'the long diminishing parade of time'

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. 

It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.

—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

'The great fragmentation of maturity.'

One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one’s being. Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels—our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforth we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridescent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose into one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.

—Henry Miller, "The Fourteenth Ward," Black Spring (1963)

'veiled from his sight'

She bent once more and trailed her hair in the water with a swaying motion sideways and then stood and swung it about her in a great hoop of spray and stood with her head back and her eyes closed. The sun rising over the gray ranges to the east lit the upper air. She held one hand up. She moved her body, she swept both hands before her. She bent and caught her falling hair in her arms and held it and she passed one hand over the surface of the water as if to bless it and he watched and as he watched he saw that the world which had always been before him everywhere had been veiled from his sight. She turned and he thought she might sing to the sun. She opened her eyes and saw him there on the bridge and she turned her back and walked slowly up out of the river and was lost to his view among the pale standing trunks of the cottonwoods and the sun rose and the river ran as before but nothing was the same nor did he think it ever would be.

--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1994)

'the richness of the world ... and, often, its inscrutability'

Whenever parts of a system interfere or cooperate with each other, there are nonlinear interactions taking place. Most of everyday life is spectacularly nonlinear; if you listen to your two favorite songs at the same time, you won’t get double the pleasure. The same goes for consuming alcohol and drugs, where the interaction effects can be deadly. By contrast, peanut butter and jelly are better together. They don’t just add up—they synergize. 

Nonlinearity is responsible for the richness of the world, for its beauty and complexity and, often, its inscrutability. For example, all of biology is nonlinear; so is sociology. That’s why the soft sciences are hard—and the last to be mathematized. Because of nonlinearity, there’s nothing soft about them. 

[…] 

Sofia Kovalevskaya helped us understand how different the world appears when we finally face up to nonlinearity. She realized that nonlinearity places limits on human hubris. When a system is nonlinear, its behavior can be impossible to forecast with formulas, even though that behavior is completely determined. In other words, determinism does not imply predictability. It took the motion of a top—a child’s plaything—to make us more humble about what we can ever hope to know.

—Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers (2019)

Our past is real

She watched him, not unkindly. She smiled. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

[...] 

That night in the garden here at my father's house Gustavo said to me that those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority and so it has proved to be. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

--Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)

'see the world in a pendulum's swing'

Galileo conceded that the study of pendulums “may appear to many exceedingly arid,” although it was anything but that, as later work showed. In mathematics, pendulums stimulated the development of calculus through the riddles they posed. In physics and engineering, pendulums became paradigms of oscillation. Like the line in William Blake’s poem about seeing the world in a grain of sand, physicists and engineers learned to see the world in a pendulum’s swing. The same mathematics applied wherever oscillations occurred. The worrisome movements of a footbridge, the bouncing of a car with mushy shock absorbers, the thumping of a washing machine with an unbalanced load, the fluttering of venetian blinds in a gentle breeze, the rumbling of the earth in the aftershock of an earthquake, the sixty-cycle hum of fluorescent lights—every field of science and technology today has its own version of to-and-fro motion, of rhythmic return. The pendulum is the granddaddy of them all. Its patterns are universal. Arid is not the right word for them.

—Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers (2019)

"I strike it out, and I use a common word."

Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean, a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all of the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word. One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you’re writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review interview (1966)

'a radiant doughnut'

When I became a writer, I went to Los Angeles many times to work on magazine pieces and books. On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought, assuming it was just a glassy landscape of office buildings that hollowed out by five o’clock every night. I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle.

—Susan Orlean, The Library Book (2018)

'revisiting and rearranging words'

After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.

—Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018)

'here was a man...who had never been elected to anything'

I'll never forget this. I walked into the press room to find a stack of press releases from Robert Moses announcing that a "study" of the bridge, an obvious first step toward its construction, would begin immediately—with the participation of the state. And now, when I went back to the same officials who had assured me they were firmly against the bridge, I found there had been a change in their position. They were now firmly for it. 

I remember I drove home that night, and all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island—it was 163 miles—I kept thinking, Everything you've been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you're in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he's had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. 

And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.

—Robert A. Caro, Working (2019)

'reality is lost to him forever'

It happens that a man sometimes sees such a thing in a dream, and afterwards he dwells on this dream all his life, reality is lost to him forever, and he is decidedly good for nothing anymore. Her name was Ulinka.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'The current generation now sees everything clearly'

There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king’s mansions! Broader and more splendid than all the other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel'

In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'an aptly spoken Russian word'

Aptly uttered is as good as written, an axe cannot destroy it. And oh, how apt is everything that comes from deep Russia, where there are no German, or Finnish, or any other tribes, but all is native natural-born, lively and pert Russian wit, which does not fish for a word in its pockets, does not brood on it like a hen on her chicks, but pastes it on at once, like a passport, for eternal wear . . . 

As a numberless multitude of churches and monasteries with their cupolas, domes, and crosses is scattered over holy, pious Russia, so a numberless multitude of tribes, generations, peoples also throngs, ripples, and rushes over the face of the earth. And each of these peoples, bearing within itself the pledge of its strength, filled with the creative capacity of the soul, with its own marked peculiarity and other gifts of God, is in an original fashion distinguished by its own word, which, whatever subject it may express, reflects in that expression a portion of its character. A knowledge of hearts and a wise comprehension of life resound in the word of the Briton; like a nimble fop the short-lived word of the Frenchman flashes and scatters; whimsically does the German contrive his lean, intelligent word, not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so pert, so bursting from beneath the very heart, so ebullient and vibrant with life, as an aptly spoken Russian word.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

we try to find stability in chance encounters

In this uninterrupted stream of women, men, children, and dogs that pass by and end up lost from sight among the streets, it would be nice to hold on to a face once in a while. Yes, according to Bowing, amidst the maelstrom that is a large city, you had to find a few fixed points.  

...Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.  

...I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a cafe, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: "It's all about trying to create ties." Encounters in the street, in a Metro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course? An anonymous office where you dictate a letter to a temp typist, a ground-floor apartment in Neuilly whose white, empty walls evoke what some would call a "showroom apartment," where there would be no trace left of your stay. Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that's what we're supposed to forge links with?

--Patrick Modiano, In the Cafe of Lost Youth (2007, trans. Chris Clarke).

'intelligence without traditions'

For a few minutes my father-in-law seemed to soften his judgment (After all, it’s difficult for all of us to orient ourselves in the chaos of the Italian crisis, and I can understand that young men like him find themselves in trouble, especially when they have a desire to act), then he rose to go to his study. But before he disappeared he had a second thought. He paused in the doorway and uttered harshly: But there is doing and doing, Sarratore is intelligence without traditions, he would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea, he’ll become a very useful technocrat. . . . 

. . . I hoped that Adele would find a conciliating phrase that might soothe me, and so I asked: 

“What does it mean that Nino is intelligence without traditions?” 

She looked at me ironically. 

“That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person.” 

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.” 

She smiled. 

“Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.” 

—Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (2015, trans. A. Goldstein)

and the canal would still be there too

Again the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter--it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass. Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept its color, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while all these things continued to exist. We would see the days get longer a few more times, then we wouldn't be young anymore. And after that, when the chestnut trees had blossomed red or white a few more times, we would die, in the prime of our lives or maybe as old men, which would be even worse. And the sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn't notice any difference. 

--Nescio, "The Writing on the Wall," Amsterdam Stories (1913; trans. Damion Searls, 2012)

'a seeming / and after that turning away'

CHORUS

STROPHE

O generations of men, how I
count you as equal with those who live
not at all!
What man, what man on earth wins more
of happiness than a seeming
and after that turning away?
Oedipus, you are my pattern of this,
Oedipus, you and your fate!
Luckless Oedipus, whom of all men
I envy not at all.

—Sophocles, Oedipus the King (c. 427 B.C.; trans. D. Grene 1942)

'the utter, hopeless thwarting that was his blood and bones and flesh'

And was this where he was going to grow old? Would it all end in a room like this? He sat down on the bed and before him on the wall was the picture of the wolf standing with vaporized breath on a snow-covered hill above a lighted farm. Then the abeyant melancholy of the evening came over him. He sat with his shoulders slumped under the oppression of the room, under the impasse that was himself, the utter, hopeless thwarting that was his blood and bones and flesh. Afraid of a crisis beyond his capacity, he held himself in, his body absolutely still in the passing and fading whine and rumble of a truck. The blue and gold frame, the long cord hanging from the molding, the discolored gold tassel at its apex, all added to the feeling that he had seen the picture in some room in childhood. Though it filled him with despondency he did not think of taking it down . . .

—Leonard Gardner, Fat City (1969)

looking at art for an hour or so

When I can't stand it I take the day off and visit the big art museum in Balboa Park. Today, after the locksmith got me back in my car, I drove to the museum and sat in on part of a lecture in one of its side-rooms, a woman Outsider artist raving, "Art is man and man is art!" I listened for five minutes, and what little of it she managed to make comprehensible didn't even merit being called shallow. Just the same, her paintings were slyly designed, intricately patterned, and coherent. I wandered from wall to wall taking some of it in, not much. But looking at art for an hour or so always changes the way I see things afterward--this day, for instance, a group of mentally handicapped adults on a tour of the place with their twisted, hovering hands and cocked heads, moving among the works like cheap cinema zombies, but good zombies, zombies with minds and souls and things to keep them interested. And outside, where they normally have a lot of large metal sculptures, the grounds were being dug up and reconstructed--a dragline shovel nosing the rubble monstrously, and a woman and child watching, motionless, the little boy standing on a bench with his smile and sideways eyes and his mother beside him, holding his hand, both so still, like a photograph of American ruin. 

--Denis Johnson, "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018)