'There is no air in the city but there is breath'

Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man’s blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he’d think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight. He would know right away the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn’t matter at all because the deception was part of it too. Anyway, he could feel his lungs going in and out. There is no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races through him like laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations. In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn’t miss it, doesn’t look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps.

—Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992)

'the art of temporal government'

THIRD PRIEST
I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government,
But violence, duplicity and frequent malservation.
King rules or barons rule:
The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice.
They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it,
And the steadfast can manipulate the greed and lust of others,
The feeble is devoured by his own.

—T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935, 4th ed. 1938)

The Wheel

THOMAS
We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
The cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

—T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935, 4th ed. 1938)

I was capable of evil

Something had gone wrong. I'd come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities. I'd turned mean inside. Even a little cruel at times. For all my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason. It's a hard thing to admit, even to myself, but I was capable of evil. I wanted to hurt Bobby Jorgenson the way he'd hurt me. For weeks it had been a vow--I'll get him, I'll get him--it was down inside me like a rock. Granted, I didn't hate him anymore, and I'd lost some of the outrage and passion, but the need for revenge kept eating at me. At night I sometimes drank too much. I'd remember getting shot and yelling out for a medic and then waiting and waiting and waiting, passing out once, then waking up and screaming some more, and how the screaming seemed to make new pain, the awful stink of myself, the sweat and fear, Bobby Jorgenson's clumsy fingers when he finally got around to working on me. I kept going over it all, every detail. I remembered the soft, fluid heat of my own blood. Shock, I thought, and I tried to tell him that, but my tongue wouldn't make the connection. I wanted to yell, "You jerk, it's shock--I'm dying!" but all I could do was whinny and squeal. I remembered that, and the hospital, and the nurses. I even remembered the rage. But I couldn't feel it anymore. In the end, all I felt was that coldness down inside my chest. Number one: the guy had almost killed me. Number two: there had to be consequences.

--Tim O'Brien, "The Ghost Soldiers," The Things They Carried (1990)

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Every winter ends in a spring

I know that now I am going to write. There comes a time when the tree, after much suffering, must bear fruit. Every winter ends in a spring. I must bear witness. Afterwards, the cycle will start up again.

I shall tell of nothing but my love of life. But I shall tell of it in my own way....

Others write because of the temptations they have put off. And each disappointment in life makes a work of art for them, a lie woven out of the lies of their life. But what I write will spring from my moments of happiness, even when what I write is cruel. I must write as I must swim, because my body demands it.

--Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 (1962; trans. Philip Thody)

Lovely Italy

Ancient, lovely Italy offered me its host of masterworks. With what reverent and poetic awe I wandered through those vast edifices consecrated to religion by the arts! What a labyrinth of columns! What a sequence of arches and vaults! How beautiful are the echoes circling round those domes like the rolling of waves in the ocean, like the murmur of winds in the forest or the voice of God in his temple! The architect seems to build the poet's thoughts and make them accessible to the senses. 

And yet with all my effort what had I learned until then? I had discovered nothing stable among the ancients and nothing beautiful among the moderns. The past and the present are imperfect statues—one, quite disfigured, drawn from the ruins of the ages, and the other still devoid of its future perfection.

—François-René de Chateaubriand, "René" (1802)

Dancing and Thinking

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means. Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out. Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking — that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing. . . . Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! — A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping — this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general. The German has no fingers for nuances. . . . dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen — that writing has to be learned?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)

'adjusted...to the most dubious mediocrity'

Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.* — What is the cause of the decline of German culture? That 'higher education' is no longer a privilege — the democratism of 'culture' made 'universal' and common. . . . Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. — No one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our 'higher' schools are one and all adjusted — as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims — to the most dubious mediocrity.

*beauty is for the few 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)

'the kind of feelings most foreign to love'

Supposing that what I felt for her was really love—which will appear at least doubtful to anyone who follows the story of our relationship—how could that passion have been accompanied from its birth with the kind of feelings most foreign to love, with peace of heart, calmness, serenity, security, confidence? How, on meeting a charming woman for the first time, a polished and attractive woman superior to myself in rank, a woman unlike any I had spoken to before, a woman on whom my fate to some extent hung—for I was dependent on the amount of interest she might feel in me—how was it then, taking all this into account, that I felt as carefree and as much at my ease as if I were perfectly certain to please her? Why did I not have a moment's embarrassment, timidity, or concern? I was bashful by nature, easily put out of countenance, and had never seen the world. How was it then that from the first day, the first instant, I assumed the easy manner, the affectionate language and familiar tone of ten years later, of a time when the greater intimacy had made it natural? Is there such a thing as love, not without desire—for desire I had—but without disquietude and jealousy? Does one not wish at least to learn from the woman one loves whether one is loved in return?

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1781; trans. J.M. Cohen 1953)