第一时间入手实体的卡森新书。
1=1
Swimming, water
Every water has a right place to be but this place is in motion, you have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.
What does that mean, fail it?
Anthropology of water in Plain Water
Swimming has a stoniness, water being as different from air as stones. You find your way among its structures, its ancientness, its history as an entity without response to you Ana’s yet complicit in the intrusion. … There is no renunciation in this (cf. meditation), no striving to detach, all these things, all the things you can name, being simply gone. Meaning, gone.
Rationales have to do with composite things, but existence and sense belong to singularity. Sentences are strategic. They let you off.
I literally cries on this mere sentence.
Passengers. To pass. To pass muster. To pass over. To be passed over. To pass the buck. To pass the butter. To pass out. To pass to one’s reward.
I’ve seen this. Surely.
To be alive in pouring in and out.
Joseph Conrad (Poland-born English writer), counterespionage,
I couldn’t escape the feeling that we only call it history when things go wrong.
Letter from Socrates in goal to Krito very funny piece. Very funny.
Eddy
What right had she> His day, his lips, his instruments. His aftermath. SHe made it be winter for him (in one sonnet), it was winter for her.
Flaubert Again
Will this different kind of novel be like that, like a third arm? I hate creativity (she said). Certainly not like a third arm. I would be less and less and less, not more. Barthes dies, he never got there. (P43)
Being respectful in church is a matter of impersonation. Being a daughter-in-law is too. We all impersonate people who know the rules. (P46)
Fate, Federal Court, Moon
The fate of simplicity, of randomness, of homesickness, of dead ends, of souls. Who can say how silvery it was? Where would he go? Sorry? (P52)
Getaway
You want me o be someone else.
I want you to be nothing.
That’s metaphysically impossible.
Oh go away.
Lecture on the History of Skywriting
I am the sky.
Alkmene - mother of Heracles
panspermia
But for a creature who exists (like my self) outside time, death has no instant. I have no instant. I am at all times. I have to watch my most beloved child burn to death at all times. And I always will. (P63)
If you bring a concept or category up close enough to the human mind to be very very attractive and then whisk it away so it stays out of reach, it becomes erotic. Flirting is not in my nature but who would be bothered doing science if it weren’t erotic. (P65)
Mr. Luke Howard
Let me quote here John Cage: “Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.”
Yoko Ono
No offense. Very funny. Terrible sense of humor.
- Is it true the question mark derives from the shape of the tail of cat when surprised. Sorry unfair question. Here’s another: if a scholar of the Rig Veda went to a Chinese restaurant what would his fortune cookie say. Answer: CONGRATULATIONS YOU LOVE CHINESE FOOD. (P70)
Why do you never arrive
…
Because everybody wants to touch the You when they’re lost.
Non-arriving, Rusty
Quote of Proust
“Two things move me to wonder: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” Those starry skies don’t come back. (P78)
Mexico!
Memory is a novelist, it saturates the data with its own toxins. (P85)
All the pieces were endlessly, gallantly, blessedly, blythesomely knights. (P85)
Yet the fact is, if he were to
from the world vanish,
my heart would
famish
(P91)By suffering we learn
Now it’s your turn
(P100)
scapegoat 替罪羊
On of the names the ancient Greeks gave to Death was Ploutos, which earns Wealths… as in the epitaph by Simonides of Keos that reads:
We are all debts owed to Death
Saturday Night As An Adult
We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can’t stop it that way. (P117)
Snow
“Spiritual” in Greek pneumatikos, “breath”
“Idea” in Greek “to see”
Three days before the lecture date my mother died. I fell to my knees in the kitchen.
Was there a way to get out of giving hat lecture, I wondered.
I read the lecture a year ago without knowing this. Now everything seems different.
He drove me to the funeral and more or less kept going. I more or less waved goodbye.
As if they did so. As if illusion.
There was no question I had to get out of giving that lecture.
Yah you need a closure too.
“It’s funny to have no home” - funny being a funny word for what she meant. I say this now to remind myself how words can quiet sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed ridiculous in the glare of the lightning. I hung up the phone. I stared at the snow for some times. I expect she did too.
Visitors
Writers, movie directors visiting “me”
The most uncanny thing about my fox is whether or not he will find the door. (P130)
you do not think it worth your while to love me! Eros, amor, infatuation, crush, flame, passion, desire, attraction, venery, tender, feelings, yearning, devotion, fancy, attachment, adoration, idolatry, worship, wooing, serenading, romance, intrigue, tryst.
Thret
Queasiness not an option. Pity not an option. Facts are what matter. (P138)
Trace blood, forensics, tell the truth for the death, no fake allowed, truth sharpened.
In fact there is no mood I can name. Expert witness or not, it was all so clumsy, it was all so inadequate, so DIY. Nothing I did matched what hey had done or tied off the loose ends of Sind. I was flailing at trauma.
TBH this passage is the hardest one among the texts in this book.
We’ve Only Just Begun
To survive you need an edge. (P153)
Pity is a corrosive substance. I’ve learned to avoid it in my work. I can’t love everyone, I can’t give back their prayers. (P161)
I’ve always felt unsatisfied with random homonyms. Words that sound alike but mean differently: let’s go back to sole and soul. Linguists tell us that, given the great number of meanings we want to express in our language and the limited number of sounds we can produce with our mouths, there’s nothing to puzzle about here at all. (P163)
Well, then you shouldn’t learn Chinese, which will drive you crazy with all homonyms.
At the back of book:
Do not walk backwards,
that is how the dead go.
Arabic on P76-77
from google translation
Today, I woke up feeling exhausted. It appeared to me, as I was talking about the source of my autobiography, that I had left a large area of my personal experience that I had not mentioned yet. What I mean is that the skies of this earth have become a means of transporting weapons of death and murder to its people. War is one of the facts of life for all creatures on earth (as described in the Book of Genesis on the last sixth day of the creation of the heavens and the earth). War is mostly an extended history of tools for killing and bloodshed flying through the air, and there is no difference in terms of the result between rifle bullets and bombs and arrows and darts, or between these and the death cannons that the Germans developed in World War II, known as Big Bertha or the American long-range bomber. Known as B-FiftyTwo. Or poisonous gas projectiles and cross-border nuclear missiles, or between these and catapult projectiles made of stones or flaming balls of fire and deadly drones, all of which, regardless of their age and extent of their killing power, are tools for destroying pleasures and separating groups. All of this made me excel at writing what I have to do, and I was creative in formulating these reflections into a fast-paced crime novel. Rhythm, and indeed war crimes have occurred. But then it became clear to me that it was impossible to reduce this long path of human evil to a simple mathematical equation about the causes of crimes War and its effects. Fictional crime novels are also characterized by a high degree of intensity, and their impact on the reader comes through the face they paint for the elements and characters of the story, i.e. the victim, the executioner, the investigator, or the secret policeman. All of these, whether good or bad, have a known face. As for wars, throughout their history, they have witnessed great development and have become pointless over time. It is certain that Hector and Eucalyptus caught each other’s eye on the battlefield, but in the year 1092, Pope Urban II found it necessary to criminalize the device that fired arrows and darts because it was a weapon that kills from afar (meaning there is no confrontation), and in the twenty-first century he covers it up. A soldier in Nevada City could press a button and kill five people in Pakistan and burn them Until they cause smoke.
If there is no face, there is no morality. This is an old idea. But also without the face (what is wrong with me) is a filly and there is no need for me to write about it. Don’t cover up and write a clear and understandable sentence using verbs only. Do not cover up and tell a story without believing in the reality of the existence of other human beings. Until now, I did not expect that all these insignificant creatures walking the earth would stop their desire for war any time soon, and I myself did not expect that I would stop transmitting your hysterical desires for your war lovers through the air of the blue sky. This is what we were created to be. Saturday was the day I admitted this.