Notes from a Room

Another, ghostly life

Posted on December 10, 2020 | Comments Off

I often dream of finding myself back in the suburbs, back before I received my PhD scholarship to pursue my studies in continental philosophy — before I could return to Manchester and leave the suburbs behind. And I dream of the strange expansiveness of the suburbs too — of their very indefiniteness, the way they seem to sprawl forever.

I used to go cycling under the white skies, and air felt thick and heavy. But I could never leave the menace behind — that “eternullity,” as Blanchot calls it; that “infinite wearing away.”

It is this “eternullity” that is, I think, so difficult to affirm. What would have happened if I’d never found my way into Reading University Library, if I’d never discovered continental philosophy, if I’d never won my scholarship and moved away?

There is, I think, another, ghostly life of mine that I’d never have the strength to affirm, in which I would have stayed stranded in those afternoons, alone with the “infinite wearing away” that belonged to them.

— Lars Iyer

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Posted in Blanchot, Lars Iyer

Recovery

Posted on December 1, 2020 | Comments Off

This book will be a record of how things turn out during that first year. But it will also, inevitably, be an account of my own life in the aftermath of illness, and of what I felt and thought dipping my toe at last into something approaching adult independence. It’s become customary, on this side of the Atlantic, stiffly to exclude all such personal narratives from writings about the natural world, as if the experience of nature were something separate from real life, a diversion, a hobby; or perhaps only to be evaluated through the dispassionate and separating prism of science. It has never felt like that to me, and since my recovery, it’s seemed absurd that, with our new understanding of the kindredness of life, so-called ‘nature writing’ should divorce itself from other kinds of literature, and from the rest of human existence.

— Richard Mabey, Nature Cure

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Serious

Posted on December 1, 2020 | Comments Off

‘Serious’ is an inadequate word. I wish I could find another, but ‘sincere’ has been murdered by President Nixon, and ‘authentic’ by the fancy critics, and there is no adjectival form of ‘integrity’, which is the quality I am talking about. Integrity, plus intelligence. An author who thinks out a major subject thoroughly, who feels the subject intensely, and who talks about it clearly, that is what I mean. The word ‘clearly’, of course, does not imply logic, expository prose, naturalism, or any other specific device; clarity in art is achieved by means that suit the end in view, which may be extremely subtle, complex and obscure. The skilled use of such means is the artist’s art. And the use of them involves considerable pain.

— Ursula Le Guin (via here)

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Posted in Ursula Le Guin

Posted on November 29, 2020 | Comments Off

Any idiot can face crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.

— Anton Chekhov

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Posted in Writing

Posted on November 29, 2020 | Comments Off

You have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald (via here)

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Posted in Writing

Posted on November 29, 2020 | Comments Off

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

— Andre Gide (via here)

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Posted in Writing

Posted on November 28, 2020 | Comments Off

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

— Jung

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Posted in Writing

Posted on October 21, 2020 | Comments Off

It is sufficient to name a “being,” and we mean, in a merely approximate yet portentous thinking, the being of this being. We name being along with it. Being is said along with every word and verbal articulation, if not named each time with its own name. Speaking says being “along with,” not as an addition and a supplement that could just as well be left out, but as the pre-giving of what always first permits the naming of beings.

[…]

Must not being, due to its multiple and constant saying, be already so articulated and well-known that its essence lies uncovered before us in complete determinacy? But what if the most said in saying kept its essence secret, if being kept to itself in the disclosure of its essence, and this not only occasionally and incidentally but according to its essence? Then not only would concealment belong to being, but concealment would have a marked relation to “saying” and would be silence.

— Heidegger, Basic Concepts (tr. Aylesworth)

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Posted in Heidegger

No one can buy me

Posted on October 10, 2020 | Comments Off

There were days when I know I spent more than twenty hours in meditation. There were periods of time that lapsed beyond two or three weeks where I know I was well beyond the human endurance when it comes to meditation. And I found out so much about myself and about the people around me, and about my husband and family. And also I found out that whatever questions I might have had in my mind concerning whatever events in the future or past were answered. Meditation brought me face to face with God. Hand in hand, heart to heart, and almost to the point where he was me and I was him. Or we were just us. I don’t know how to phrase it… it was just a closeness… it’s just impossible to be that close to a human. I think that gave me my freedom. I think it gave me my true independence. No matter where I go in the world, no matter what I do or whatever my environment, I’m free. The Earth, the world cannot claim me anymore. Like I said, there were demands made, definite demands, which took me away from the world. At one point almost away from everything, music, family, because the sacrifice had to be within an inch of my life, almost literally. And I feel that because it was such a high price paid… I can’t say it was as high a price as Buddha or Christ, because that was life. Or Martin Luther King. That was life. But I’ve been very close to the end of my life. And I feel that I’ve been given my freedom now, that I can act, I can be, I can live as I want to and nothing can… there’s no claim, no one can buy me. There’s no action I have to pay, I have no karmas to pay. I think all of it has been given back to me. That I’m free.