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Entirely Local and Nearly Eternal
The Gazette reported the outside world in only contingent fashion: as a source of weather, as the destination of migratory birds currently quitting mid-Wessex. There was also a weekly chart of the night sky. Martha examined this as she did the market prices. Where Sirius might be glimpsed, what dull red planet blinked near the Eastern horizon, how to recognize Orion's belt. This, she thought, was how the human spirit should divide itself, between the entirely local and the nearly eternal. How much of her life had been spent with all the stuff in the middle: career, money, sex, heart-trouble, appearance, anxiety, fear, yearning.
Julian Barnes |
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Open-Handed Dreamers
How do you dream with your hands open? How do you let go of intangible ideals yet strive to see dreams realized? |
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i tortured myself with visions of her, imprisoned, struggling, trapped in a painful fantasy of her own making, or trapped in another fantasy, equally painful, which was not hers at all but those of the people around her. And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly between this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammer - i say, you say, he and she say, on the other hand, does not say - paying for the privilage of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on. Margaret Atwood |
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Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you for us or for our enemies?" |
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with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentances, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas i'm trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intention toward me, and i grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that can translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what i write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who, setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that i convey to him the effort that i am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me. - italo calvino (ukko ahti)
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