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"Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve."
simply perfection
Related Recs
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the endings of great novels stay with you. a momentous rush that last dot, words and eyes speeding towards it almost with reluctance, until yes that world is done but something ripples out, a faint radiance or shadow, like the dark spot that lingers in your eye long after staring at the sun.
this i felt reading:
—portrait of a lady by henry james
—swann’s way by proust
—the red and the black by stendhal
—ulysses by joyce
—the sun also rises by hemingway
Jan 30, 2024
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The Blue Flower, a short perfect novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, was published in London in 1995 when she was 78 years old. It’s a dramatization of Friedrich von Hardenberg’s years as a struggling writer and student, from 1790 to 1797, before he made a name for himself as romantic symbolist poet Novalis, and tells the story of his infatuation with the very ordinary, childish 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. He meets her when he’s 22 and falls in mystical love at first sight with her. Like many powerful novels, it’s a book of longing. What von Hardenberg really longs for however isn’t Sophie, but the “blue flower” he’s writing about. Some lines from the story he reads aloud:“I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world.”The blue flower is what he’s been searching for his entire life but cannot find, will never find.What it represents is not explained. It might be understood as a perfect moment of transcendental joy; or the Great Beauty, or the writing that gives meaning to life, the hope, which destroys us, the trembling, skipping longing for the infinite. The flower is different for all of us. The blue has never been seen. We could do with more vaulting romanticism I feel.“The universe, after all,” thinks Friedrich, “is within us.”
Jun 15, 2021
Lyrical and tender, this is a short book but you’ll want to read it slowly simply because every page is packed with something devastating or gorgeous...or both
“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”
Jul 8, 2024
Top Recs from @kejti
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friends, partners, pets, neighbours, people you see once and never again, lines from your favourite poems, voicenotes your sister sends every week, eating chinese food on the street with an old friend, the part in bizarre love triangle that goes "EVry time i seeeee you fallin i GET down on my kneeees and pray".... i used to be so cautious! but time is short and life is nothing. i'll never be cautious again!
May 22, 2024
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it's almost 9pm and i'm in bed with my cat, watching reruns of that terrible MTV documentary show "my life as liz", drinking cans of dr. pepper from the corner shop. socialising? i don't know her
Apr 6, 2024
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we are all going forward. none of us are going back (i am, and will always be, a richard siken stan)
Jun 9, 2024