Bokelskere.no

The person who is not doing anything isn't committed to any activity, so she has the potential for anything. Since non-doing lacks a place in the general order of things, it becomes a threat to order.

Og hver dag den samme natten.
Og et helt nytt hode.

Og hver natt den første blå stripen
på himmelen. Morgenen kommer
som et spyd i blått gull.

Og hodet skjelver.

Jeg kjente en revne i sinnet –
som om hjernen var delt –
Jeg prøvde å skjøte den – søm for søm –
men fikk den ikke hel.

Tanken som kom etter ville jeg knytte
til tanken som kom først –
men sammenhengen floket seg
som nøster på et gulv.

Hjernen er større enn himmelen
for hvis du sammenlikner –
vil den ene lett romme den andre
og i tillegg også deg

Hjernen er dypere enn sjøen
for hvis du ser dem blått mot blått
vil den ene absorbere den andre
som svampen gjør med vått

Hjernen veier det samme som Gud
for hvis du veier dem gram for gram
er de like forskjellige
som stavelse og klang –

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

At individet kan bli likvidert med hud og hår, er fortsatt en for optimistisk tanke.

Le soir lève son bâton blanc devant les piétons.
Cornes des bœufs les soirs d’abondance vous semez
l’épouvante sur le boulevard
Passez votre chemin !

L'automne, déjà! - Mais pourquoi regretter un éternel soleil, si nous sommes engagés à la découverte de la clarté divine, - loin des gens qui meurent sur les saisons.

L'automne. Notre barque élevée dans les brumes immobiles tourne vers le port de la misère, la cité énorme au ciel taché de feu et de boue. Ah ! les haillons pourris, le pain trempé de pluie, l'ivresse, les mille amours qui m'ont crucifié!

Et je redoute l'hiver parce que c'est la saison du confort!

The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.

Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.

There are all kinds of beauty in the world, thank God, though ugliness is homogeneous. . . . But for a greatness of beauty I have never experienced anything like New Mexico. As those mornings when I went with a hoe along the ditch to the canyon, at the ranch, and stood in fierce, proud silence of the Rockies, or their foothills, to look far over the desert to the blue mountains away in Arizona, blue as chalcedony, with the sagebrush desert sweeping gray-blue in between, dotted with tiny cube-crystals of houses: the vast amphitheater of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the East, and coming up flush at the pine-dotted foothills of the Rockies! What splendor! Only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendor of it all.

All of the activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Høstens dag har ingen lengsel mer.