His characters—men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception—are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse towards flight.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Archives for category: Words
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with good luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
From this Wired article, where you will also find an audio recording of Ernest Hemingway giving the above speech.
―Mario Vargas Llosa
—The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.
—Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
—Aeschylus, playwright and soldier, c. 525 BC—c. 456 BC
After a stripped-down unplugged set, the concert swung into a boisterous third set. Members in the audience in the pit front of house were on their feet, clapping and singing along.
Just as I was expecting another fast number, the lights went down and the rest of the band retreated into the shadows. Koji Tamaki, in white suit and pants, stood alone and sang this ballad almost without any accompaniment. The lyrics to the song appeared on the two overhead screens. To his soaring vocals I read the words, words of regret, of loss, of memories.
I had goosebumps and a lump in my throat the whole time.
After the concert, I searched for the song and listened to it again. But the raw emotions and the intimacy, like the moments about which the song was written, were forever gone, meant to be lived just once.
雨
安全地帯
作詞/作曲：玉置浩二
元気？
愛しているんだよ もう戻れないけど
あれは初めての恋だった 募る想い
遠い遠い昔 青春の日々
あの日震えてる君の手を 握りしめただけで
大切な人になると思った
何ものにも変えられない
世界中で一番大事なものなんだって
わかったんだ わかってたんだ
会えば嬉しくて ギュッと抱きしめた
雨の午後は人恋しくて 求めあったふたりは
もう少しそうしてたかったのに
どちらからともなく離れた
なんにも伝えらんなくて 雨が降り止まなくて
いっしょに いたいだけなのに
今でも 今でも
思い出すだけで 切なくて
胸が張り裂けそうで
ほんとに ほんとに
世界中で一番 君が 君が 好きだったって
わかったんだ わかってたんだ
ずっと ずっと
愛しているんだよ
もう遅いけれど
あれは最初で最後の夜
眠ってる君に
残した 「I love you」
A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, “In a Strange Room” is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.
Very occasionally they would employ the word “mingle” to refer to intercourse, but even then the most striking example of this is when the bones of Achilles and Patroclus are mingled together in death.
Aphrodite was not the goddess of love as is popularly believed, as we tell our children. She was the Goddess of Sex. The patron goddess of prostitutes in fact. And her son, Eros, dear little Cupid with his darling little arrows, was the god of passion.
And this is why even Sappho spoke only of longing, of pain, of sex, of people being precious to her, this is why even Sappho never used the word “love.” It didn’t exist.
—Girls, Nic Kelman
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)(This is the school in which we learn…)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn…)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
— Delmore Schwartz
A beautifully-written article that won the author the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. You have to read this.
“Pearls Before Breakfast” by Gene Weingarten
All the more amazing considering Mr. Weingarten is a humor writer.
— Chiyo Uno, Confessions of Love
About
34, male and very Cancerian. Often irascible, even if he is prescient to his emotions. Lives for the resonance of beautiful passages, cinematic magic and aural bliss. Dabbles in fiction writing, photography, sketching and daydreaming in his free time, even though he is paid to do just those in a professional capacity.
He is, in other words, quite a geek.
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