Nedan markeringar är nog alla gjorda i någon slags skymning, både för att solen står lågt eller kanske till och med försvunnit ned under horisonten, men också för att sömnen är nära och ögonlocken klipper.
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off.
Francis Spufford, Nonesuch
The air was warm and getting warmer. She was wearing the silver dress, bias-cut so it flowed over curves and clung there mermaid-close. It was right for the Savoy, but it needed protecting till she got there. Up to August, hem twitched in her free hand to keep it out of the treads. Up to the late-summer glow in the cheeks and the prickle at the hairline; up to city dust and city speed and city noise. Up to the twenty thousand streets! To the babble of the pavements, to the bray of horns and the bells and the shouts of the news boys selling bad news and the snatches of music from opened doors. To the lively air, with all its smells of petrol and beer and perfume and tobacco and cooking food swirled into motion by the busy passage of human bodies. To the foyers of the theatres, where the crowds were in strict evening dress, and the democratic glamour of the cinemas, where people were dressed and dressed up any way they liked. Up to gold and to gilding, to dear and to cheap delight. Up to life, waiting to be seized, moment by moment, every chance not taken lost forever.
Could she not hear, in the crystal voice, a touch of relish? Wasn’t it orating, just a bit? As if it had not got to use language for a while, maybe, and was making the most of the chance.
‘What if it’s all nonsense?’ he said. ‘Statues. Time machines. Lall trying to change history. What if none of it’s real?’ ‘It is, though,’ said Iris. ‘And is it really any madder or harder to believe than the rest of this?’ She waved at the ripped-paper city, dimming in the early evening light. ‘Look at it,’ she said. ‘Another couple of hours and we’ll all be hiding in holes. And then boys from Hamburg and Munich – nice boys, probably, on the whole, who love their mothers – will fly overhead trying to kill us. It’s a crazy world.’
Ben Lerner, Transcription
“I call her Eva in this book.”
A problem with Freud is he thinks we dream only our own dreams.
Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!
Tracy Kidder, House
In the Balkans, as recently as the late 1800s, builders digging a foundation hole would entice a passer-by near so that the innocent victim’s shadow would fall into the excavation. The builders would cover the shadow with a stone, or mark out the shadow’s length and breadth and bury the measurement of it. The ritual ensured the foundation’s durability. The victim, it was thought, would die within the year.
Arthur Bahr, Chasing the Pearl-manuscript
The uncanny is too Freudian and too negative for what I really mean, however, which is more like “supereffability,” a term usefully coined by Cristina Maria Cervone to describe “an understanding of sacred fullness enacted through form.”
For although it is significantly earlier and illustrated quite differently, I will argue that the Pearl-Manuscript achieves similar effects: from its choice and sequencing of texts to its paratext and images, it is a pedagogical compilation in the art of speculation.
Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine
The concept of Umwelt—coined by the early twentieth-century biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll—describes how the perceptual apparatus of different animals creates a different reality for each of them.
(They even have their own emoji: Unicode character U+1F9FF). [🧿]
Isaac Fitzgerald, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
He joined the short-lived Fruitlands utopian experiment in 1843, earning him a place as a character named Moses White in a book about the commune that was written by Amos Bronson Alcott’s daughter, one Louisa May Alcott. Transcendental Wild Oats was originally serially published in a newspaper in 1873, and is best described as a satirical look at male arrogance and female exploitation, and a sharp-tongued critique of, well, utopian communes.
M. John Harrison, The End of Everything
It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything.
What were the iGhetti and where had they come from? They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Competing authorities associated the iGhetti with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s, while others believed it to be less an invasion than a ‘re-enchantment of the world’, a process of spiritual tourism and gentrification pursued by advanced civilisations from a mooted ninth planet. More popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet’: indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself; the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.
You had the sense they were focussed on other projects.
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do.
‘The sea, the sea, yes,’ James went on. ‘Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father’s side? Do you have porpoises, seals?’
Claudia Piñeiro, Cathedrals
Even though he’d been a professor of history, he read widely in the areas of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, biology, theology. My grandfather was interested in everything. My grandmother always complained that, after retiring, he wasted all his time reading and hiding from her behind his books. I would’ve done the same if I were him. From him I inherited my voracious appetite for reading.
It’s unimaginable how one hand could carve wood with such precision that the folds of a dress look so realistic.
‘I’m not going to lie to you. From now on, whatever you don’t want to forget you’re going to have to write down, do you understand? Write down what I’m about to say to you,’ he instructed, and then dictated: ‘In order to remember something, you’re going to have to write it down.’ And I wrote it down. ‘You may manage to recover some memories; information travels many pathways, there are some shortcuts. But the main route is broken.’ I nodded as if I understood what he was telling me. And I wrote it down, confused, dizzy, and angry. ‘In order to remember something, you have to write it down.’ ‘There are shortcuts.’ ‘I’m not going to lie to you.’ ‘Main route broken.’ The doctor, the notebook, the diagnosis, his advice. I can repeat what he said because it’s written down and I can read it, on the first page of that maroon notebook with the black butterfly, the first of so many, of different sizes and cover designs, that would follow. There are some words and phrases that, also, I took the time to highlight in fluorescent colours – pink, green, or yellow – important things that I might want to refer back to in the near future. The highlighted phrases moved, over time, to a favourites folder on my computer. Some things I’ve highlighted are ‘anterograde amnesia’, ‘semantic memory’, ‘hippocampus’, ‘left side’. Also ‘Ana’, ‘murdered?’, ‘Lía/ring’, ‘Mateo’ (along with a photo, to sensorially associate the name and face), ‘Alfredo’. The highlighted words I copy from notebook to notebook, when one gets filled up and I begin the next, so I don’t have to go back so far to find it.
Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief
“A group of rats is called a mischief.” He was very good on animal groupings, Ces. A crash of rhinoceroses, a flamboyance of flamingos, a troubling of goldfish
Seule au fond du gouffre (Alone at the Bottom of the Abyss) was composed of diary entries written by Le Guen during her sojourn in an underground cave in the remote uplands of Southern France. The cover showed Le Guen rappelling into the cave’s mouth in a blue jumpsuit and headlamp, taking a final upward glance. Beneath her lay total darkness. That was me, I thought grandly, descending into the abyss… though of course I had no idea how far the metaphor would extend.
Le Guen’s sense of time swiftly deteriorated underground, as the date stamps on her journal entries indicate: “I think it’s August 15 … I’ve persuaded myself that it’s August 17 … I believe that it’s August 19 … August 18? Surely not!” After more than a month in darkness she began referring to herself as a person hors du temps—outside of time. The absence of sunlight demolished her circadian rhythms; she began sleeping for eighteen hours at a time and staying awake just as long. When she finally surfaced from her swallow hole, collapsing into her husband’s arms, Véronique Le Guen believed that she had been underground for forty-two days. It had been one hundred and eleven. Two “days” further into Le Guen’s diary—“I don’t really dread solitude, so much as idleness”
The only untidy presence was the overcrammed bookshelf that served as the bed’s headboard. It held titles in French, Italian, Spanish, German, and a neat row of leather-bound journals—a small, hardcover design that I had favored back when I could afford to buy frivolous things. A small tablet, propped on a Chinese-English dictionary, streamed in gray scale the front desk’s surveillance feed.
I wanted to understand how a person could start again, could create a life outside of the world, a life of freedom and self-reliance: an American kind of life.
Daniel Mason, Country People: A Novel
That was before Kate’s sustained remission, before natalizumab, before rituximab, those drugs with names like Milton’s angels.
In the family, getting distracted was known as “being visited by the Person from Porlock,” a literary reference that softened the self-recrimination that usually accompanied procrastination. Olive was five when Miles had first explained how Coleridge, one day, awaking after having dreamed the whole of Kubla Khan, had begun to write it down when he was called from his cottage “by a person on business from Porlock,” and detained for an hour. Upon returning to his writing desk, he found he had lost the train of the poem, a masterpiece that would never be completed. Since then, “Person from Porlock” had come to mean someone who interrupted the creative process.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place
He was hungry. He was always hungry. He was never exactly hungry, but always wanting to eat.
Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere
Houses can get lonely too, you know.
It’s not that I’m against the universities, but I just think we need to ask ourselves more often, what good are they?
They’re better than the universities, professor, better than all those buildings and all those ideas. But the thing is, a murmuration looks like the plague, too, coming for you. They look like locusts, but it’s so beautiful, like this proof of wild things having an intelligence far greater than ours. The way they move, like a swarm of bees. You know what I mean, like traffic. Have you ever driven in traffic and thought to yourself, it’s a miracle there aren’t more accidents? I think about that every time I’m in traffic. I think about it when I’m driving and another car comes at me from the other direction, and we pass each other and we’re a foot apart, separated by one line. It’s the most natural thing in the world, hurtling past each other the way we do, it’s beautiful chaos, and most of the time we are okay. Then sometimes we do collide. But starlings never collide.
It’s curious that you should be interested in this life alongside those big ideas of yours. I’ve never read your work, but I looked you up, just a little. I know the media just wants to sell an ad, so I didn’t read too deep or too far into things. We all need to leave old lives because we outgrow them, is what you said. ‘We all need to experience ourselves anew.’ You wrote about the idea of new starts. You wrote about the idea of being reborn. I read that piece of yours, the idea of helping others to give birth to something. I guess it’s not true that I haven’t read your work. Sometimes reading is pointless, though, and it’s better just to take things in. You learn a lot by just looking and seeing.
Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say. Why look at your reflection in search of the truth? We are more than just our puny selves, and mirrors are all about puniness.
You are always without time, with too much work, regardless of how much time or how little work you actually have. It’s because you struggle with purpose, baby. You do things because you have to, but that’s the only reason. If you didn’t need to do things, you wouldn’t bother doing anything at all. What kind of life is that? A life without meaning?
That’s why, in terms of energy, leaving the city would be a positive move for you. You need support, you need nature, you’re needing more of a natural kind of energy, and you’re not getting it. It’s the internal energy that is within each of us. Part of you, part of your teaching has been to put as much money aside as you can so that you can arrive at a moment and say, “Now I’m ready, I’m going to do it.” But who is “I”?