:::: You want to trot over and hug her every time you see her stirring in her seat.
:::: To hope is to contradict the future.
Emphasized Emile Cioran, who in 1933 studied at the University of Berlin and confessed in a newspaper column: There is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler.
:::: To simplify is to contradict the past.
:::: Because, after a little more than an hour, I realized I should take my leave of Ron. I don’t believe I have ever experienced more complication closing a door behind me.
:::: How that door remained both open and shut after I left because the only real closure can come in mimetic fiction and knee-jerk memoir, stories of trauma leading to redemption, triumph over adversity, faux wisdom hardened into commodity for those desperate to buy and believe it.
Like an order of Arby’s Cheesecake Poppers, only with your life.
:::: I think I’ve heard of Lance Olsen. I wonder who he was.
People in 50 years won’t ever say.
:::: If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
Posited Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern pragmatism, who during the last two decades of his life couldn’t afford heat in winter and was forced to subsist on old bread donated by the local baker.
:::: No comment.
Reads the epitaph on Edward Abbey’s memorial stone.
:::: It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived, recounted Joel-Peter Witkin. We were going to church. Walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it, but before I could touch it someone carried me away.
:::: Death is not an event in life, Wittgenstein claimed: we do not live to experience death.
:::: Yes, I want to say, and no.
:::: Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.
Emma Bovary eats arsenic, Eva Braun cyanide, Alan Turing cyanide, Walter Benjamin morphine, Freud morphine, Raymond Roussel barbiturates, Abbie Hoffman barbiturates, Stefan Zweig barbiturates, Frieda Kahlo painkillers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman chloroform.
Attila the Hun, whose empire stretched from the Ural to the Rhine and the Danube to the Baltic, chokes to death at his own wedding feast.
:::: Sculptor Tony Cragg asking the audience during an interview with Ulrich Krempel at the Academy to imagine two dots on a piece of paper.
Now, he says, imagine how you might connect them.
Most of us would draw a straight black line from one to the other. The artist would see a plethora of opportunities, including a colorful filament that circles out and around Jupiter and back again.
:::: The polymorphous flare-up of white asparagus everywhere, each tapering penile stalk more than a foot long, an inch round.
Pan-fried asparagus. Wiener Schnitzel with asparagus. Cheesecake with asparagus. Asparagus lasagna. Asparagus quiche. Asparagus soup. Asparagus salad. Asparagus ice cream.
Asparagus, Proust’s narrator noticed, transforms my chamber pot into a flask of perfume.
:::: Because Virginia Woolf drowns herself in the Ouse, Paul Celan in the Seine, Spalding Gray in the East River, Hart Crane in the Gulf of Mexico.
:::: I think the future has it in for us.
Theorized Noel Gallagher, who may have been intentionally slant-rhyming with Jim Morrison’s not unfamiliar observation: No one here gets out alive.
Niemand hier bekommt lebend raus.
:::: God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.
Fussed Eugène Ionesco.
:::: Because Anne Sexton shrugs on her mother’s old fur coat, removes her rings, pours herself a glass of vodka, strolls into the garage, and starts her car.
:::: Consciousness’s continuous harassment by the flesh.
:::: God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable, felt H. L. Mencken. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
:::: He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
Saw Nietzsche.
:::: Because Patrik Ouredník tells how, during the first months Buchenwald was open for business, those in charge gifted the inmates with postcards saying: Accommodation is wonderful, we are working here, we receive decent treatment and are well looked after. The inmates were made to sign them and address them to relatives, some of whom apparently believed what they read. One Greek prisoner mailed his postcard to his father in Pyrgos. Three months later, the man arrived for a visit.
At the railroad platform, the son leapt upon him, strangling his father to death before the Germans could get their hands on the poor sap.
:::: Three weeks away from the taxi that will take us to Tegel, O. begins imagining what their suitcases will look like waiting next to their apartment door.
:::: That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.
Were Lou Costello’s last words.
:::: Beyond a certain point there is no return. That is the point that has to be reached.
Contended the writer with a t-shirt designed to make money in his name saying: Kafka didn’t have a lot of fun either.
:::: I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.
Wrote another editor when rejecting Gertrude Stein.
:::: O. invariably begins to imagine what comes after the finish line of every race long before the homestretch rounds into view.
:::: Death is the mother of beauty.
Penciled Wallace Stevens, who in 1935 confessed to his publisher he was a Mussolini supporter and added: The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors.
:::: Because my uncle had a heart attack on a beach in Texas while feeding the pigeons.
A good Scandinavian, he was too embarrassed to draw attention to himself, recounted his wife, who was sitting beside him at the time, and so he expired, sotto voce, on the spot.
:::: Or my cousin who went into the hospital for a routine hip replacement to fix his fullback years and caught a virulent bacterial infection. One week he was fine, the next on a ventilator, and the next his wife was emailing family and friends announcing the time and place of his memorial service.