For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
(Melville, Pierre, Book XXII, Chapter 3)
“Public life on television is more real than private life in the flesh”
(one of the characters in Cronenberg’s Videodrome)
The writer is in a permanent predicament when it comes to punctuation marks; if one were fully aware while writing, one would sense the impossibility of ever using a mark of punctuation correctly and would give up writing altogether. For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible: in punctuation marks the check the writer draws on language is refused payment. The writer cannot trust in the rules which are often rigid and crude; nor can he ignore them without indulging in a kind of eccentricity and doing harm to their nature by calling attention to what is inconspicuous – and inconspicuousness is what punctuation lives by. But if, on the other hand, he is serious, he may not sacrifice any part of his aim to a universal, for no writer today can completely identify with anything universal; he does so only at the price of affecting the archaic. The conflict must be endured each time, and one needs either a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity not to lose heart. At best one can advise that punctuation marks be handled the way musicians handle forbidden chord progressions and incorrect voice leading. With every act of punctuation, like every musical cadence, one can tell whether there is an intention or whether it is pure sloppiness.
(Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann & trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, Columbia University Press, 1958, pp. 96–7)
“It is very agreeable,” he confided to me. “I stop where I please and go on when I please, a regular land yacht. And I am alone.”
“Alone?” I said, “But people . . .”
“Yes, that’s true, but one can avoid the villages. Mussolini, whom I went to see in Rome, made the same remark. I replied that he did not need such an automobile to attract the attention of the crowd. Ah! the pope too, wished to see my auto. But as he cannot leave the Vatican and I could not decently – I wonder why – drive my roulotte in there, he sent someone, the nuncio, who went away filled with admiration.”
(Raymond Roussel, in conversation with Roger Vitrac)
“Only those who do not know how to think what they feel obey grammar. People who want to control their own expression use grammar. The story is told about Sigismund, King of Rome, that he made a grammatical error in one of his public speeches and responded to the person who pointed it out to him in this way: “I am King of Rome and am above grammar.” And the story goes on to say that from then on he was known as Sigismund ‘super-grammaticam.’ A wonderful symbol! Every person who knows how to say what he talks about is in his way King of Rome. The title isn’t bad, and its soul is being oneself.”
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (trans. Alfred Mac Adam), from fragment 11)
“Look: Tomorrow my best, my most intimate friend is going to Paris to stay. Aunt Anica (take a look at her letter) in all likelihood is soon going off to Switzerland with her daughter, who’s married now. Another one is going to Galicia for a long time. My second-best friend is moving to Porto. So in my human environment everything is organizing (or disorganizing) itself to drift away, and I don’t know if it’s to isolate me or to lead me to another path I cannot as yet see. Even the fact that I am going to publish a book is going to change my life. I am losing something – being unpublished. And so changing for the better, because change is bad, is always changing for the worse. And losing a defect or a deficiency or a negation is always losing something. Imagine Mother not living with her painful, daily feelings, a creature who is so sensitive!”
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (trans. Alfred Mac Adam), from fragment 2)
At night, in Rome, it seems you can hear lions roaring. There is an indistinct murmur, and that is the city breathing, amidst its dark domes and the distant hills, in shadow that glistens here and there; and every so often, the raucous noise of sirens, as if the sea were nearby, and ships were setting sail from the harbour for unknown horizons. And then there is that sound, both lovely and savage, cruel but not devoid of an odd sweetness, the roaring of lions, in the nocturnal desert of houses.
I have never figured out what makes that sound. Perhaps hidden workshops, or car engines as they climb uphill? Or perhaps the sound is born, more than from any actual event, from the depths of memory, from the time when between the Tiber and the forests, on solitary slopes, wild beasts still roamed, and she-wolves still suckled foundlings?
I listened carefully, peering into the dark, over roofs and terraces, into that world teeming with shadows; and the sound pierced me like a childhood memory, terrifying, moving, and obscure, bound up with another time. Even if produced by machinery, it is still an animalistic sound, which seems to well up from hidden viscera or from maws yawning futilely, seeking an impossible word. It is not the metallic sound of trams rounding bends in the night, the prolonged, thrilling screech of the trams of Turin, the doleful but confident howl of those factory-worker nights in the empty cool air. This is a noise full of laziness, like some yawning beast, indeterminate and terrible.
You can hear it everywhere in the city. I listened to it for the first time, so many years ago now, as it came through the bars of a cell in the prison of Regina Coeli, along with the screams of the sick and the mad in the infirmary, and a distant clattering of metal; at the time it seemed like the breathing of that mysterious liberty that must somehow still exist, out there. And I was listening to it just now, a few months after the liberation, from a room high above the Via Gregoriana, a temporary, provisional refuge in those times of change, according to where a providential destiny led us, here and there.
(Carlo Levi, L’orologio, trans. Tony Shugaar)
“The author had thought of qualifying this book: A Novel Without Hypocrisy; but he reflected that these words might appear unseemly, since hypocrisy is becoming more and more fashionable.”
(Remy de Gourmont, preface to A Virgin Heart, trans. Aldous Huxley)
Extremely obliging as he was, he did enjoy some small popularity and in the end made up for not being a fireman by stuffing, furiously and with great conviction, all the polecats and weasels killed in the surrounding woods. Every family possessed at least one specimen of our cousin’s skill and at that time we could not got into a house without seeing in its place of honour one of these animals, seated on its piece of wood, indulging in flirtacious gestures, generally in the style of squirrels. Owing to a tendency towards the ideal, which the elderly, retired military often display, our cousin adjusted and softened features in the animals corpses which seemed too repellent or fierce.
(Octave Mirbeau, Abbé Jules, trans. Nicoletta Simborowski)
“Today the city is preoccupied with food. In the 70's, we were preoccupied with sex. It was a moment of total hedonism with no consequences, no AIDS. And there was birth control and little thought of getting married. Now, a 25-year-old knows 70 kinds of sushi, but at what expense? A youth spent on restaurants is a youth misspent.”
(Fran Leibowitz, a throwaway quote on the glory days of NYC in The New York Times.)