Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), there shall be no
check to my genius from beginning to end.
--Jane Austen
how should another know your mind?
And there was a beautiful view
But nobody could see.
Cause everybody on the island
Was saying: Look at me! Look at me!
--Laurie Anderson
will he discern what quickens you?
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 @ 8:15 AM
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
***
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
***
...Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love-just what is wholly unsayable.
-From the Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)