"We talk because we are mortal: / words are not signs, they are years."
Octavio Paz, To Talk (tr. by Mark Strand)
"Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years."
Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon (tr. by Barbara Harshav)
Purple crocus flower in the sunlight
Every spring, with the appearance of the first shoots and flowers, with thoughts of beauty as a refuge and a wound, Louise Glück: "Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love."
I don't think I can describe this trip of a book because it's Friday night, but I also don't think I could do it on any other day. (with love to all of us, as we will all navigate the bardo, each in our way 🖤)
Cover of Lutz Bassmann's book Black Village (tr. by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Open Letter, 2022)
Mind-blowing
Bit by bit, everything in this wide realm
becomes more like a dream.
Oh, if only I were a tiny tree
and stood on the bank of a little brook.
-Robert Walser,
translated by Kristofor Minta,
from his wonderful
<My Heart Has So Many Flaws>
I absolutely loved The Wall.
A sheet of paper shaded with apple green watercolor and white ink
Moving toward the spring light
She's a sweetheart ❤️
Duino Elegies page 53 (end of the Eighth Elegy) It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves. Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away? Just as, upon the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, he turns, stops, lingers—, so we live here, forever taking leave. Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Stephen Mitchell.
“so we live here”
Text: The Lovers There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake. See how the water holds fire but cannot end it? We insist on love when all we want is mercy.
Victoria Chang, THE TREES WITNESS EVERYTHING
Oh, I remember that essay! It is truly wonderful.
Oh February. To get ink and weep!
To write of February, sob it out,
While slush is blazing through the deep,
Black spring and spreading on the ground.
Boris Pasternak, February (tr. Andrey Kneller)
Thank you!
What film is that?
Oil on canvas: a single white calla lily flower on a stem against a dark background
This Saturday, "Hug" by Kayoko Kimura, 2022
Jeremiah, that is really wonderful. Congratulations and good luck :)
"places of darkness, places of kindness." 🖤
A snowdrop surrounded by last year's leaves. The sky is clear, the branches bare. A promise.
A return to long morning walks, the feeling of being able to breathe again, and Louise Glück: "Spring: the unforeseen / flooding the abyss. // And the life / filling again."
(from Decade)
This one by Li-Young Lee. Love the dissonance, the discord it brings.
❤️
Dreamed of a place like the one in Marlen Haushofer's The Wall... I still think about that book.
This is beautiful
Nighttime coziness—
"Your voice is water open beneath stars,
collected from abundant rain, gone to low places.
The night is moist, the ground wet,
air still, trees silent, and tonight I love you."
Robert Bly, Seeing You Carry Plants In
❤️
These are stunning
What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?
- Eavan Boland, “Eurydice Speaks”
images from four small stones - appearing like glimpses of lost landscapes
▫️ unforgotten ▫️
💙
Text: I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away—
Reading East Coker by T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets
