elizabethanism

[elizabethanism]

“We cannot get around silence. We can only go through it.

The mind is unable to think the mind.”

(Jabès, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, tr. R. Waldrop)

#edmond jabès #silence #Mind

[elizabethanism]

“…beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.”

(Beckett, Molloy)

#Beckett #Silence #universe #samuel beckett

[elizabethanism]

“We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.”

— Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

#marcel proust #Paradise

[elizabethanism]

“It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know.”

(Perec, A Man Asleep, tr. A. Leak)

#georges perec #Life #melancholia #Wrong

[elizabethanism]

“The place we commonly call the real world is surrounded by vast and possibly infinite landscape which is invisible... but which I am able to apprehend by other means. The more I tell you about this landscape, the more inclined you might be to call it my mind.”

— Gerald Murnane

#Reality #Real world #Gerald Murnane #landscape

[elizabethanism]

“Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now for half a century.”

— Estragon (Waiting for Godot)

#Estragon #Nothing #Waiting for Godot

[elizabethanism]

“A few hours before, standing by the bonfire, he had reached an impersonality inside himself: he had been so deeply himself, that he had become the ‘himself’ of any other person, in the way that the cow is the cow of all cows.”

“But how did I not understand that whatever I can’t reach in me . . . is already other people? Other people, who are our deepest plunge! We who are all of you as you yourselves are not yourselves.”

— Lispector, The Apple in the Dark

#clarice lispector #read more women #Self

[elizabethanism]

“Can we consider others by abstracting the other?

Others are the unsilvered mirror where the other looks at himself.

Captive absence of an absence captivated.”

— Edmond Jabès (tr. R. Waldrop)

#Edmond Jabès #Others #Other #Self #absence

[elizabethanism]

“Receive me intensely but abstractedly

Let me have no face or name for you,

So that being the thief I can give you more

And the stranger, exile, in you, in me

May become the origin . . .”

— Yves Bonnefoy, from “Two Boats” (tr. Richard Pevear)

#Yves Bonnefoy #you and me #Face #Name #Stranger

[elizabethanism]

“Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. […] Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language. During the second part of my life, it was generally English, my own brand of English—not the Cambridge variety.”

— Nabokov

#Images #Language #Writing #Cinema #Silent film #vladimir nabokov

[elizabethanism]

“And yet the slightest attempt to convert any meaningful idea (*of one’s own*—this is the main thing) into words leads inevitably to the thesis: for pure thought, all human languages are foreigners.”

— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

(Countries That Don’t Exist, tr. Anthony Anemone)

#Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky #Words #Language #Idea

[elizabethanism]

“Alone, one can but toy with imagery.”

(James Merrill, from “Hourglass”)

#James Merrill #hourglass #Alone #Imagery

[elizabethanism]

“I was the image of what I was not, and that image of not-being overwhelmed me. … Since I didn’t know what I was, ‘not being’ was the closest I could get to the truth: at least I had the other side. … Painstakingly not being, I was proving to myself that—that I was.”

Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey

#read more women #clarice lispector #image #Self #Being #Not being

[elizabethanism]

“I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.”

— Lyn Hejinian, from My Life

#Lyn Hejinian #Self #Person #Comma #Pause

[elizabethanism]

“Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but as the earth precedes the tree, but as the world precedes the man, but as the sea precedes the vision of the sea, life precedes love […] and in turn language one day will have preceded the possession of silence.”

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey

#Reality #Love #Language #read more women #Clarice Lispector

[elizabethanism]

“Eine Uhr als Uhr, d. h., als Zifferblatt mit Zeigern sehen ist ähnlich wie: den Orion als schreitenden Mann sehen.”

(Wittgenstein, Philosophische Grammatik)

#ludwig wittgenstein #Time #Orion

[elizabethanism]

W.G. Sebald in an interview (1988):

“The past, horrendous though it is, with all its calamitous episodes, nevertheless seems to be some kind of refuge because at least the pain that you had there is over. … The presence of the past has something very ambivalent about it. On the one hand it is burdensome, heavy, it weighs you down, on the other hand it is something that liberates you from present constraints.”

#W.G. Sebald #Past #Memory #presence