Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the experience of anonymity. Thoreau was misguided in his instinct to separate himself from the people around him and to envision their lives as empty and useless. The […]
He returned to the other point of view — opposite to that of his love and of his jealousy, to which he resorted at times by a sort of mental equity, and in order to make allowance for different eventualities — from which he tried to form a fresh judgment of Odette, based on the […]
Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.“ – Jack Kerouac, On the Road The music flows in and out of your senses as easily as the sweat raises your skin. What you […]
Gustave Doré’s illustration to Dante’s Inferno. Plate X: Canto III: Charon herds the sinners onto his boat. “Charon the demon, with eyes of glede, / Beckoning to them, collects them all together, / Beats with his oar whoever lags behind.’” (Longfellow’s translation, which isn’t particularly good, it must be said.) Find more here:
A Japanese poet once wrote that there is no utility in metaphor, that in the modern world the only valuable expression is of words that are specific to one thing. This is language as the table of existential elements: when used precisely, words make an objective reality that we can use to breach the gaps between […]
..the unwieldy elephant,/ To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed/ His lithe proboscis… John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV We elephants are images of humility, as when we/undertake our melancholy migrations to die. Dan Chiasson, The Elephant
Here’s the quote again. It’s been lingering in my mind. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. J.D. Salinger This epitaph is scattered prominently across the web since J.D. Salinger’s death. It’s the simplest way to explain Salinger’s long silence: his own words. I wonder whether […]