Bokelskere.no

Wie sollte/ er es nicht lieben, da es ihm lächelte.

We've made a great mess of love
Since we made an ideal of it.

Ah, through the open door

Is there an almond tree

Aflame with blossom!

--Let us fight no more.

Among the pink and blue

Of the sky and the almond flowers

A sparrow flutters.

--We have come through,

It is really spring!--See,

When he thinks himself alone

How he bullies the flowers.

--Ah, you and me

How happy we'll be!--See him

He clouts the tufts of flowers

In his impudence.

--But, did you dream

It would be so bitter? Never mind

It is finished, the spring is here.

And we're going to be summer-happy

And summer-kind.

We have died, we have slain and been slain,

We are not our old selves any more.

I feel new and eager

To start again.

It is gorgeous to live and forget.

And to feel quite new.

See the bird in the flowers?--he's making

A rare to-do!

He thinks the whole blue sky

Is much less than the bit of blue egg

He's got in his nest--we'll be happy

You and I, I and you.

With nothing to fight any more--

In each other, at least.

See, how gorgeous the world is

Outside the door!

To-night is a woman born/ Of the man in me

"Those who suffer from the superabundance of life" make suffering an affirmation in the same way as they make intoxication an activity; in the laceration of Dionysus they recognise the extreme form of affirmation, with no possibility of subtraction, exception or choice. "Those who suffer, on the contrary, from an impoverishment of life" make intoxication a convulsion, a numbness; they make suffering a means of accusing life, of contradicting it and also a means of justifying life, of resolving the contradiction. All this in fact goes into the idea of a saviour; there is no more beautiful saviour than the one who would be simultaneously executioner, victim and comforter, the Holy Trinity, the wonderful dream of bad conscience. From the point of view of a saviour, "life must be the path which leads to sainthood". From the point of view of Dionysius, "existence seems holy enough by itself to justify a further immensity of suffering".

I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
You stand, and the night comes through
Your eyes when you look at me.

I would bear the pain.
But always, strong, unremitting
It would make me not me.
The thing with my body that would go on living
Would not be me.
Neither life nor death could help.

Except for you alone I see nothing in this terrestrial abode worthy to occupy my soul and my senses; no, without you nature is nothing to me: but her empire is in your eyes, and that is where she is invincible.

Oh how much more lovable you were when you were less lovely!

How I deceived myself, Mademoiselle, in my first Letter! Instead of relieving my afflictions, I have only increased them by exposing myself to your disfavor, and I feel that the worst of them all is to displease you. Your silence, your cold and reserved manner only too clearly proclaim my rejection.

Do be more consistent, perhaps I shall be less tormented.

“You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap d’Antibes, and Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying good night to his butler.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.