Sunday, January 29, 2017

On the Heights of Despair






 “I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”




 


“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”



 


“Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”



 


“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots.....



  


 To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”



 


“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”







“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”




“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”
Emile Cioran

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Chronicles, Vol. 1



 


“The line it is drawn 
The curse it is cast






The slow one now 
Will later be fast





As the present now 
Will later be past





 


The new order is 
Rapidly fadin'.




And the first one now 
Will later be last 
For the times they are a-changin'.”



 


“Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.” 
Bob Dylan

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Liquid Modernity and Love





“The main point about civility is...the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.”


 


“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”



 



“Desire and love act at cross purposes. love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving. True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love's shackles.”


 


“What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.”
Zygmunt Bauman

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Haiku Two to Fourteen






Into the lake spill
a single drop of wine
and there fades the sun






In the meadows
not one four-leaf clover;
among the three of us, who is to blame?







In the museum garden
Chairs deserted.
The statues have gone back
to that other museum.







Could that be the voice?
of our dead friends?
or could that be the phonograph?








She rests her fingers
on the sea-blue scarf
Look, there: corals!







Contemplating
Heavy are her breasts
through the looking glass






Again I put on
the tree leaves
and you, you bleat.







Darkness. The wind.
Divorce spreads
and moves in waves.







Naked woman
the pomegranate she threw
was full of stars.







 
I am raising now
a dead butterfly
with no make-up








How can you gather
the thousand little pieces
of each person?







What's wrong with the rudder?
The boat goes in circles
And not a single gull in sight







Sick Fury
She has no eyes left,
the snakes she was grasping
swallow her hands.







There is a hole in this column.
Can you see
Persephone? 

George Seferis