the swimmer who plunges into the water with no assurance that he will reach the other shore). Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station where I awaited a train blocked by storms and snow; then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Santa Fe limited, surrounded by black spurs of the Colorado mountains, and by the eternal pattern of the stars. Thus were written at a single impulsion the passages on food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of men. I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights.”

Rilke, from "Auguste Rodin"

“Things were made very early, with difficulty, after the pattern of natural things already existing; utensils and vessels were made, and it must have been a strange experience to see the made object as a recognized existence, with the same rights and the same reality as the thing already there. Something came into existence blindly, through the fierce throes of work, bearing upon it the marks of exposed and threatened life, still warm with it—but no sooner was it finished and put aside than it took its place amongst the other things, assumed their indifference, their quiet dignity, and looked on, as it were, from a distance and from out its own permanence with melancholy consent.

This experience was so remarkable and so great that we can understand how things soon came to be made solely for its sake. For the earliest images were possibly nothing but practical applications of this experience, attempts to form out of the visible human and animal world something immortal and permanent, belonging to an order immediately above that world: a thing.”

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.”