The road crossed a great plateau, with hills and undulations to the right, rising to mountains of some height towards the northerly horizon. Just as the winter days I had spent in America three years before had been dark and colourless, so now the earth's surface, a patchwork of greens, was flooded with light. In the long since abandoned pastures stretching towards the mountains grew clumps of oaks and alders; rectilinear plantations of spruces alternated with irregular stands of birches and aspens, the countless trembling leaves of which had opened only a week or so before; and even on the dark, distant slopes, where pine forests covered the mountainsides, the pale green of larches lit by the evening sun gleamed here and there in the background. When I saw those seemingly uninhabited highlands, I remembered the longing for faraway places that I had known when I bent over my atlas as a pupil at the monastery school, and how often I had travelled, in my thoughts, across the states of America, which I could recite by heart in alphabetical order. In the course of a geography lesson that lasted very nearly an eternity -- outside, the early morning blue was still untouched by noonday brightness -- I had once explored the regions I was now driving through, as well as the Adirondacks further to the north, which Uncle Kasimir had told me looked just like home. I still remember searching the map with a magnifying glass for the source of the Hudson River, and getting lost in a map square with a great many mountains and lakes. Certain place names such as Sabattis, Gabriels, Hawkeye, Amber Lake, Lake Lila and Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds have remained indelibly in my memory ever since.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

impatient and angry like a little stupid god

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing--the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in those ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say--so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Elsewhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient--impatient and angry like a little stupid god.

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end;
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge;
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . .

Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son

A snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life

As a boy in his father's church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful. He had played with this thing, but had never allowed it to come alive.

He knew now what this thing was--hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is . . . a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life.

Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts

A cutting retort you have never forgotten

A small boy you come out of Connolly's Stores holding your mother by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward along the highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach the long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother's face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten.

Samuel Beckett, Company

If You Only Knew

Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing,
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly.
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you only knew.
Far from me and even farther yet from being unaware of me and still unaware.
Far from me because you undoubtedly do not love me or, what amounts to the same thing, that I doubt you do.
Far from me because you consciously ignore my passionate desires.
Far from me because you are cruel.
If you only knew.
Far from me, joyful as a flower dancing in the river at the tip of its aquatic stem, sad as seven p.m. in a mushroom bed.
Far from me yet silent in my presence and still joyful like a stork-shaped hour falling from on high.
Far from me at the moment when the stills are singing, at the moment when the silent and loud sea curls up on its white pillows.
If you only knew.
Far from me, o my ever-present torment, far from me in the magnificent noise of oyster shells crushed by a night owl passing a restaurant at first light.
If you only knew.
Far from me, willed, physical mirage.
Far from me there's an island that turns aside when ships pass.
Far from me a calm herd of cattle takes the wrong path, pulls up stubbornly at the edge of a steep cliff, far from me, cruel woman.
Far from me, a shooting star falls into the poet's nightly bottle.
He corks it right away and from then on watches the star enclosed in the glass, the constellations born on its walls, far from me, you are so far from me.
If you only knew.
Far from me a house has just been built.
A bricklayer in white coveralls at the top of the scaffolding sings a very sad little song and, suddenly, in the tray full of mortar, the future of the house appears: lovers' kisses and double suicides nakedness in the bedrooms strange beautiful women and their midnight dreams, voluptuous secrets caught in the act by the parquet floors.
Far from me,
If you only knew.
If you only knew how I love you and, though you do not love me, how happy I am, how strong and proud I am, with your image in my mind,
to leave the universe.
How happy I am to die for it.
If you only knew how the world has yielded to me.
And you, beautiful unyielding woman, how you too are my prisoner.
O you, far-from-me, who I yield to.
If you only knew.

Robert Desnos

It was a cross. She saw it as a cross, and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness.

Don DeLillo, "Baader-Meinhof"

from The New Yorker, April 1, 2002

each individual must foment a private conspiracy

But Nadja was poor, which in our time is enough to condemn her, once she decided not to behave entirely according to the imbecile code of good sense and good manners. She was also alone: "At times, it is terrible to be so alone. I have no friends but you," she said to my wife on the telephone, the last time. She was, finally, strong, and extremely weak, as one can be, in that idea she had always had but in which I had only too warmly encouraged her, which I had only too readily aided her in giving supremacy over all the rest: the idea that freedom, acquired here on earth at the price of a thousand--and the most difficult--renunciations, must be enjoyed as unrestrictedly as it is granted, without pragmatic considerations of any sort, and this because human emancipation--conceived finally in its simplest revolutionary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean according to the means at every man's disposal--remains the only cause worth serving. Nadja was born to serve it, if only by demonstrating that around himself each individual must foment a private conspiracy, which exists not only in his imagination--of which, it would be best, from the standpoint of knowledge alone, to take account--but also--and much more dangerously--by thrusting one's head, then an arm, out of the jail--thus shattered--of logic, that is, out of the most hateful of prisons.
Andre Breton, Nadja, pp. 142-143