Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. Things, each thinging from time to time in its own way, are heron and roe, deer, horse and bull. Things, each thinging and each staying… Continue reading Martin Heidegger
We must learn from things; we have everything to learn from them. How to let things make themselves known by themselves, before any translation… — Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Harvard University Press September 1, 1992) First published January 1, 1986.
Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change. Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who… Continue reading Ray Brassier
[A] point of pure passage: a language without discourse, a speech without sentence, without syntax, without parts, without grammar, a language of pure effusion, beyond the cry, but short of the hinge. — Jacques Derrida, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performance (University of Nebraska Press January 1, 1998)
And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful. — Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (Simon Schuster, August 1st 2006) Originally published July 4th 1855.
Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. ― Pope John Paul II
Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. ‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,’ wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live.… Continue reading Maggie Nelson
For things are what they are, earth and sky, cloud, furrows, undergrowth, stars; it is things alone which transfigure themselves, in no way are they symbols; they are the world we breathe… — Philippe Jaccottet, Landscapes for Absent Figures (Gallimard December 18, 1997) First published January 1, 1970.
And it’s always the lilac garden on the other side of the river. If the soul should ask you if that is far from here, you should say, On the other side of the river, not this one, but the one over there. — Alejandra Pizarnik, “Rescue,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems (New Directions… Continue reading Alejandra Pizarnik
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” HER DOCTOR had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed… Continue reading Flannery O’Connor
The Vale of Soul-Making 