Perhaps the only true thoughts

Posted on October 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Perhaps the only true thoughts are those that have been obvious all along, that have been lying in wait for you only to show you how the way you shield yourself from them has prevented them from being revealed to you.

— Frenet, Journal

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He writes now

Posted on October 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

He goes for a walk. Why, he asks himself with a smile, why must it be he who has nothing to do, nothing to strike at, nothing to throw down? He feels the sap and the strength in his body softly complaining. His entire soul thrills for bodily exertion. Between high ancient walls he climbs, down over whose gray stone screes the dark green ivy passionately curls, up to the castle hill. In all the windows up here the evening light is aglow. Up on the edge of the rock face stands a delightful pavilion, he sits here, and lets his soul fly, out and down into the shining holy silent prospect. He would be surprised if he were to feel well now. Read a newspaper? How would that be? Conduct an idiotic political or generally useful debate with some respected official half-wit or other? Yes? He is not unhappy. Secretly he considers happy alone the man who is inconsolable: naturally and powerfully inconsolable. With him the position is one small faint shade worse. He is too sensitive to be happy, too haunted by all his irresolute, cautious, mistrusted feelings. He would like to scream aloud, to weep. God in heaven, what is wrong with me, and he rushes down the darkening hill. Night soothes him. Back in his room he sits down, determined to work till frenzy comes, at his writing table. The light of the lamp eliminates his image of his whereabouts, and clears his brain, and he writes now.

— Walser, ‘Kleist in Thun’ (tr. Middleton)

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An invulnerable experiment

Posted on October 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

When I was young I daydreamed about sending a version of myself out into the world who could act without pain, follow his desires without fear, be caught up in life without being crushed by it: a self who could live in my stead as an invulnerable experiment.

— Frenet, Journal

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Unhappiness

Posted on October 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

It’s been given to me to understand almost any form of unhappiness, that’s my talent. People come to me in their unhappiness because they sense I’ll share it. And when they move on, when they start their lives anew, I smile when I think of them, I want them to forget about me. I love them the only way I know. In another life I might have been a priest, a good man, instead of the bitter, remote person I’ve become.

— Frenet, Journal

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The boundless moments

Posted on October 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

All my life, the feeling of life having taken a wrong turn. Youth: knowing nothing not yet having lived enough. Ageing: knowing nothing not having lived enough when young. It’s in the odd boundless moments of my life that I live, in the moments that detach themselves from the rest of my ragged history, that gather and lift me up. I do whatever it takes to summon them, and in between try to bridge my past and present, to create the link that would save me but never comes.

— Frenet, Journal

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I’m no longer an author

Posted on October 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

That sentence was the only thing I knew, all the way, [throughout] those 3,600 pages. I wanted the book to end with that sentence, and I wanted to be in a mental state where I could say that and mean that: ‘I’m no longer an author’. Because this is also a book about wanting to be a literary writer, having ambition to be a writer, it’s about literature and life and where they mix, and the problem for me in my life is that I don’t think I live my life as I should. I live it in literature, I live it in reading, and I want that to end.

— Knausgaard, interview

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I give myself drift

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

I say ‘I’ to gather myself in, but as the word escapes my mouth I lose it, as I type it I give myself drift.

— Frenet, Journal

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Perfection

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

At the same time I had to tell myself that we invariably made excessive demands of everything and everybody: nothing is done thoroughly enough, everything is imperfect, everything has been merely attempted, nothing completed. My unhealthy craving for perfection had come to the surface again.

— Thomas Bernhard, Concrete (tr. McLintock)

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I type a few words

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

I type a few words, halfheartedly, delete half of them, smoke a cigarette, despair of my life, and if the right words come, if one right phrase comes, I’m found, or rather lost in a larger world, at least for a moment.

— Frenet, Journal

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To lie

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

To write is to rewrite, which is to say to quibble, which is to say to lie. Thus to write is the work of the devil and to be written is the work of God. But to write is unavoidable and to write is also to be written.

— Frenet, Journal

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