Bokelskere.no

What if I didn't know what I felt anymore? I probably had never known what I felt. I only liked getting drunk and being in love. If I wasn't either of those things, I simply needed my rent, cigarettes and coffee, simple enough. I really liked the life of the poet.

We are a nation of metamorphs. Anything red compels us.

Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and to be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be as gods.

But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the shadow side of our other wants.

It goes without saying that I was in love with Sherlock Holmes, and, once I got around to it, with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe as well. There is something to be said for a greatcoat or trenchcoat, a back alley, and a clenched jaw, and that none of these men au fond had much respect for women did not bother me a whit: the blonde usually did it, and I was not a blonde.

What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Years balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

The architecture of the Minotaur's heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for nearly five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life—is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster's veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur's world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.

A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It's a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins.

Cats are all right, though. Cats judge everything and everyone, so even when they're judging you, you know it isn't personal.

I want to take her on my bike to the woods. I want to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her; listen to music with her before bed; read poetry to her, and while I work during the day she can wander away and do whatever she likes until dusk when we'll walk along the Seine or stroll through the streets.... I want to go to the Louvre with her, and at night visit the park in Villette; I want to take her to see Angelopoulos movies and to listen to Argerich's wild concerts; I want to take pictures of us around the fourth arrondissement as we sweep the dust from the cracks of our everyday lives.

And Tokyo is the cherry blossoms, the sunset at dusk, dawn sunlight through her windows, the cry of the crow, the cityscape of darkened rooms on a rainy evening, the depth of feeling in her eyes....

Later we walked from rue des Écoles to Odéon in the heart of the Latin Quarter. There was a fine drizzle typical of late winter and early spring, not cold just slightly cool, and the streets were filled with students. Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens... a swath of gold ringed in a misty-blue halo, this was the Paris that most entranced me. None of us had brought an umbrella, and the other three women hurried ahead while I nearly burst with glee, singing one song after another deep down in my throat in unintelligible (to them) Chinese. They turned back to make funny faces at me, glowering, scolding, smirking. Their golden, chestnut-brown hair dampened by the rain, glittered in the sunset. They were beautiful, Paris was beautiful, and I and them, I and Paris, my life felt so dear. We were four children under heaven, without nationality or student credentials, far from home, each abandoned by their beloved.

Life has suddenly become overcrowded. Too many people I can care for are swarming in and filling up my chest. Too many things I want to do are rushing headlong into my new life for reasons unknown to me. All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination...

When the heart is dead, all is dead, though the victim may not fully realise it for a long time.

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.

In myths, the hero survives.
The evil is vanquished.
The world is set right.
Sometimes there are celebrations, and sometimes there are funerals.
The dead are buried. The living move on.
Nothing changes.
Everything changes.
This is a myth.
This is not a myth.

The trouble is that there is little the dead can do; otherwise they wouldn't be the dead. No! But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. They are powerless only to give the full answer to the new questions posed for the living by history. But they try! Whenever they hear the imperious cries of the people in a crisis, the dead respond.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and one hot July week in Oxford I was moved to spend an afternoon walking the graveyard looking for his stone, a kind of courtesy call on the owner of the property. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.