Category: language

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I heard the trailing garments of the Night     

Sweep through her marble halls!

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light     

From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,     

Stoop o’er me from above;

The calm, majestic presence of the Night,     

As of the one I love.

Hymn to the Night, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty
Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives
A vision exquisite. Yet who can match
The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing
The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine?
We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch
Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring
Glimpses ineffable of things divine.

Limitations, Henrietta Cordelia Ray

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Polls are now closed in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a crowded race that has largely narrowed into a contest between Andrew Cuomo, the state’s former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist. ??

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There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank. (TM)

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The beauty of what we do is its secrecy, its smallness. (TM)

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For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

[…]

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.

Margaret Walker, “For My People”

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The subjunctive is a lovely mood (Joshua Clover)

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Yahdon Israel on The Critic and Her Publics. (Aaliyah Bilal’s Temple Folk. Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson)

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space, too, is a temporal concept. Paul Klee, Creative Confession and Other Writings