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The Love of Rubin 975
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Judd was soon hidden by the blessed scrub. He who could squeeze the meaning out of a line by pressing on it with his finger-nail, always hastened to remove himself from the presence of true initiates when they were at their books. All the scraps of knowledge with which he was filled, all those raw hunks of life that, for choice, or by force, he had swallowed down, were reduced by the great mystery of words to the most shameful matter. Words were not the servants of life, but life, rather, was the slave of words. So the black print of other people's books became a swarm of victorious ants that carried off a man's self-respect. So he wandered through the bush on that morning, and was only soothed at last by leaves and silence.
Patrick White, Voss
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I loved Him, I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself; my love for Him resembled the way I had become used to the futile insect-like movements of my hands and arms, the way I understood the thoughts which every day echoed against the walls of my mind and died away, the way I recognized the unique smell of sweat from my wretched body, my thinning hair, ugly mouth, the pink hand holding my pen: it was for this reason they had not been able to deceive me.
Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle
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Makiko was not looking at a river or a fish, but at human forms writhing on the shadowy bed. Honda elevated his head until he struck the top of the bookcase in an effort to see down through the small peephole. He could in this way observe what was taking place on the bed beyond the wall. A man's thin, pale thighs were twined about those of a woman. Immediately below him were two heaps of withered flesh hardly bursting with vigor, swaying slowly like aquatic animals as they made contact. They gleamed damply in the faint light; the devourer was unmistakably being devoured; obvious trickery was going hand in hand with sincere tremors. Two mounds of moist pubic hair touched and separated; and a white patch where the light struck the woman's belly, as if a piece of white tissue had been inserted between the two bodies, pierced Honda's awestricken eyes.
Whatever the situation, Imanishi had shamelessly exposed the pitiful thighs of an intellectual in heat. True to his theories, the cheerless, rippling oscillation of his flat buttocks, between which appeared a wasted coccyx, was merely a illusion. His obvious lack of sincerity angered Honda.
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn
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For the first time somewhere within-and at his age!-a desire for transformation had awakened. Having earnestly observed other men's reincarnation without so much as turning an eye, he had never brooded over the impossibility of his own. And now that he was reaching an age when the last glow of life revealed the expanse of his past, the certainty of its impossibility heightened the illusion of the possibility of rebirth all the more.
He too might do something unexpected. To this day all his actions had been predictable, and his reason had always cast its light one step ahead, like a flashlight held by someone walking along a dark road at night. By schemes and predictions he had been able to avoid surprising himself. The most frightening thing was that all mysteries, including the miracle of transmigration, finished by being cut and dried.
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn
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Once at the Bang Pa In the old ladies quickly put aside their formality. Forgetting their stiff decorum, they giggled and ran about in high spirits. The formality gone, their age was all that remained of their ceremoniousness. They occupied themselves in picking at betel nuts together, quite like greedy, wrinkled parrots clustering around a bagful of seeds. They also scratched wherever they itched, thrusting their hands under the hems of their skirts. They would cackle noisily as they strutted sideways in imitation of young dancing girls. One mummied dancer with wig-like white hair shining over her brown face stretched her betel-stained mouth in gaping laughter and raised her sharp elbows, thrust sideways as she danced; the exposed, dry bones of her angular arms cut sharp shadow-pictures against the background of blue sky with its layers of dazzling clouds.
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn
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This is where my real research begins; for I will not rest content with this vague abridgement, I will not let myself be cheated of that past which, I well know, is not an empty past, since I can assess the distance that divides me from the man I was when I arrived, not only the extent to which I have been bogged down and bewildered and blinded but also the gains I have made in some spheres, my progress in the knowledge of this town and its inhabitants, of its horror and its moments of beauty; for I must regain control of all those events which I feel swarming within me, falling into shape despite the mist that threatens to obliterate them, I must summon them before me one by one in their right order, so as to rescue them before they have completely foundered in that great morass of slimy dust, I must rescue my own territories foot by foot from the encroaching weeds that disfigure them, from the scummy waters that are rotting them and preventing them from producing anything but this brittle, sooty vegetation.
Michel Butor, Passing Time
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You dream in a language that I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.
Celine Song, Past Lives (2023)
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They're good machines, granted, quite as good as any others, very fine articles that work beautifully, but that's quite outside your department, your duties or concerns, for you've nothing to do with the production side: you've merely got to see that people buy a Scabelli rather than an Olivetti or a Hermes, and that, naturally, without any really valid reason; it's a game that's quite amusing sometimes, an exhausting game, a game that leaves you hardly any respite, a remunerative game, a game which might destroy you utterly like a vice, but which hasn't done so, since today you're free, since you're going to find your freedom, which is called Cécile; and so no doubt, in spite of your material wealth and his too obvious indigence, you are more to be pitied than he, because he's doing what interests him, because his whole life is centred round what he enjoys, if you hadn't got that splendid love, that proof of your independence, that proof that you've been successful on both planes, since on the one hand you've gor nearly enough money and on the other you're still young enough in spirit to be able to make good use of it in a wonderful life of adventure.
Michel Butor, Changing Track
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…she did not belong here nor anywhere upon the earth, everything that she, the Venus de Milo meant, whatever it might be, originated from a heavenly realm that no longer existed, which had been pulverized by time, a moldering, annihilated universe that had disappeared for all eternity from this higher realm, because the higher realm had itself disappeared from the human world, …
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below, “Where You’ll Be Looking”
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…weight and mass and air resistance and wind and gravitation, that's what they come up with, tops, but no one, nobody, says that there is an invisible gigasystem at work here, and that's how the world is, this, just this, is simply of no interest, they point to resistance, gravitation, forces, so there, it's all so obvious, no need to ruminate over it, whereas this is exactly what shows that everyone here is absolutely, truly ignorant; or take another example, because there it is, let's look at the Earth, then you'll see there are things that stand still and things that will sooner or later come to a standstill, that is, at the moment they happen to be moving from one place to another, there is stoppage and delayed stoppage, there are these two if we consider only the Earth and the way we see it, but if we take the realm of the invisible where, let's say, he says, neutrons and protons and electrons and hadrons and leptons and quarks and bosons and superpartners bicker and so on and so forth where the series is endlessly continuable as time passes-because they too are only assembled out of something-well, no matter, the point is that here we see motion, the interruption or stoppage of which, how shall I say it, is deferred forever, so that we have stoppage and motion, but behind both, and pay attention now, he says, there is that elusive, untathomable gigasystem that determines what is it going to be, stoppage or motion, and beyond the worlds there are other worlds, every world perfectly conceals another world, of course, although the whole thing can also be expressed by saying that any one world is only a gateway, a secret door to billions of worlds, which are reachable only through this one and only world, and there are worlds upon worlds, but really, a huge topsy-turvydom, a gigachaos, one might say, and that doesn't express what we're talking about any better than if we were to recognize the whole as hierarchical parts of a single vast system, of course these are only words, and words never reveal anything, no, it's absolutely certain that they exist precisely to hide the way out, playing the role of the hidden, no, the bricked-up door that will never open, and of course things aren't much better with thought either, thought too always gets stuck at some threshold, exactly where this thought should cross over into the beyond, in short, no matter if it is words or thoughts, this is just like a border closing in the old days—no way in, no way out-while the enclosed area in its tense causality quivers there like a jelly-like mass, worthless and misleading, …
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, “Obstacle Theory”
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Well... How do you think you know that person you were a second ago is the same person you are now? A continuous stream of memories. Given only that, we all create illusions within ourselves, saying that we each have only one fixed persona
Perfect Blue, 1997
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The rope of words that uncoils down through the sheaf of papers and connects me directly with that moment on the first of May when I began to braid it, that rope of words is like Ariadne’s thread, because I am in a labyrinth, because I am writing in order to find my way about in it, all these lines being the marks with which I blaze the trail: the labyrinth being my days in Bleston, incomparably more bewildering than that of the Cretan palace, since it grows and alters even while I explore it.
Michel Butor, Passing Time
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from the Gallipoli peninsula on a clear day you can see as far as the hills near Troy, Asia, the narrow sea wound of the Dardanelles opens onto the Sea of Marmara a few leagues away from Constantinople, with Marianne on vacation in a resort in July 1991 I stay glued to the TV, trying to get news of Croatia, this vacation was an engagement gift from her parents if I remember right, in the end we didn't get engaged I left to hunt pig and meet Andrija in Osijek I got engaged to death as the marching song of the Spanish legionnaires says, soy el novio de la muerte, but Marianne still wore a ring with a diamond and gold earrings I had given her maybe the same as Helen of Lacedaemon's under her veil, in that boring resort one could take advantage of organized excursions, one to the Dardanelles one to Troy that's all Marianne managed to get me to agree to,
Mathias Énard, Zone
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In a world of inhumane reality, there is actually only one humane sanctuary left, Doctor, and that can be found in the comfort of a simple dream. That parade you saw is full of refugees who were unwillingly chased out of reality.
Paprika (2006)
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The shade, the meal he'd eaten, the tobacco, and the depths of autumn, about to subside into the darkness of the solstice th masked days, as the shortest days of the years were called—sent a shiver down the emperor's spine. He could have moved to the sunny side of the courtyard, but he was out of humor, and to be a pain in the ass he requested the goose-feather cape he wore in his rooms when it was cold. Etiquette demanded that he donate whatever tunic, cape, and headdress he wore at his public audience each morning, so he never appeared there in his white feather cloak, which he loved. He wore no earrings, necklaces, or lip plug. The tunic he had on now, also white, was embroidered with a simple border of flowers and sea snails. He was wearing plain sandals, adorned only with pearls-the gold-and-gem-encrusted sandals he'd worn to receive El Malinche were dazzling but very uncomfortable. He'd left them under the courtyard arch to feel the floor of swept clay under the soles of his feet. The feeling brought back the happy times before he'd entered the calmecac, when he could run for the fun of it with his cousins and the nursemaids' children along the corridors of the Old Houses, without having to think about the Tlaxcalteca besieging the city, the demands of the traders, a surfeit or a dearth of warriors to be sacrificed in the temples, infinite ambassadors presenting well-wishes and requesting a discount on the latest tribute due from their cities, or testy gods blithely doling out droughts, earthquakes, defeats, and invasions.
Álvaro Enrique, You Dreamed of Empires
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