We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.
What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
I’m vain enough to think that I’ve made a successful life. I’ve had everything I’ve ever wanted. You can’t beat that.
Fame is a lot of fun, but it’s not interesting. I loved being noticed and praised, even the banquets. But they didn’t have anything that I wanted. After about six months, I found it boring.
We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.
WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.
But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.
When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, ‘What is the sound of the waterfall?’ ‘Silence,’ he finally told me.
I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn’t think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don’t have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.
Without bravery, we will never be able to realize the vaulting scope of our own capacities. Without bravery, we will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, our lives will remain small – far smaller than we probably want our lives to be.
But one can acquire a taste for love as for loneliness or ugliness as for saintliness. Each a special way of going down.
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul under the almost full moon. Lost for the last two hours. Finishing a loaf of bread and worried about the curfew. I have not spoken for three days and I am thinking, “Why not just settle for love? Why not just settle for love instead?
We must risk delight.
What can I do with these people? They come to the risk so dutifully. Are delighted by anecdotes that give them Poetry. Are grateful to be told of diagonals that give them Painting. Good people. But stubborn when warned the beast is not domestic. How can I persuade them that the dark, soulful Keats was five feet one? Liked fighting and bear-baiting? I can’t explain the red hair. Nor say how you died so full of lust for Fanny Brawne. I will tell them of Semele.
You can’t work in a steel mill and think small.