Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.
No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be their last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?
Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.
You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.
Somewhere, and I can’t find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?
Martin Buber tells this tale: “Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ’in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things any more.
Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.
An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given.
The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
She bade solitude good-bye. Good-bye to no schedule but whim; good-bye to her life among no things but her own and each always in place; good-bye to no real meals, good-bye free thought. The whole fat flock of them flapped away. But what was solitude for if not to foster decency? Her solitude always held open house. when was the last time anyone needed her? She was eager to do it, whatever it was.
Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?
You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
I like the slants of light; I’m a collector.
It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, allowing and leaping.
Innocence is a better world.
But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.
It was a clear, picturesque day, a February day without could, without emotion or spirit, like a beautiful women with an empty face.
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.