“this city’s brute capacity for gathering” Nick Laird (New York Elasticity) via Under the Banner of New York, Zadie Smith.
Inside us live innumerable others; If I think or feel, I do not know Who is thinking or feeling. I am only the place Where feeling and thinking happen.
I have more than one soul. There are more I’s than just I myself. And yet I remain completely Indifferent to them all. I silence them: I speak.
The crisscrossing impulses Of what I feel and don’t feel Argue inside the person I am. I ignore them. They dictate nothing To the me I know I am: I write.
219, Ricardo Reis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari
I do not want to remember or to know myself. We just get in the way if we look into who we are. Not knowing we are alive Is quite enough of life.
The hour in which we live is just as alive As we are, and also equally dead When it passes along with us As we pass along with it.
If knowing this is of no help in knowing this (Because otherwise, what’s the point of knowing ourselves?), The best life is the life Lived out unmeasured.
112, Ricardo Reis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.
“he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.
Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.”
“In 1928, he published “One-Way Street,” a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (“All disgust is originally disgust at touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of urban life taken in by the flâneur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault interviewed Toni Morrison, 1987.
Being on the surface of a spherical planet, we find flatness conflates scale, distance, and time. Our relations to what is just beyond are illusionary, continually unfolding, and expansive. The horizon holds the counterpart to our here–real, ongoing, and seemingly determined. From there will emerge all utopian promises for justice, imaginaries for the enrichment of humanity, fully formed structures in the support a life, good fortune, and knowledge, and futures to be written. As we belong there, in equal parts to the here we find ourselves; we move about and maneuver in ways to reach for the enchanted from the complement realm.
Published in Voyage around my Room: Selected Works of Xavier de Maistre, which includes an Introduction by Richard Howard, Joseph de Maistre’s 1811 Preface, as well as two other works by Xavier de Maistre:
Nocturnal Expedition around my Room (see our review)
Vittorio Fortunati, “Du haut de leurs mansardes : le motif de l’isolement chez Baudelaire et Xavier de Maistre”, Revue italienne d’études françaises [Online], 14 | 2024, Online since 15 November 2024, connection on 17 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rief/13188; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12oyy
Jacques Rancière, Courts Voyages au pays du peuple, 1990.
