XLIV. "words, english words"

on my little collection

It’s 75 and gorgeous out, a little too hot to be comfortably hungover. I sent a book to my best friend yesterday because there was a line in it about a sparrow that was so attentive and warm, and I immediately thought of her. I recently started a new album on my phone called ‘pages of books.’ I don’t annotate when I read fiction but sometimes I come across a passage I know I don’t want to lose—because it’s beautiful or difficult or I suspect it might settle in the sediment of thought and demand to be kicked up again later. Reading and writing, to me, are both processes of “anamnesis, or un-forgetting, the discovering of things hidden in the mind.”

Walking home last night, from a dive bar I used to frequent when I first moved to New York under the first dj presidency, I dictated to text rambling sentiments in my notes app. There were only a couple of interesting thoughts—it’s sad how poorly I write when I’m drunk, how general and brittle the thoughts are—the only two shareable things were: I wish I smoked cigarettes and I think there are a lot of beautiful things left. I think there will be a lot of beautiful things in the future and that doesn’t mean it won’t be horrible, but it means there will still be something else. Today I watched the beginning of Moana. I laughed on the couch with my friend. So I was thinking of my pages of books album and thought I would share some—give my dull mind something to roll around, perhaps provide a little break in the rapidly setting evening.

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Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett

Certain written words are alive, active, living—they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear, in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn’t exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn’t exist without you. And isn’t the opposite true too—that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes, that is how I have gone on…

This is My Beloved, Walter Benton

Entry June 27
                    
                           I stood long where you left me.
Night was all around me
and the stars pecked at it with fierce acetylene silver beaks. 
A little thin moon scarred the sky. 
Then I walked . . . my arm around the emptiness of you beside me. 

And because you were total in my eyes like sudden blindness, 
I saw only you. 
                           You were my purpose and my way, 
you were the bright articulate lights and the dark lonely streets, 
you were each door and window . . . and every passing face. 

And because you were indelible in my blood and brain
in infinite copies—without drink or delirium
my mind conceived you . . . my senses registered you dimensionally.

And it was beautiful . . . O then it was beautiful
in a high beautiful city . . . in a tall lighted beautiful world—
the moon was young and the stars winked like fireflies in tall grass:
night was a jewelled tent around us 
and we were wonderfully alone and sleepy as we always are just after love.

The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one’s own self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.

The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

The man I came here to work with continues to impress me, humanly and professionally. It is true he’s made mistakes, in part because he has done so much. Those who undertake less can be more circumspect. (And those who attempt nothing—whether of the soul or the intellect—are safest, and of course most critical, of all. It’s easy enough to denounce—all you need is ill will.) What an atrocious, sustained effort is required, I find, to learn or do anything thoroughly—especially if it’s what you love.

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I leave you with those, may they swim around among the mental detritus.

xx

Mia