‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
a particular kind of flower [or form] around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen
Thought, sunshine, flowers: they wanted intangible as well as tangible goods, pleasures as well as necessities, and the time to pursue them, the time to have an inner life and freedom to roam the outer world.
The cycle of rupture and repair is a requirement of living, a cost of surviving, something that goes hand in hand with another reality of survival: that, throughout your life, you may not only lose people but also gain them.
they spend at least some of whatever time they have left stitching together small pieces that, eventually, might make something big enough to be meaningful.
Do you know that all history’s happening at the same time and see the future if you scry, gross matter It is 2007 someone dear having died I am on an air- plane to San Diego and suddenly see blue and orange geo- metrical formations around the periphery of my vision both eyes is this part of the poem I’m the singer of
tales of bliss and structure of the universe yet unperceived Is it built like what I’m talking is it in fact structured when I write Voices Ross, the dear dead speaks to me in the kitchen to say he’s happy the dead are happy I later believe some are sad sometimes, cyc- lically until they work it out my poems help them
that my poems help everyone that I am re- structuring whatever this is that is everything so
The Post keeps standing, filling space emptied out by more ethical actors. It’s just one example of a larger American problem. The people who insist on making sense speak in small, prim voices, trusting their listeners to understand subtleties of tone. After all, everybody’s off carving out his own personal city, made up of small but real impressions. Why try? The Post screams on, and—by the evidence of our last national election, in which almost every demographic in the city veered right, toward Donald Trump, whose profile was created, in part, in Murdoch’s pages—New York keeps hearing it out.
Maybe I read the Post because, as Ramona Garnes said, it leaves its malice naked and, therefore, shows me a more complete picture of where I and people like me really stand.
Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” from 1973, is the greatest artistic exploration of the vicissitudes of marital loneliness. It consists of six roughly hour-long episodes, in which a married couple—Johan and Marianne—try and mostly fail to connect to each other.
[…]
It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.
[…]
It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.
[…]
Can any marriage survive an honest reckoning with itself? Can you get close enough to any person for life to feel real? These are Bergman’s questions
When the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time-drunk brain, nothing can end. There could be no end, there can be only circles. (Samantha Harvey)
Nous n’écrivions ni pour le romantisme de la vie d’écrivain – il s’est caricaturé –, ni pour l’argent – ce serait suicidaire –, ni pour la gloire – valeur démodée, à laquelle l’époque préfère la célébrité –, ni pour le futur – il n’avait rien demandé –, ni pour transformer le monde – ce n’est pas le monde qu’il faut transformer –, ni pour changer la vie – elle ne change jamais –, pas pour l’engagement – laissons ça aux écrivains héroïques –, non plus que nous ne célébrions l’art gratuit – qui est une illusion puisque l’art se paie toujours. Alors pour quelle raison ? On ne savait pas ; et là était peut-être notre réponse : nous écrivions parce que nous ne savions rien, nous écrivions pour dire que nous ne savions plus ce qu’il fallait faire au monde, sinon écrire, sans espoir mais sans résignation facile, avec obstination et épuisement et joie, dans le seul but de finir le mieux possible, c’est-à-dire les yeux ouverts : tout voir, ne rien rater, ne pas ciller, ne pas s’abriter sous les paupières, courir le risque d’avoir les yeux crevés à force de tout vouloir voir, pas comme voit un témoin ou un prophète, non, mais comme désire voir une sentinelle, la sentinelle seule et tremblante d’une cité misérable et perdue, qui scrute pourtant l’ombre d’où jaillira l’éclair de sa mort et la fin de sa cité.
In terms of the development of “democracy,” it is difficult to overestimate the enormous gain Western governments managed to consolidate when they successfully advanced democracy as the opposing counterweight to communism. They had actually gained control of the entire word for themselves, leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance. Indeed, democracy had become a class ideology justifying systems that allowed a very small number of people to govern—and to govern without the people, so to speak; systems that seem to exclude any other possibility than the infinite reproduction of their own functioning. To be able to call an unchecked and deregulated free market economy, a ruthless, no-holds-barred opposition to communism, a right to intervene, militarily and otherwise, in countless sovereign nations and their internal affairs—to succeed in calling all this democracy was an incredible feat. To successfully present the market as an evident condition of democracy and to have democracy viewed as inexorably calling forth the market, is an astounding accomplishment. (Kristin Ross)
