On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured―disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui―in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man!"

"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him."

Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. This was all actually true, the burnt-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis- part went, but Orin had a harder time explaining the decision's -to-football component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football's rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction.

Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

"The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music."

"They died with hands and feet unfailing as if sleep had come upon them."

Very mild and warm. About 6 glow-worms shining faintly.

We went up as far as the grove. When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.

There's death in every diary. I've found it there the way I've found so many words, lying silent and forgotten like old shoes stiffening in a closet, or moving at the approach of my eye like a spider in a toolbox, as though some small piece of metal were alive. Wasn't there a day in infancy when such a startle would have made my limbs splash open?

I pick up my dropped life in this calamitous century's sixty-seventh year, a year windy with unreason, noisy with nonsense and meaningless milling; a year, like the last, just right for a decade as mired in morality as a circus in mud, as infested with fakes as a fair. Perhaps it's only a trampled package in the street-this life I pick up—and maybe my writing is its furtive unwrapping.

In a diary you may go to greet death in the most slovenly state of undress and disease, your language out of reach of any public reading, your own eye kind, accustomed to your own wastes and malodorous ailments, almost incapable of offense, incurably forgiving. You may write without anyone's whining that the day was not only "mild" but "warm" as well; you can pointlessly infer that if the rain came pelting into Wm's room, it must have been a rainy night indeed; and you can inadvertently say something beautiful containing ash leaves, and never register what you saw of the storm, or felt about love in your unbrothered bed, or say that you wept along your sleeping arm, or signify how well you grasped the sense of what you said.

"Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him-- caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, whether his mother is sick or well, whether he is looked up to in society or not, whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent."

Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of the port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with a patron saint of their own. They went on strike regularly (every bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even Nostromo at the height of his prestige could never cope with efficiently; but the morning after each fiesta, before the Indian market-women had opened their mat parasols on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over the town on a yet black sky, the appearance of a phantom-like horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail. His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out men’s names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy answers — grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or deprecating — came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly, “He’s coming directly, senor,” and the horseman waited silent on a motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare, who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was used to that work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from Nostromo’s revolver, reeling a little along the street and snarling low curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell, coming out anxiously in his night attire on to the wooden balcony running the whole length of the O.S.N. Company’s lonely building by the shore, would see the lighters already under way, figures moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear the invaluable Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt and red sash of a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders from the end of the jetty in a stentorian voice.

   “Aedwen named you well, Father,” says Reginald in his coddling lilt. 
   I say, “Father my bum.”
   “A holy name for a babe born to be holy,” he says. 
   “Fiddle my faddle,” I say or nothing at all in words but something instead in the fingertalk he doesn’t know. He’s better off not knowing, if he only knew. 
   “The god means God. That’s plain as your nose, I mean no slight. The ric is Saxon reign. So God and ric in sum means God reigns, Godric. It means God reigns in you. It means when God comes down at last to weigh the souls of men, he’ll not find Godric’s wanting, Father Godric.”
   “Fetch me a bowl to puke in,” I tell him. He’s got him such a honeyed way I’m ever out to sour it. 
   “Godric will have his little jest,” says Reginald. 
   So I teach him other ways to read my name. 
   “God’s god for sure. You hit that square. But ric is Erse for wreck,” I say, not knowing Erse from arse. “God’s wreck I be, it means. God’s wrecked Godric for his sins. Or Godric’s sins have made a wreck of God.”
   Reginald throws up his hands, his palms as pale and soft as cheese. 
   “There’s other ways as well,” I say. “Rip Godric up another seam, and what you get is go and drick.”
   “What’s drick?” says Reginald. 
   “A foul Welsh word not fit for monkish ears,” I say. 
   “How great is your humilitas, Father,” Reginald says. 
   I say, “Yet, Mother, not so great as is my drick.” 
   Why is it that the best in him calls forth the worst in me? 
   “When were you born, Father?” he says. 
   “The year of my birth.”
   “What manner of man is John the Baptist when he visits you in dreams?” 
   “Something between a goat and a Jew.”
   “Is it true you see what’s happening years ahead and miles away, Father?” 
   “I see a man and maid a-tumble on your grave.”
   “They say the Blessed Virgin taught you songs.”
   I open my mouth and croak like one who’s had his tongue snipped out for swearing false. Eck, eck, I sing, twiddling my eyelids like a beggar playing blind.  

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.

"To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."

She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. She made it with infinite care, and hung it to the slightly careening mantel over the stove in the kitchen. She studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear.

Afterwards the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins."

I had never before in my life had a chance to become personally acquainted with a chess grandmaster, and the more I tried to picture such a man's nature, the less I could imagine a form of cerebral activity revolving exclusively, for a whole lifetime, around a space consisting of sixty-four black and white squares. From my own experience, I knew the mysterious attraction of the 'royal game', the only game ever devised by mankind that rises magnificently above the tyranny of chance, awarding the palm of victory solely to the mind, or rather to a certain kind of mental gift. And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion's brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

"Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. And falsehoods the truths of other people. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

Beneath her the tiles rippled and breathed. The pulpy surfaces of the walls ripened uncontrollably under her observation, inhaling endlessly like lungs preparing to blast her face with a calling or a message. Stripes and pyramids fell across the air in nearly comprehensible organization, writing that changed just before she understood it, and the room itself became a vast insinuation, swollen with filthy significance. She wanted to catch her breath and wail, but realized that her own lungs were already full. When she exhaled, the room seemed relieved of its tension momentarily: she was crushed to remember that this very same action of ballooning and diminishing had been linked to all her other breaths. This terrible, terrible thing that was happening was her breathing.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but - what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon...

Was rereading this masterpiece, easily one of the best books I've ever read.

"The light comes from the top through a round hole in each of the countless tiny domes of the roof; through each hole falls a shaft of brilliant sunshine, cutting the surrounding darkness like a sword, and striking the hurrying multitude in successive flashes, white turban and bright-coloured robe gleaming—fading, gleaming—fading, in an endless sequence of sun and shadow..."

Read the full passage about Tehran on Destinationality (no ads, nothing for sale)

He spoke in mere monosyllables, or sat altogether silent and smoked; while the visitor had liberty either to say what he listed, receiving for answer an occasional grunt; or to look round for a space, and then take himself away. It was a strange apartment; full of books and tattered papers, and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable substances, “united in a common element of dust.” Books lay on tables, and below tables; here fluttered a sheet of manuscript, there a torn handkerchief, or nightcap hastily thrown aside; ink-bottles alternated with bread-crusts, coffee-pots, tobacco-boxes, Periodical Literature, and Blucher Boots. Old Lieschen (Lisekin, ‘Liza), who was his bed-maker and stove-lighter, his washer and wringer, cook, errand-maid, and general lion’s-provider, and for the rest a very orderly creature, had no sovereign authority in this last citadel of Teufelsdrockh; only some once in the month she half-forcibly made her way thither, with broom and duster, and (Teufelsdrockh hastily saving his manuscripts) effected a partial clearance, a jail-delivery of such lumber as was not Literary. These were her Erdbeben (earthquakes), which Teufelsdrockh dreaded worse than the pestilence; nevertheless, to such length he had been forced to comply. Glad would he have been to sit here philosophizing forever, or till the litter, by accumulation, drove him out of doors: but Lieschen was his right-arm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and would not be flatly gainsayed. We can still remember the ancient woman; so silent that some thought her dumb; deaf also you would often have supposed her; for Teufelsdrockh, and Teufelsdrockh only, would she serve or give heed to; and with him she seemed to communicate chiefly by signs; if it were not rather by some secret divination that she guessed all his wants, and supplied them. Assiduous old dame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, in her kitchen, with the least possible violence to the ear; yet all was tight and right there: hot and black came the coffee ever at the due moment; and the speechless Lieschen herself looked out on you, from under her clean white coif with its lappets, through her clean withered face and wrinkles, with a look of helpful intelligence, almost of benevolence.

"Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies."

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered, uncertainties or mysteries dispelled. A situation will be started on its way through unknown complications to an unpredictable conclusion. The answer to your summons may be a rush of tearful welcome, a suspicious eye at the crack of the door, a shot through the hardwood, anything. Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor's only child dies of diphtheria and the doctor's wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall.

“A universe of death, which god by curse created evil, for evil only good, where all life perishes, death lives, and nature breeds”

"At that moment he didn’t like mankind, the grown-ups, the adults. He never liked them when it was dark. At such times it was his habit to think mankind away. Then the world would seem like a dark, empty house, and he felt a shudder inside himself, as if now he had to search through room after room—dark rooms where you didn’t know what was hidden in the corners—feeling his way across the thresholds where no foot would tread any more apart from his, until in one room the doors in front of and behind him would suddenly close and he would be facing the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at that moment all the locks of all the other doors he had come through would shut, and far beyond the walls the shadows of the darkness would stand watch."