It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.
I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.
Just as art is the concealment of art, laissezfaire is the concealment of tremendous generosity.
Blessed is your name. Blessed is the confession of your name.
I remember what Ben Jonson said: ‘I’ve studied all the philosophies and all the theologies but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.
We did no train ourselves to receive, because we believed there wasn’t anything to receive and we could not endure with this belief.
No soy un santo ni un asesino; no amo ni mato. Hago el amor y arranco las alas de las moscas.
The wretched beast is tame I don’t need a lover So blow out the flame...
I looked for you in everyone And they called me on that too I lived alone but I was only Coming back to you.
Listen to the one who has not been wounded, the one who says, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ Recall your longing to the loneliness where it was born, so that when she appears, she will stand before you, not against you. Refine your longing here, in the small silver music of her preparations, under the low-built shelter of repentance.
Blessed be the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.
Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.
Listen to a name so private it can burn hear it said aloud and learn and learn History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison of all they want to keep Now.
Refine your longing here, in the small silver music of her preparations, under the low-built shelter of repentance.
Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food.
Bind me to your will, bind me with these threads of sorrow, and gather me out of the afternoon where I have torn my soul on twenty monstrous altars, offering all things but myself.
Blessed are you who, among the numberless swept away in terror, permitted a few to suffer carefully.
I write to murder the selves that whisper untruths to me.
All your stupid charities have armed the poor against you.
I was funding my depression; meeting Christ and reading Marx.
We spoke so that we could become tender. It was not the kind of tenderness which follows passion, but the kind which follows failure.