In the big empty office the man and the woman at looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. "I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places."

-Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

a favorite of mine

Memoir

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now -
radioactive to the end of time -
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminated patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.

-Vijay Seshadri

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth became a falsehood.

-Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

It's just so wonderful.

I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.

-Flannery O'Connor, A Temple of the Holy Ghost

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