He perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were contained in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.
— Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (tr. R. Lamberton)
Posted in Blanchot
Around his body, he knew that his thought, mingled with the night, kept watch.
— Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (tr. R. Lamberton)
Posted in Blanchot
If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.
— Walser, Institute Benjamenta/Jakob von Gunten (tr. C. Middleton)
Posted in Walser
As mystery, the word remains remote. As a mystery that is experienced, the remoteness is near.
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His renunciation having pledged itself to the world’s mystery, the poet retains the treasure in remembrance by renunciation. In this way, the treasure becomes that which the poet – he who says – prefers above all else and reveres above all else. The treasure becomes what is truly worthy of the poet’s thought. For what could be more worthy of thought for the saying one than the world’s being veiling itself, than the fading word for the word?
— Heidegger, On the Way to Language (tr. J. Stambaugh)
Posted in Heidegger
First it’s a sound that makes another sound, in the nocturnal hollow of things. Then it’s a low howl, accompanied by the creaking of the street’s swaying signboards. And then the voice of space becomes a shout, a roar, and everything shudders, nothing sways, and there’s silence in the dread of all this, like a speechless dread that sees another dread when the first one has passed.
Then there’s nothing but wind, just wind, and I sleepily notice how the doors shake in their frames and how the glass in the windows loudly resists.
I don’t sleep. I interexist. A few vestiges of consciousness persist. I feel the weight of slumber but not of unconsciousness. I don’t exist. The wind… I wake up and go back to sleep without yet having slept. There’s a landscape of loud and indistinct sound beyond which I’m a stranger to myself. I cautiously delight in the possibility of sleeping. I really do sleep, but don’t know if I’m sleeping. In what seems to me like a slumber there is always a sound of the end of all things, the wind in the darkness, and, if I listen closely, the sound of my own lungs and heart.
— Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (tr. R. Zenith)
Posted in Pessoa
Not to write — what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point.
— Blanchot (via This Space)
Posted in Blanchot
…enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals, never anything else any more, from this time forth, and in it, somewhere, perhaps, riveted, tiny, the prisoner, how can he be found, how false this space is, what falseness instantly … it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails, no, it’s something else, it’s an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me, you must accuse someone, a culprit is indispensable, it speaks of my sins, it speaks of my head, it says its mine…
— Beckett, The Unnamable
Posted in Beckett
Wonder or dream from distant land
I carried to my country’s strandAnd waited till the twilight norn
Had found the name within her bourn—Then I could grasp it close and strong
It blooms and shines now the front along…Once I returned from happy sail,
I had a prize so rich and frail,She sought for long and tidings told:
“No like of this these depths enfold.”And straight it vanished from my hand,
The treasure never graced my land…So I renounced and sadly see:
Where words break off no thing may be.
— Stefan George (tr. P. Hertz)
Posted in Stefan George
I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.
*
Only not to overestimate what I have written, for in that way I make what is to be written unattainable.
— Kafka, Diaries (1912), tr. J Kresh
Posted in Kafka
It only means that there will be a new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
— Beckett (via A Piece of Monologue)
Posted in Beckett
Notes from a Room 