Everything conceals something else
Helprin, Mueller, Schulz, Woolf, H.D., Weinberger, hooks, Calvino, Howe, Saunders
Like the stone mounds with which people have marked landscapes for thousands of years, these literary cairns of Perelandra mark mysterious points and paths of human interest. Where do they suggest we are headed? Always somewhere together.
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
“To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.”
Breaking Things At Work by Gavin Mueller
“Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution; it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage. Letting technology take its course will lead not to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones, as the ultra-wealthy expend their resources on shielding themselves from any accountability to the rest of us: postapocalyptic bunkers, militarized yachts, private islands, and even escapes to outer space.”
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
“On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh the strange complexion of timber, warm without exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant!”
The Pargiters by Virginia Woolf
“When we come to imaginative literature, there again, I think the difficulty is [in being] women. Take Mr Joyce or Proust. One of the achievements of their books is their honesty, their openness, their determination to say everything. For women, the prudery of men is a terrible bugbear. Dr. Johnson said, “We were shocked to see a woman cross her legs”. So until the year 1850 ( I daresay), women never crossed their legs. Now men are shocked if a woman said what she felt (as Joyce does ). Yet literature which is always pulling down blinds is not literature. All that we have ought to be expressed — mind and body — a process of incredible difficulty and danger.”
Helen in Egypt by H.D.
“It comes to me, lying here,
it comes to me, Helena;
do you see the cloth move,
or the folds, to my breathing?
no, I breathe quietly,
I lie quietly as the snow,
drifted outside; how did I find
the threshold? marble and snow
were one; is this a snow-palace?
does the ember glow
in the heart of the snow?
yes — I drifted here,
blown (you asked) by what winter-sorrow?
but it is not sorrow;
draw near, draw nearer;
do you hear me? do I whisper?
there is a voice within me,
listen — let it speak for me.”
An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger
“If you dream you are writing, you’ll be bitten by a snake.
If you dream of a lake, it is nothing.
If you dream of a frog, it is nothing.
If you dream of a flower, it is nothing.
If you dream of heaven, it is nothing.
If you dream of leaves, it is nothing, but if the leaves are shaking in the wind, grasshoppers will eat the corn.
If you dream of fog, people are coming who are sad and ill.
If you dream you know something, you do not know it.
If you dream of a halo around the moon, the end of the world is coming.
That which is thin in a dream will be thick.
That which is certain in a dream won’t happen.”
All About Love by bell hooks
“How different things might be if, rather than saying ‘I think I’m in love,’ we were saying ‘I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.’ Or if instead of saying ‘I am in love’ we say ‘I am loving’ or ‘I will love.’ Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.”
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Radical Love by Fanny Howe
“There are animated bodies other than my own, but I can’t really know them without love.
This is the horror. All I guess is, by the time I’ve touched someone, we’ve both moved on, and loneliness puts us each into perpetual motion.
The city is all one color because snow is on the way.
It has an appearance of absolute stone. Houses look rejecting, clubby, with their windows and their smoke. Being rejected is actually freeing. You can love in peace.”
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
“The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.”