Anna, trainee attorney-at-law.
765 posts
Hersuavevoice - Bellezza Destino - Tumblr Blog
“[…] the idea of perfection which art pursues, the wisdom accumulated in writing, the dream of satisfying every desire that is expressed in the luxury of ornaments, all these point towards one single meaning, celebrate one foundational principle, entail one single final object. And this is an object which does not exist. Its sole quality is that of not being there. One cannot even give it a name.”
— Italo Calvino, tr. Martin McLaughlin, from “The Mihrab,” Collection of Sand (Mariner Books, 2013; orig. pub. in Italian, 1984)
...the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
“Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.”
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
Uykusu gelmeyenlere, uykusu geldiği halde gergin olanlara, uyuyamayanlara ve saçları saman sarısı kirpikleri mavi olanlara…
Susana Soca
With lingering love she gazed at the dispersed Colors of dusk. It pleased her utterly To lose herself in the complex melody Or in the cunous life to be found in verse. lt was not the primal red but rather grays That spun the fine thread of her destiny, For the nicest distinctions and all spent In waverings, ambiguities, delays. Lacking the nerve to tread this treacherous Labyrinth, she looked in on, whom without, The shapes, the turbulence, the striving rout, (Like the other lady of the looking glass.) The gods that dwell too far away for prayer Abandoned her to the final tiger, Fire.
– Jorge Luis Borges
“The question is no longer: How can experience of nature give rise to necessary judgments? But rather: How can man think what he does not think, inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority? How can man be that life whose web, pulsations, and buried energy constantly exceed the experience that he is immediately given of them? How can he be that labour whose laws and demands are imposed upon him like some alien system? How can he be the subject of a language that for thousands of years has been formed without him, a language whose organization escapes him, whose meaning sleeps an almost invincible sleep in the words he momentarily activates by means of discourse, and within which he is obliged, from the very outset, to lodge his speech and thought, as though they were doing no more than animate, for a brief period, one segment of that web of innumerable possibilities?”
— Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Annexation and Narciso Lòpez–Letterbook
Source: sotheby’s.com
“[F]or most of my life I felt a strange gravitational pull toward an undisclosed traumatic event, that could only be described as a dreadful yearning, and I found it eventually in my son’s death – something that both destroyed me and ultimately defined me. It feels that the unformed yearning that followed me through my days, manifested in the death of my son. […] My son’s death brought me to the essence of my formed self. I mention this, because it could be that the unformed yearning […] may turn out to be something that eventually obliterates you, but also brings you back to life, transforming you into something beyond yourself.”
— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, June 2019
Igor Stravinsky at the Seattle Opera conducting The Soldier’s Tale in 1967. The cast included Basil Rathbone as the narrator, Marina Svetlova as the princess, and Anton Dolin as the devil.
“And so love passes, leaving only bits from which we must construct our lives.”
— Simon Van Booy, from “The Mute Ventriloquist,” The Secret Lives of People in Love (Turtle Point Press, 2007)
“And everything stayed unsaid.”
— Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Eavan Boland, from “Departure from England,”
"There was so much lost time in you, you were so much the shape of what you might have been under different constellations..."
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
“A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us.”
— Giorgio de Chririco
“Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness — that of the seemliness of religious symbols — had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands.”
— Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”