The passing of time

My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Philip Larkin

While the pages lots grew ever thicker

Over and over again I felt helplessness, anguish as I watched the remaining pages growing thinner and thinner, while the pages lost grew ever thicker. And yet, I kept reading .... Books are the maps of men. Every act of reading involves the paradoxical act of touching a map with the tip of the index finger and believing that we are travling through France, moving through a chapter of a book as if we were climging down the side of a mountain or ascending the cirque of a glacier by following it contour lines. I walked in maps ...

Belen Gopegui, The Scale of Maps

That stupid bonnet

I wanted to do some work, but couldn't; why should I dress up in that stupid bonnet which makes my head ache?

Sofia Tolstoy

I Walked So Fast

And it was autumn when I walked, November, always November, late evenings with drizzling rain and the streetlights flashing past high above my head and because I walked so fast, it was as though they came on and off, those lights, never stopping and could suddenly crackle sharply in the damp air and send off flashes of blue lightning around them while my words circled in my brain and my thoughts sparked like an electric current and perhaps looked blue as light sometimes could, if you were to slice through my brain to study what was happening.

Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time

The last reverberation of a great movement

I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction ...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Eighty Scholarly Monkeys

... though libraries were fine places in themselves, the finest of places, actually, I always found it impossible to complete the tasks I had been assigned for the simple reason that the more often I went there the more aware I became of the other readers, and the more aware I became of the other readers the more I noticed the profusion of nervous tics and compulsive behavior which seemed to flourish in these places.  Pretty soon it was impossible to concentrate on anything, what with the girl to my right chewing her nails and the girl to my left digging at her head, and it did not take long to realize that most people are fidgeters, as if synaptic activity were encouraged by endless scratching and fidgeting, and before long I had the impression I was in a room with eighty scholarly monkeys, busily delousing as they sat reading their books or typing at their computers, and at those rare moments when I looked up and no one was doing anything I felt as if  truce had been called or an anhel were flying overhead and, out of deference, the monkeys had removed their paws from their faces and hair.

 Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

Ghost of a Chance

You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch, 

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle,

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant 

sea.

Adrienne Rich

Affection For Literature

Even Aristophanes -- who was, we should remember, a comedian and not a critic -- seems to have been made uneasy by the sadistic aspects of criticism. "I cannot judge anymore," his Dionysos apologizes when the word-weighing is over.  "I must not lose the love of either one of them. / One of them's a great poet. I like the other one." The lines remind you that loving and liking are as much a part of criticism as are hating and hacking; and that the impulse underlying good criticism ought to be affection for literature rather than animus toward writers.

Daniel Mendelsohn

A Common Condition But One I Found Troubling

I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.  I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971.  During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen. I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house; made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any reduction of points would be pari passu with the financing studio, put lentils to soak on Saturday night for lentil soup on Sunday, made quarterly F. I. C. A. payments and renewed my driver's license on time, missing on the written examination only the question about the financial responsibility of California drivers ... This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised.  I was supposed to have a script and I had mislaid it.  I was supposed to hear cues, and I no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I know was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. 

Joan Didion

Pre-Nasalism

But since the completion of Terrorism, I'd produced nothing but the blog. It's true that Norman Harkness, blog reviewer for New York Magazine called it "an account of writer's block which, for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record," but it made no dint in my depression.  Like any writer, I'd known my share of gridlock over the years, but my current state was different, all-encompassing. It wasn't just my own work I'd rejected, but language in general. As I wrote in the blog of June 11, 2010, "More than mute when I sit at my desk, I am disgusted with any thought of writing or reading or the least hint of internal description."

Lawrence Shainberg

A Diversified Portfolio of Experience

That's the thing: When you're a novelist, or want to be one, and instead of staying at home to nurture your genius, you're chasing some romantic prospect, or drinking too much with your friends, or writing another book review, it's never entirely clear whether you are wasting your time, or whether, in fact, you are investing in so many treasury bonds to be paid out in the form of mature works. It could be that ostensible distraction is really just a diversified portfolio of experience.

Ben Kunkel

Well, he agitates

     She isn't really listening. 

     "What's he do?" she asks again.

      Maybe she won't let go of it until I discover the right answer, like a game with nouns and synonyms. 

      "He ... well, he agitates," I tell her.

      "Is that some kind of factory work?"

      "Not exactly, no, it's not a nine-to-five job or anything ... "

      She lets the magazine fall, now, cockers her head to one side, and stares at me without blinking her cold yellow eyes. She has the look of a hawk, of a person who can see into the future but won't tell you about it.  She's lost business for staring at customers, but she doesn't care.

       "Are you telling me that he doesn't ... " Here she shakes her head twice, slowly, from one side to the other, without removing me from her stare. "That he doesn't have regular work?"

       "Oh, what's the matter anyway?" I say roughly.

Louise Erdrich

More Resigned, More Civil, More Intellectual

I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves ... Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing -- more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

 Jorge Luis Borges

Forgive the Comparison

These days, whenever I start to write or think about having to write, I feel as repelled as if I were eating cabbage soup with a cockroach floating in it -- forgive the comparison.

Anton Chekhov