Posted on September 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Gabriel Josipovici arrived in Oxford to be interviewed for a place to study English – the most un-English of students, Jewish, twice-displaced, already passionate about the great European writers: “They kept asking me what English novelist I most admired and I kept saying ‘Dostoevsky’, and they kept saying, ‘English novelist, Mr Josipovici’, and I kept saying ‘Dostoevsky’, vaguely aware that something was profoundly wrong but unable, in the heat of the moment, to put my finger on it.”

— Gabriel Josipovici, (via here)

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Posted in Gabriel Josipovici

A small room of my own

Posted on September 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

It is true I have a small room of my own, but that is not a home, only a place of refuge where I can hide my inner turmoil, only to fall all the more headlong into its clutches.

— Kafka, in G. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (via here)

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Posted in Kafka

The sick man

Posted on September 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside […] The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the ‘happy lover’ who exclaims: ‘All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love’. Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts.

— Roberto Calasso, K. (tr. G. Brock)

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Posted in Kafka, Roberto Calasso

The task

Posted on September 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide.

— Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (tr. M. Hofmann)

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Posted in Kafka

Posted on September 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.

— Cioran (via here)

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Posted in Cioran, Spurious

Posted on September 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

— Jeremiah 8:20

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Posted in Writing

Sleep

Posted on September 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.

— Faulkner (via here)

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Posted in Faulkner, Sleep

Posted on September 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

All that sort of thing could be put up with, it belonged to the ordinary continual petty annoyances of life, it was nothing compared with what K. was striving for, and he had not come here simply to lead an honoured and comfortable life.

— Kafka, The Castle (tr. W. and E. Muir)

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Posted in Kafka

Fragments

Posted on August 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

Fragments speak to me of hope. They reach out to completion but never reach it.

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The world is various, abundant and incomplete. If it were ever to reach completion, that would be annihilation. The fragment represents life.

— Lauren Albert

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Posted in FragLit

Posted on August 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being [die Nahe des Seins], he must first learn to exist in namelessness [Namenlosen]. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

— Heidegger

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Under every deep, another deep opens.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words. 

— Rilke

(via here)

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Posted in Heidegger, rilke