House of Fortitude

- Ben Okri / The Famished Road

"IN THE BEGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

 In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because the...

- Susanna Kaysen / Girl, Interrupted

Etiology

This person is (pick one):

1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;

2. possessed by (pick one):

a) the gods,

b) God (that is, a prophet),

c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils,

d) the Devil;

3. a witch;

4. bewitched (variant of 2);

5. bad, and must be isolated and punished;

6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one):

a) purging and lee...

- Lev Shestov / All Things Are Possible and Penultimates Words and Other Essays

“Practical advice.—People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to read, and that isn't easy. Out of a hundred bookreaders ninety-nine have no idea what they are reading about. It is a common belief, for example, that any writer who sings of suffering must be ready at all times to open his arms to the weary and heavy-l...

- Attar of Nishapur / The Conference of Birds

The world’s birds gathered for their conference
And said: ‘Our constitution makes no sense.
All nations in the world require a king;
How is it we alone have no such thing?
Only a kingdom can be justly run;
We need a king and must inquire for one.’

They argued how to set about their quest.
The hoopoe fluttered forward; on his breast
There shone the symbol of the Spirit Way
And on his head Truth’s crown, a feathered spray.

Discerning, righteous and ...

- Margaret Atwood / Corpse Song

I enter your night
like a darkened boat, a smuggler

These lanterns, my eyes
and heart are out

I bring you something
you do not want:

news of the country
I am trapped in,

news of your future:
soon you will have no voice

 I resent your skin, I resent
 your lungs, your glib assumptions

Therefore sing now
while you have the choice

 My body turned against me
 too soon, it was not a tragedy

 I ...

- Patrick Süskind / Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Two

A FEW WEEKS later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, market basket in hand, at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald monk of about fifty with a light odor of vinegar about him-Father Terrier-she said “There!” and set her market basket down on the threshold.

“What’s that?” asked Terrier, bending down over the basket and sniffing at it, in the hope that it was something edible.

“The bastard of...

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

"The static blooms of Adonis provide us with an answer to our question 'What would the lover ask of time?' As Plato formulates it, the answer brings us once again to the perception that lovers and readers have very similar desires. And the desire of each is something paradoxical. As lover you want ice to be ice and yet not melt in your hands. As reader you want knowledge to be knowledge and yet lie fixed on a written page. Such wants cannot help but pain you, at least in part, because they pl...

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down.

The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hove...

- Patrick Süskind / Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Eleven

GIUSEPPE BALDINI had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit. The odor of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his ability to smell; he had carried it about with him for decades now and no longer noticed it at all. And although he had closed the doors to his study and asked for peace and quiet, he had not sat down at his desk to ponder and wait for inspiration, for he knew far better than Chenier that inspiration woul...

- Stanley Kunitz / The Wild Braid

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.'

Pastor Jón Prímus to himself: That's rather good.

With that he thrust the manual into his cassock pocket, turned towards the coffin, and said:

That was the formula, Mundi. I was trying to get you to understand it, but it didn't work out; actually it did not mat...

- Hazrat Inayat Khan / The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan

“When a person begins to see all goodness as being the goodness of God, all the beauty that surrounds him as the divine beauty, he begins by worshiping a visible God, and as his heart constantly loves and admires the divine beauty in all that he sees, he begins to see in all that is visible one single vision; all becomes for him the vision of the beauty of God. His love of beauty increases his capacity to such a degree that great virtues such as tolerance and forgiveness spring naturally fr...

- Roberto Bolaño / The Savage Detectives

“And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have ...

- Hazrat Inayat Khan / The Dance of the Soul: Gayan, Vadan, Nirtan

“I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it.
My heart has been rent and joined again;
My heart has been broken and again made whole;
My heart has been wounded and healed again;
A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet.
I went through hell and saw ...

- Yasunari Kawabata / Dandelions

“The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are still just words. Words make our loves richer and more complicated, yes, but much has also been lost on their account - shrouded in the trappings of the age, drunk on the vacuity of artificial thrills. The progress of language is both a friend to love between the sexes and its enemy. Such love abides, i...

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when y...

- Anne Carson / Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death.
There's no one alive
who can say if he will be tomorrow.
Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.
No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.
Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!
But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess.
You can let the rest go. Am I makin...

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Dr. Syngmann: I am talking about the only quality that was worth creating the world for, the only power that is worth controlling.

Pastor Jón: Úa?

Dr. Syngmann in a tired, gravelly bass: I hear you mention once more that name which is no name. I know you blame me; I blame myself. Úa was simply Úa. There was nothing I could do about it. I know you have never recovered from it, John. Neither have I.

Pastor Jón: That word could mean everything and nothing, and when i...

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the atmosphere is true? But whoever isn't ready to live and die for that cloud is a man bereft of happiness.

Embi: Should there be lyrical fantasies, then, instead of justice?

Pastor Jón: Agreement is what matters. Otherwise everyone will be killed.

Embi: Agreemen...

- Walt Whitman / Song of Myself (1892 version)

1

I celebrate myself, an

- Jean Genet / Our Lady of the Flowers

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.”

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved.

What else is going o...

Poll 8.

It's been a little while since I have done a poll and I was just deliberating something that I would love to hear your thoughts or at least gauge your views about.

I generally try to create images that have a genuine sense of intimacy about them. Some of these images are created with friends, some are created with complete strangers and some have been created in the context of intimate relationships. I have thus far shied away from posting any images that were clearly taken in sexual ...

- Paul Bowles / The Sheltering Sky

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conc...

- Mario Vargas Llosa / Letters to a Young Novelist

“Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of e...

- John Barth / The Sot-Weed Factor

“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: ...

- Ebenezer Cook / THE SOTWEED FACTOR or A VOYAGE TO MARYLAND

Condemn'd by Fate to way-ward Curse,
Of Friends unkind, and empty Purse:
Plagues worse than fill'd Pandora's Box,
I took my leave of Albion's Rocks:
With heavy heart, concern'd that I
Was forc'd my Native soil to fly.
And the Old World must bid good-buy.
But Heav'n ordain'd it should be so.
And to repine is vain we know:
Freighted with Fools, from Plymouth sound,
To Mary-Land our ship was bound.
Where...

- Ray Bradbury / Zen in the Art of Writing

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with y...

- Mario Vargas Llosa / In Praise of Reading and Fiction (Nobel Lecture December 7, 2010)

“I have always been fascinated to imagine the uncertain circumstance in which our ancestors – still barely different from animals, the language that allowed them to communicate with one another just recently born – in caves, around fires, on nights seething with the menace of lightning bolts, thunder claps, and growling beasts, began to invent and tell stories. That was the crucial moment in our destiny, because in those circles of primitive beings held by the voice and fantasy of the s...