Category: Literature

And I Worshiped Them in Silence

In the evening before going to sleep they liked singing in musical and harmonious chorus. In those songs they expressed all the sensations that the parting day had given them, sang its glories and took leave of it. They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one’s heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

Some of their songs, solemn and rapturous, I scarcely understood at all. Though I understood the words I could never fathom their full significance. It remained, as it were, beyond the grasp of my mind, yet my heart unconsciously absorbed it more and more. I often told them that I had had a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow; that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without tears. . . that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them? and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why could I not love them without hating them? They listened to me, and I saw they could not conceive what I was saying, but I did not regret that I had spoken to them of it: I knew that they understood the intensity of my yearning anguish over those whom I had left. But when they looked at me with their sweet eyes full of love, when I felt that in their presence my heart, too, became as innocent and just as theirs, the feeling of the fullness of life took my breath away, and I worshipped them in silence.

Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
translated by constance garnett

People Are Alone in the World

Insensibility. oh, nature! people are alone in the world. that’s what is so dreadful. “Is there a living man on the plain?” cries the russian legendary hero. I, too, echo the same cry, but no one answers. They say the sun brings life to the universe. The sun will rise and—look at it. Isn’t it dead? Everything is dead. Dead men are everywhere. There are only people in the world, and all around them is silence—that’s what the earth is! “Men love one another!”—who said that? Whose commandment is it? The pendulum is ticking away unfeelingly, dismally. Two o’clock in the morning. Her dear little boots stand by her little bed, as though waiting for her. . . . No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what’s to become of me?

Dostoevsky, A Gently Creature

The Dream of a Curious Man

Do you know, as i do, how suffering can be savoured, and do you make people say of you, ‘what a strange man!’ I was going to die. my amorous soul felt desire mingled with horror, an illness peculiar to itself;

Anguish and lively hope, without any impulse to protest. the lower the fatal hourglass sank, the more savage and delicious was my torture; all my heart was tearing itself away from the familiar world.

I was like the child desperate to see the play, hating the curtain as one hates a barrier … at last the cold truth revealed itself:

I had died without surprise, and the terrible dawn was enfolding me. – ‘What! is that all?’ The curtain had risen and I was still waiting.

Charles Baudelaire

I Shall See Her Today!

‘I shall see her today!’ I exclaim in the mornings when I raise and look up the beautiful sun with a glad heart; ‘I shall see her today!’ and then i have no other wishes all day long. Everything, everything is included in that one hope.

In vain I stretch my arms to her when morning comes and I gradually waken from deep dreams, In vain i look for her in my bed at night when some happy, innocent reverie has tricked me into believing I was sitting with her in a meadow, holding her hand and covering it with a thousand kisses. Ah, still half asleep I reach for her, cheered to think she is there-and a flood of tears pours from my sorely beset heart, and I weep inconsolably over my somber future.

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

O Mother

O mother: you who are without an equal, who stood before all this silence, long ago in childhood. who took it upon yourself to say: don’t be afraid; i’m here. who in the night had the courage to be this silence for the child who was frightened, who was dying of fear. you strike a match, and already the noise is you. and you hold the lamp in front of you and say: i’m here; don’t be afraid. and you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: you are there, you are the light around the familiar, intimate things, which are there without afterthought, good and simple and sure. and when something moves restlessly in the wall, or creaks on the floor: you just smile, smile transparently against a bright background into the terrified face that looks at you, searching, as if you knew the secret of every half-sound, and everything were agreed and understood between you. does any power equal your power among the lords of the earth? look: kings lie and stare, and the teller of tales cannot distract them. though they lie in the blissful arms of their favorite mistress, horror creeps over them and makes them palsied and impotent. but you come and keep the monstrosity behind you and are entirely in front of it; not like a curtain that it can lift up here or there. no: as if you had caught up with it as soon as the child cried out for you. as if you had arrived far ahead of anything that might still happen, and had behind you only your hurrying-in, your eternal path, the flight of your love.

Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Poems

…poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. you ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. for poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. for the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. you must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quite, retrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. you must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. but you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. and it is not yet enough to have memories. you must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. for the memories themselves are not important. only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

God’s Music

But, Master, if some pure spirit with a virgin ear were to lie down beside your music: he would die of bliss; or he would become pregnant with infinity, and his fertilized brain would explode with so much birth.

Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

And It’s a Very Good Thing, Literature

And it’s a very good thing, literature, a very good thing…a profound thing! A thing that strengthens people’s heart, instructs….Literature is a picture, that is in a certain way a picture and a mirror; the expression of passion, a kind of subtle criticism, an exhortation to edification and a document.

You perhaps would like to know how i occupy myself when i am not writing? I read. I read an awful lot, and reading has a strange effect on me. I will read through something I read a long time ago and it is as though I am wound up with new powers. I pay attention to everything, understand everything clearly, and draw from it the ability to create for myself.

Dostoevsky

Listening to the Reed Flute

There’s a blind man on the road saying,
Allah, Allah. Sheikh Nuri runs to him,
‘What do you know of Allah? And if you know,
why do you stay alive?’ The sheikh keeps on,
beside himself with ecstatic questions.
Then he runs into a low place, where
a reedbed has recently been cut down.

He falls and gets up, falls again,
floundering on the sharp reed-ends.
People come and find him dead, the ground
wet with blood and written on every reed-tip,
the word Allah. This is the way one must
listen to the reed flute. Be killed
in it and lie down in the blood.

Attar, Persian Poet

trans. coleman barks