The exhausting awareness of every ache

So there you have it: two things and I can’t bring them together, and they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary – how am I to resolve them?

[…] A cold paralyzing horror: a glimpse into the subhuman… the sickness of life beginning again: the exhausting awareness of every ache. What the hand does in reaching, a misery of awareness; loss of memory in small things; hatred of necessary routines; hatred but not fear of dark; watching the skin, the fingers; overeating; a full preoccupation with unnecessary tasks; weakness in the morning; fear of headlights; distrust of children; a tide of loss.

(Theodore Roethke, notebooks)

 

Smart woman

 

More of the future

 

 

 

Someday it will come to us

Though with us there is sin, unrighteousness, and temptation, still all the same, there is on this earth, in such and such a place, somewhere, someone holy, and exalted; he has the truth; he knows the truth; so the truth does not die on earth, and therefore someday it will come to us and will reign over all the earth, as has been promised.

Dostoyevsky  |  “Brothers Karamazov”

St Francis in Meditation  |  CARAVAGGIO  (c. 1606)

 

A lonely species by nature

Posted by: Jussara

“Melancholy”  |  Photo by Diego Bardone

We read on. We go on looking, as we’ve always looked, not so much for them as for ourselves, our own, obscure traces. Reading books, visiting museums, or simply stopping short before the vast gold umbrella of some chestnut tree in mid-autumn, aren’t we always, in a sense, looking for ourselves?

A lonely species by nature, made even more so today by the loss of any commonly shared vision — any collectively accepted referent — we wander through galleries, archival tumuli, and archeological vestige, hoping to discover, at any given instant, the key, the tiny, metallic glint in the midst of our own shadows. Call it, if you will, the breath at the heart of our own empty mirror.

Gustaf Sobin  |  “Reading Prehistory” in Luminous Debris