where the pale petals shone white and calm in all the green

I remember feeling sorry for these plants, positioned on their separate crags, lonely and exposed, how they must have yearned for the life they saw unfolding beneath them.  Down where the plants merged into one another, continuously forming new combinations according to the time of day and year, like the old pear and plum trees she had once brought from her grandparents' country cottage, where the shadows flickered over the grass as the wind swept through the foliage on one of those lazy summer days while the sun was setting beyond the horizon at the mouth of the fjord and you could hear the distant sounds from the town rising and falling like the swell of waves in the air, mingling with the hum of wasps and bees at work among the rosebushes against the wall, where the pale petals shone white and calm in all the green.  The garden already had the character of something old, a dignity and a fullness that only time can create and no doubt was the reason she had positioned a greenhouse at the bottom, half hidden behind a rock, where she could extend her handiwork and also cultivate rarer trees and plants without the rest of the garden being marred by the industrial and provisional nature of the construction.  In the autumn and winter we caught glimpses of her down there, a faint silhouette of color behind the shiny walls, and, it was not without a touch of pride that she remarked, in a casual sort of way, that the tomatoes and cucumbers on the table didn't come from the shop but from her greenhouse in the garden.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle

     I have always had a great need for solitude.  I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.  And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.  Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I . . . do what?  Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.  It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do at home the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be, at times it is nothing less than bedlam, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality is involved.  And there is quite a bit of that here.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle

     And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all.  In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood.  One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone.  They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds.  Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.  There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.  That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

--Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can't have both.

     But he had never once personally experienced those emotions.  He'd never seriously wished for talents and gifts he didn't have, or been passionately in love.  Never had he longed for, or envied, anyone.  Not to say there weren't things he was dissatisfied with, things about himself he found lacking.  If he had to, he could have listed them.  It wouldn't have been a massive list, but not just a couple of lines, either.  But those dissatisfactions and deficiencies stayed inside him--they weren't the type of emotions that motivated him to go out, somewhere else in search of answers.  At least until then. 
     In this dream, though, he burned with desire for a woman.  It wasn't clear who she was.  She was just there.  And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart.  I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru.  My body or my heart.  But you can't have both.  You need to chose one or the other, right now.  I'll give the other part to someone else, she said.  But Tsukuru wanted all of her.  He wasn't about to hand over half to another man.  He couldn't stand that.  If that's how it is, he wanted to tell her, I don't need either one.  But he couldn't say it.  He was stymied, unable to go forward, unable to go back.

--Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (trans. Philip Gabriel)

The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

     "What baby?"
     "She left me."
     "Aw, girl.  Don't cry."
     "She was my best thing."
     Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors.  His hands are limp between his knees.  There are too many things to feel about this woman.  His head hurts.  Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman.  "She is a friend of my mind.  She gather me, man.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
     He is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-iron back; the delicious mouth still puffy at the corner from from Ella's fist.  The mean black eyes.  The wet dress steaming before the fire.  Her tenderness about his neck jewelry--its three wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet into the air.  How she never mentioned or looked at it, so he did not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast.  Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that.  He wants me to put his story next to hers.
     "Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow."
     He leans over and takes her hand.  With the other he touches her face.  "You your best thing, Sethe.  You are."  His holding fingers and holding hers.
     "Me?  Me?"

--Toni Morrison, Beloved

The tyranny of the actual begins.

 

     "I used to tell my students that you don't need three men to go through what she does.  One will usually fit the bill, as Rodolphe, then Leon, then Charles Bovary.  First the rapture and the passion.  All the voluptuous sins of the flesh.  In his bondage.  Swept away.  After the torrid scene up at his chateau, combing your hair with his comb--and so on.  Unbearable love with the perfect man who does everything beautifully.  Then, with time, the fantastical lover erodes into the workaday lover, the practical lover--becomes a Leon, a rube after all.  The tyranny of the actual begins."
     "What's a rube?"
     "A hick.  A provincial.  Sweet enough, attractive enough, but not exactly a man of valor, sublime in all things and knowing all.  A little foolish, you know.  A little flawed.  A little stupid.  Still ardent, sometimes charming, but, if the truth be known, in his soul a bit of a clerk.  And then, with marriage or without--though marriage will always speed things along--he who was a Rodolphe and has become Leon is transformed into Bovary.  He puts on weight.  He cleans his teeth with his tongue.  He makes gulping sounds when he swallows his soup.  He's clumsy, he's ignorant, he's coarse, even his back is irritating to look at.  This merely gets on your nerves at first; in the end it drives you nuts.  The prince who saved you from your boring existence is now the slob at the core of the boring existence.  Dull, dull, dull.  And then the catastrophe.  Somehow or other, whatever his work, he fucks up colossally  on the job.  Like poor Charles with Hippolyte.  He sets out to do the equivalent of removing a bunion and gives somebody gangrene.  The once perfect man is a despicable failure.  You could kill him.  Actuality has triumphed over the dream."
     "And which are you to me, do you think?"
     "At this moment?  I'd say somewhere between a Rodolphe and a Leon.  And slipping.  No?  On the slide to Bovary."
     "Yes."  Laughing.  "That's just about right."
     "Yes, somewhere between desire and disillusionment on the long plummet to death."

--Philip Roth, Deception

Brown raised his eyes from the poem, still muttering, the pools behind the lenses disturbed as he brought his attention up. --What are you asking me about a copy of it for?  What makes you think you sent it to us?  Ask the secretary.
     --But I sent copies to . . . I know I sent one here, your secretary . . . and your secretary isn't here today, she . . .
     --We get things from agents, and send them back to agents.  Ask your agent.  Then Brown appeared to notice that the reddened eyes of this young man, who looked enough in keeping with that stereotype of disheveled insanity suddenly assembled so often associated with genius, eyes strained open to abnormal width, were fixed on the scrawled page protruding from under his sleeve.  He pulled some papers toward him, partially covering it, to return to the day's business correspondence.

--William Gaddis, The Recognitions

All altruism stops at profit-sharing.

They own this place in ways that have nothing to do with deeds and liens and property lines... Contracts're just pieces of paper, they own the world before there's laws.

--Evan Dara, Flee

what I sense is more like the approach of an ice man, a man made of ice cubes, who will come and kiss me on the mouth, on my toothless mouth

And in that phase of radical insomnia I see all of Remedios Varo's pictures passing one after another like tears cried by the moon or my blue yes.  So, honestly, it's hard to notice details or distinguish clearly between last and second-to-last.  And then Remedios Varo lifts up the giant's skirt to reveal an enormous valley, viewed from the highest mountain, a green and brown valley, and the mere sight of that landscape makes me anxious, because I know, just as I know there is another person in the house, that what the painter is showing me is a prelude, the setting for a scene that will be scorched into my soul, or no, not scorched, since nothing can affect me like that any more, what I sense is more like the approach of an ice man, a man made of ice cubes, who will come and kiss me on the mouth, on my toothless mouth, and I shall feel those lips of ice on my lips, and I will see those eyes of ice a few inches away from mine, and then I shall faint like Juana de Ibarbourou, and will murmur, why me? (a coquetry for which I shall be forgiven) and the man made of ice cubes will blink, and in that blink of an eye, I shall catch the briefest glimpse of a blizzard, as if someone had opened a window and then, on second thought, shut it again suddenly, saying, No, you shall see what you must, Auxilio, but all in good time.

--Roberto Bolano, Amulet

Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

Why, General Bonaparte?

Are you not my secretary?

Tell me the name of Alexander's.

Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

--David Markson, This is Not a Novel

just because he talks, that doesn't mean she wants to listen to him

... when she thinks of that generation of silent men, the boys who lived through the Depression and grew up to become soldiers or not-soldiers in the war, she doesn't blame them for refusing to talk, for not wanting to go back into the past, but how curious it is, she thinks, how sublimely incoherent that her generation, which doesn't have much of anything to talk about yet, has produced men who never stop talking, men like Bing, for example, or men like Jake, who talks about himself at the slightest prompting, who has an opinion on every subject, who spews forth words from morning to night, but just because he talks, that doesn't mean she wants to listen to him, whereas with the silent men, the old men, the ones who are nearly gone now, she would give anything to hear what they have to say.

--Paul Auster, Sunset Park

The vanity speaks so stark. DFW

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian.

You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings. He was too much of a Calvinist for that.

Please explain.

You want me to say what lay behind Coetzee's politics? You can best get that from his books. But let me try anyway.
In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.

--"Sophie," from Summertime

France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners.

The mornings are growing colder, I enter them unprepared. Icy mornings. The streets are still dark. The bicycles go past me, their parts creaking, the riders miserable as beggars.

I have a coffee in the Cafe St. Louis. It's as quiet as a doctor's office. The tables have chairs still upturned on them. Beyond the thin curtains, a splitting cold. Perhaps it will snow. I glance at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her. Still, it's depressing. One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.

These dismal mornings. I stand near the radiator, trying to warm my hands over iron that's cold as glass. The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it. Most of their rooms are dark as the poorhouse. There's an odor of tobacco, sweat and perfume, all combined. A dispirited atmosphere in which every sound seems cruel and isolated--the closing of a door, footsteps beneath which one can detect the thin complaint of grit, hoarse bonjours. One feels part of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there's an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. I see her almost daily. I can always go down there on some pretext, but it's difficult to talk while she's working. Oh, Claude, Claude, my hands are tingling. They want to touch you. In her elaborately done hair there is a band which she keeps feeling for nervously. Then she touches the top button of her sweater as if it were a jewel. Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses. A green stone on her index finger. And she wears several wedding bands, three, it seems. I'm too nervous to count.

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

"He doesn't count because we don't know where he is."