Williams + Mann

They craved the miraculous!

-W.C.W., Paterson


With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining--
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire .

-W.C.W., Paterson


--


Aschenbach, receiving this smile, hurried away with it as with a fateful gift. He was so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee the light of the terrace, the front gardens, and he hastily sought the darkness of the park behind the hotel. Strangely indignant and affectionate exhortations were wrung from him: "You musn't smile like that! Listen, you mustn't smile at anyone like that!" He flung himself on a bench, he was beside himself, he breathed the nocturnal fragrance of the plants. And leaning back, with dangling arms, overwhelmed, and shuddering again and again, he whispered the standard formula of desire...

-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice


Bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

I asked him, What do you do?

He smiled patiently, The typical American question.
In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or,
What are you doing now?

What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No
sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire
occupation.


-William Carlos Williams, Paterson

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
--Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

-T.S. Eliot

"I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

on John Milton

London, 1802

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

-William Wordsworth


--


In his Paradise Lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve--are all John Milton.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge


--

MILTON, speaking to himself.
The future is my judge and will understand my Eve, falling, as in a sweet dream, into the night of Hell. The future will understand my Adam, who is guilty, yet good. And the future will understand my indomitable archangel, who is proud of reigning over his own eternity: magnificent in his despair and in his very madness profound. See! He rises from the lake of fire and with his immense wings beats down the waves! Milton shall live in his own thoughts and console himself there. As I silently brood over my audacious, unheard-of design, an ardent genius flames in my breast. Yes! I dare to emulate the Creator Supreme. Through the power of my own words I shall create a whole world: my own Heaven, my own Hell, my own Earth.

-Victor Hugo


--


O many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

-A.E. Housman

we sit and talk
I wish to be with you abed, we two
as if the bed were the bed of a stream
--I have much to say to you

We sit and talk
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes

which has no speech; to
go to bed with you, to pass beyond
the moment of meeting, while the
currents float still in mid-air, to
fall--
with you from the brink, before
the crash--



-William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Death in Venice

The observations and encounters of a loner who seldom speaks are both more nebulous and more penetrating than those of a gregarious man; his thoughts are more intense, more peculiar, and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions, which might easily be brushed aside with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy his mind unduly; they are deeper in silence, take on significance, become experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the perverse, the asymmetrical, the absurd, the forbidden.

--

Nothing is more bizarre, more ticklish, than a relationship between two people who know each other only with their eyes--who encounter, observe each other daily, even hourly, never greeting, never speaking, constrained by convention or by caprice to keep acting the indifferent strangers. They experience discomfort and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need to recognize and to exchange, and they especially feel something like a tense mutual esteem. For people love and honor someone so long as they cannot judge him, and yearning is a product of defective knowledge.

--

"For how can a man be a fit educator if he has an inborn, natural, and incorrigible preference for the abyss? We can certainly shun it and gain our status, but no matter where we turn, we are still drawn to the abyss. And so we renounce knowledge, which disintegrates things, for knowledge, Phaidros, has no dignity or severity; knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving, devoid of composure, of form; it sympathizes with the abyss, it is the abyss. And so we firmly reject knowledge, and henceforth our sole concern is Beauty--that is, simplicity, grandeur, and new severity, a new innocence and form. But form and innocence, Phaidros, lead to euphoria and desire, may lead the noble person to a horrid emotional blasphemy, which his own beautiful severity will reject as disgraceful--and they lead to the abyss, they, too, lead to the abyss. They lead us poets there, I tell you, for we cannot soar, we can only be wanton. And now I shall leave, Phaidros, and you shall remain, and do not leave until you can no longer see me."




-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . [This] homicide ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself--slays an immortality rather than a life.

-John Milton, Areopagitica

I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down,
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus'.
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They'd judge us - how?
For you served Heaven, you know
Or sought to;
I could not,

Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.

And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.

And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.

So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

-Emily Dickinson

A few from Milton. I'm eventually going to go through and mark down all the sections I loved, but for now I'll only do a little (since I'm procrastinating a paper on this book as it is):

. . . From morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day, and with the setting sun
Dropped on the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos th'Aegean isle. Thus they relate,
Erring. (1.743-7)

. . . For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion? (2.146-51)

. . . Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the muses haunt
Clear spring or shady grove or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song. But chief
Thee, Sion, and the flow'ry brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit nor sometimes forget
Those other two equaled with me in fate
(So were I equaled with them in renown)
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return but not to me returns
Say or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose
Or flocks or herds or human face divine
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank. (3.26-48)

These then though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain. Nor think, though men were none,
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise!
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen both when we wake and when we sleep.
All these with ceaseless praise His works behold
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole or responsive each to other's note,
Singing . . . (4.674-83)

Dismounted on th'Aleian field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn. (7.19-20)

They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves as mountains to assault
Heav'n's heighth and with the center mix the pole. (7.211-5)