The Passion according to G.H. - pg. 99

For I was looking for my city's treasure.
A city of gold and stone, Rio de Janeiro, whose inhabitants in the sun were six hundred thousand beggars. The city's treasure might be in one of the breaches in the rubble. But which one? That city was in need of a mapmaker.

The Guide - Closing

He went down the steps of the river, halting for breath on each step, and finally reached his basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes, and turned toward the mountain, his lips muttered the prayer. Velan and another held him each by an arm. The morning sun was out by now; a great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings. It was difficult to hold to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to flop down. They held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes, looked about, and said, "Velan, it's raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs -" He sagged down.

The Guide - pg. 209

But each day the crowd increased. in a week there was a permanent hum pervading the place. Children shouted and played about, women came carrying baskets filled with pots, firewood, and foodstuffs, and cooked the food for their men and children. There were small curls of smoke going up all along the river bank, on the opposite slope and on this bank also. It was studded with picnic groups, with the women's bright-colored saris shining in the sun; men too had festive dress. Bullocks unyoked from their carts jingled their bells as they ate the straw under the trees. People swarmed around little water-holes.

The Slave - Opening

I
I

A single bird call began the day. Each day the same bird, the same call. It was as if the bird signaled the approach of dawn to its brood. Jacob opened his eyes.

THIRD PRINTING, 1964

Copyright 1962 by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Published simultaneously in Canada by

Ambassador Books, Ltd. Toronto

Manufactured in the United States of America
designed by Patricia de Groot

The Guide - pg. 146

Here entered the man himself, standing at the door and calling in his booming voice, "Sister!" I scrambled to my feet and ran to the door. My mother came hurrying from the kitchen. Rosie stopped her practice. The man was six feet, darkened by the sun from working in the fields, and had a small knotted tuft in his skull; he wore a shirt with an upper cloth, his dhoti was brown, not white like a townsman's. He carried a bag of jute material in his hand (with a green print of Mahatma Gandhi on it), and a small trunk. He went straight to the kitchen, took out of the bag a cucumber, a few limes, and plantains and greens, saying, "These are for my sister, grown in our gardens." He placed them on the floor of the kitchen for his sister. He gave a few instructions as to how to cook them.

The Guide - pg. 136

But whenever she could get at me, she hissed a whisper into my ear. "She is a real snake woman, I tell you. I never liked her from the first day you mentioned her."

The Guide - pg. 110

When she indicated the lotus with her fingers, you could almost hear the ripple of water around it. She held the performance for nearly an hour; it filled me with the greatest pleasure on earth. I could honestly declare that, while I watched her perform, my mind was free, for once, from all carnal thoughts; I viewed her as a pure abstraction. She could make me forget my surroundings. I sat with open-mouthed wonder watching her. Suddenly she stopped and flung her whole weight on me with "What a darling. You are giving me a new lease on life."

SHIBBOLETH

Along with my stone
like a great tear fell
in back of the shutters,

they hauled me
into the dust of a market,
that place
where a flag was unrolled
to which I never had sworn.

Flutes,
double-flutes of the night:
remember the dark
and twin redness,
Madrid and Vienna.

Memory,
set up your flag at half-mast.
At half-mast
today and forever.

Heart:
let us see you here too,
here in the dust of this market.
Thunder your shibboleth here
into your alien homeland:
February. No pasaran

Unicorn:
you know of the stones
you know of the water,
come,
let me lead you away
toward the voices
of Estremadura.

The Guide - pg. 56

The moment she got down from the train I wished I had hidden myself somewhere. She was not very glamorous, if that is what you expect, but she did have a figure, a slight and slender one, beautifully fashioned, eyes that sparkled, a complexion not white, but dusky, which made her only half visible - as if you saw her through a film of tender coconut juice. Forgive me if you find me waxing poetic.

The Guide - pg. 40

The teacher suggested,"Do not mistake me, but will you speak to these boys whenever you can?" This gave Raju a chance to air his views on life and eternity before the boys. He spoke to them on godliness, cleanliness, spoke on Ramayana, the characters in the epics; he addressed them on all kinds of things. He was hypnotized by his own voice; he felt himself growing in stature as he saw the upturned faces of the children shining in the half-light when he spoke. No one was more impressed with the grandeur of the whole thing than Raju himself.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 54

"Do you believe in God - in Christ - in the Holy Spirit?" We can now add that it thereby represents the positive corollary to the triple renunciation that precedes it: "I renounce the devil, his service and his work."
This means that faith is located in the act of conversion, in the shift of gravity from worship of the visible and practicable to trust in the invisible. The phrase "I believe" could hhere be literally translated by "I hand myself over to", "I assent to". In the sense of the Creed, and by origin, faith is not a recitation of doctrines, an acceptance of theories about things of which in themselves one knows nothing and therefore asserts something all the louder; it signifies a movement of the human existence; to use Heidegger's language, one could say that it signifies an "about-turn" by the whole person which from then on constantly structures one's existence. In the procedure of the threefold renunciation and the threefold assent, linked as it is with the thrice-repeated death-symbol of drowning and the thrice-repeated symbolization of resurrection to new life, the true nature of faith or belief is clearly illustrated: it is a conversion, an about-turn, a shift of being.

The Passion according to G.H. - pg. 63

I felt impure, as the Bible speaks of the impure. Why did the Bible spend so much time on the impure, even to making a list of impure and forbidden animals? Why, if, like all the rest, they too had been created? And why was the impure forbidden?I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure.

The Passion according to G.H. - pg. 33

Suddenly, with, now, real discomfort, I finally allowed there to come over me a sensation that, through negligence and lack of interest, I had for a good six months not allowed myself to have: the sensation of that woman's silent hatred. What surprised me was that it was a kind of free hate, the worst kind of hate: indifferent hate. Not a hate that individualized me but just the absence of all compassion. No, not even hate.

The Passion according to G.H. - pg. 14

I'm stalling. I know that everything I say is just to put it off
- to put off the moment when I'll have to start talking, knowing that
there is nothing more for me to say. I'm putting off my silence. Have
I been putting off silence for my whole life? but now, in my disparagement
of the word, perhaps I'll finally be able to start talking.

from ROMANIAN PROSE POEMS

AS PARTISAN OF EROTIC ABSOLUTISM. reticent megalomaniac even among divers, and simultaneous messenger of Paul Celan's halo, I evoke the petrified apparitions of the sunk airship only every ten (or more) years, and I go skating only at the latest hour on a lake guarded by the giant forest of brainless members of the world-poets-conspiracy. It's easy to understand that here you cannot get through with the arrows of visible fire. At the border of the world an infinitely large amethyst-curtain hides the existence of that human-shaped vegetation beyond which I, selenic, attempt a dance supposed to make me ecstatic. But so far I have not succeeded, and with my eyes, which have migrated to my temples, I contemplate my profile, waiting for spring.

The Guide - pg. 31

ONE fine day, beyond the tamarind tree the station building was ready. The steel tracks gleamed in the sun; the signal posts stood with their red and green stripes and their colorful lamps; and our world was neatly divided into this side of the railway line and that side. everything was ready. All our spare hours were spent in walking along the railway track up to the culvert half a mile away. We paced up and down our platform, a gold mohur sapling was planted in the railway yard. We passed through the corridor, peeping into the room meant for the stationmaster.

The Passion according to G.H. - pg. 8

Perhaps what happened to me is an understanding for me to be true, I have to continue being separate from it, have to continue not understanding it. All sudden understanding very closely approximates a clear nonunderstanding.

The Passion according to G.H. - Opening

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don''t know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience.

To Potential Readers:

This is a book just like any other book. But I would
be happy if it were read only by people whose outlook is
fully formed. People who know that an approach - to
anything whatsoever - must be carried out gradually
and laboriously, that it must traverse even the very
opposite of what is being approached. They and they
alone will, slowly, come to understand that this book
exact nothing of anyone. Over time, the character G. H.
came to give me, for example, a very difficult
pleasure; but it is called pleasure.

C.L.

Originally published as A paixao sequndo G.H.,
copyright The heirs of Clarice Lispector.
Copyright 1988 by the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis MN 55414
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham.
Printed in the United States of America.

The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.

CLARICE LISPECTor

Translation by
Ronald W.
SOUSA

The Guide - pg. 27

"Do you know sometimes these Yogis can travel to the Himalayas just by a thought?"
"I don't think that he is that kind of Yogi," said another.
"Who can say? Appearances are sometimes misleading," said someone.

CORONA

Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We are picking time out of a nut, we teach it to run:
and time rushes back to its shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dreams people sleep,
the mouth tells the truth.

My eye descends to the sex of my loved one,
we gaze at each other,
we whisper out darkness,
we love one another like poppies and memory,
we sleep like wine in a seashell,
like the sea in the moon's bloody rays.

Embracing we stand by the window, and people look up from
the street:
it is time that they knew!
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
that unrest formed a heart.
It is time it was time.

It is time.

The Guide - pg. 16

My father ignored food and sleep when he had company. My mother sent me out several times to see if he could be made to turn in. He was a man of uncertain temper and one could not really guess how he would react to interruptions, and so my mother coached me to go up, watch his mood, and gently remind him of food and home. I stood under the shop awning, coughing and clearing my throat, hoping to catch his eye. But the talk was all-absorbing and he would not glance in my direction, and I got absorbed in their talk, although I did not understand a word of it.

The Lake - Closing

He felt miserable as he limped along. Why hadn't he gone straight home after hanging the firefly cage on Machie's back? When he reached his rented upstairs room, Gimpei pulled off his socks. His ankle had turned faintly red.

The Lake - pg. 157

He found it hard to believe that in one single night he had seen Machie at the firefly-catching, been pursued by the vision of the baby on the bank, and was now drinking with a woman he had met entirely by chance. Perhaps it was her ugliness that made it possible. To have seen Machie by the moat was a beautiful dream, but this ugly woman in a cheap restaurant was real. Yet drinking with this "reality" seemed at the same time a way to reach the girl in the dream. The uglier the woman, the better the vision. Her ugliness brought Machie's face into view.

The Lake - pg. 128

"You know, there was snow here long after it had gone from the streets. I suppose it's becase the wall is high. Anyway people shoveled snow over here from outside. There was a mountain of it this side of the gate, and somehow that too seemed to stand in the way of our love... I thought there might be a baby buried under it..."

The Lake - pg. 41

"What are you doing? It's like a dream," Gimpei said from his strange ecstasy. He turned around, but of course he couldn't see his own ear. Then, bending her arm in slightly toward his face, the girl put her finger back in his ear and slowly turned it.
"It's like an angel's whisper of love. I only wish I could clean out all the other human voices tat have lodged there, so that I could listen only to your beautiful voice. Even lies would vanish..."

The Pickwick Papers - Opening

CHAPTER I
The Pickwickians

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of this public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Cllub, which the editor of these papers feel the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

First published 1836-7
Published in Penguin Classics 1999
Reprinted with a revised Dickens chronology 2003

Introduction and Notes copyright Mark Wormald, 1999
A Dickens Chronology copyright Stephen Wall, 1995, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the editors have been asserted

Set in 10/11.25 pt PostScript Monotype Fourier
Typeset by Rowland Pototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lnt,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than thaat in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The Lake - pg. 20

Gimpei learned from the passbook that the woman's name was Miyako Mizuki If he had had no intention of taking the money and had only been lured on by her strange appeal, he ought suurely to have sent the money and passbook back to her. But as it was, he couldn't be expected to return them. Just as he had followed the woman, so the money followed him, like a living being with a mind of its own. It was the first time Gimpei had stolen money. Or rather, not that he had stolen it, but that the money had intimidated him, refusing to go away.

The Lake - Opening

Gimpei Momoi arrived in Karuizawa at the end of the summer season, although up there it seemed more like autumn.

Published by Kodansha International Ltd., 12-21 Otowa 2-chome
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112 and Kodansha International/USA Ltd.,
with offices at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022 and
The Hearst Building, 5 Third Street, Suite No. 430, San Francisco,
California 94103. Copyright 1974 by Hite Kawabata. All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

First edition, 1974
First paperback edition, 1978
Sixth paperback printing, 1984

The Guide - Opening

Chapter One
Raju welcomed the intrusion - something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt smashed and embarrassed.

COPYRIGHT 1958 BY R. K. NARAYAN
PUBLISHED IN 1958 BY
THE VIKING PRESS, INC.
625 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK 22, N. Y.

PRINTED IN U.S.A BY THE VAIL_BALLOU PRESS, INC.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Closing

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - pg. 147

If we did a thing like that the world would turn to chaos: ten tankers would sink in the harbor, and a thousand trains would be derailed; the glass in the windows all over the city would shatter, and every lovely rose would turn black as coal.

Urdu

میرا پہلا مُرسلا ہِندی میں دیو-ناگری رسم-اُل-خت کو اِستیمال کرتے ہے

Hindi

मेरा पहला मुरसला हिन्दी मैं देव-नागरी रस्म-उल-ख़त को इस्तेमाल करते हे

गूगल की जे!

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - pg. 92

Finally, rocking the whole harbor and carrying to every city; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rayuko's horn screamed one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea. Ryuji was llost from sight.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - pg. 77

For Riyuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of. The softness of her lips, her mouth so crimson in the darkness he could see it with closed eyes, so infinitely moist, a tepid coral sea, her restless tongue quivering like sea grass ... in the dark rapture of all this was something directly linked to death. He was perfectly aware that he would leaver her in a day, yet he was ready to die happily for her sake. Death roused inside him, stirred.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - pg. 38

He hadn't been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean's swell. Whenever he tried to talk about those things, he failed. If there were times when he felt he was worthless, there were others when something like the magnificence of the sunset over Manila Bay sent its radiant fire through him and he knew that he had been chosen to tower above other men. But he hadn't been able to tell the woman his conviction. He remembered her asking: "Why haven't you ever married?" And he remembered his simpering answer: "It's not easy to find a woman who is willing to be a sailor's wife."

SPEECH-GRILLE

Eye-orb between the bars.

Ciliary lid
rows upwards,
releases a gaze.

Iris, swimmer, dreamless and dim:
the sky, heart-gray, must be near.

Skew, in the iron socket,
the smoldering splinter.
By the sense of light
you guess the soul.


(Were I like you. Were you like me.
Did we not stand
under one tradewind
We are strangers.)

The tiles. Upon them,
close together, the two
heart-gray pools:
two
mouthfuls of silence.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - pg. 13

Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy's iron heart - but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks ot the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life - the cards had paired: Noboru and mother - mother and man - man and sea - sea and Noboru...

The Upanishads - Opening

In the first mantra of the first chapter the student asks the teacher: "Directed by whom does the mind think, impelled by whom does Prana, or vital force, function, and willed by which god does speech utter, eyes see and the ears hear?"

To Adi Shankaracharya

The greatest teacher of the Vedanta

ASIAN HUMANITIES PRESS

Asian Humanities Press offers to the specialist and the general reader alike the best in new translations of major works and significant original contributions to enhance our understanding of Asian literature, religious, cultures and thought.

Copyright 1999 by Shyam N. Shukla. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.

Herzog - Closing

Walking over notes and papers, he lay down on his Recamier couch. As he stretched out, he took a long breath, and then he lay, looking at the mesh of the screen, pulled loose by vines, and listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle's broom. He wanted to tell her to sprinkle the floor. She was raising too much dust. In a few minutes he would call down to her, "Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle. There's water in the sink." But not just yet. At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.

Herzog - pg. 317

...Why not say rather that people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and self-sufficient fictions, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves to feel awake. I know that my suffering, if I may speak of it, has often been like that, a more extended form of life, a striving for true wakefulness and an antidote to illusion, and therefore I can take no moral credit for it. I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering.

Herzog - pg. 311

...the human intellect is one of the great forces of the universe. It can't safely remain unused. You might almost conclude that the boredom of so many human arrangements (middle-class family life, for instance) has the historical aim of freeing the intellect of newer generations, sending them into science. But a terrible loneliness throughout life is simply the plankton on which Leviathan feeds... Must reconsider. The soul requires intensity. At the same time virtue bores mankind. Read Confucius again. With vast populations, the world must prepare to turn Chinese.

Herzog - pg. 286

A quixote imitated great models. What models did he imitate? A quixote was a Christian, and Moses E. Herzog was no Christian. This was the post-quixotic, post-Copernican U.S.A, where a mind freely poised in space might discover relationships utterly unsuspected by a seventeenth-century man sealed in his smaller universe.

Herzog - pg. 271

"Then it's the old memento mori, the monk's skull on the table, brought up to date. And what good is that? It all goes back to those German existentialists who tell you how good dread is for you, how it saves you from distraction and gives you your freedom and makes you authentic. God is no more. But Death is. That's their story. And we live in a hedonistic world in which happiness is set up on a mechanical model. All you have to do is open your fly and grasp happiness. And so these other theorists introduce the tension of guilt and dread as a corrective. But human life is far subtler than any of its models, even these ingenious German models. Do we need to study theories of fear and anguish?

Herzog - pg. 266

The necessary premise is that a man is somehow more than his "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases him to call "My Life." We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light. This was by no means a "general idea" with him now. It was far more substantial than anything he saw in this intensely lighted telegraph office. It all seemed to him exceptionally clear. What made it clear? Something at the very end of the line. Was that thing Death? But death was not the incomprehensible accepted by his heart. No, far from it.

Herzog - pg. 259

He drove directly to Woodlawn Avenue - a dreary part of Hyde Park, but characteristic, his Chicago: massive, clumsy, amorphous, smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty facades, slabs of structural nothing, senselessly ornamented triple porches with huge cement urns for flowers that contained only rotting cigarette butts and other stained filth; sun parlors under tiled gables, rank areaways, gray backstairs, seamed and ruptured concrete from which sprang grass; ponderous four-by-four fences that sheltered growing weeds. And among these spacious, comfortable, dowdy apartments where liberal, benevolent people lived (this was the university neighborhood) Herzog did in fact feel at home.

Herzog - pg. 220

And where is it! Where is that human life which is my only excuse for surviving! What have I to show for myself? Only this! His face was before him in the blotchy mirror. It was bearded with lather. He saw his perplexed, furious eyes and he gave an audible cry. My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human. But what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human. And like a troubling dream, a persistent vapor. A desire. Where does it all come from? And what is it? And what can it be! Not immortal longing. No, entirely mortal, but human.

Sakharam Binder

If you live here, you don't need to fear anyone. This Saharam Binder - he's a terror... He's not scared of God or of God's father!

Herzog - pg. 187

Moses was strongly tempted to lie to her, to say, "Yes, Ramona, it was you." Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.

Herzog - pg. 175

At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage. Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw strips of molding like javelins. Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheic gases.

Herzog - pg. 166

Why, to get laid is actually socially constructive and useful, an act of citizenship. So here I am in the gathering dusk, the striped jacket on my back, sweating again after my wash, shaved, powdered, taking my underlip in my teeth nervously, as if anticipating what Ramona will do it. Powerless to reject the hedonistic joke of a mammoth industrial civilization on the spiritual desires, the high cravings of a Herzog, on his moral suffering, his longing for the good, the true. All the while his heart is contemptibly aching. He would like to give his heart a shaking, or put it out of his breast. Evict it. Moses hated the humiliating comedy of heartache. But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of explanations.

Testament to Youth in Verse

Should you go looking for a Testament to Youth in Verse,
variations on the age old curse, you blame the stations
when they play you like a fool and like a fool you get played with.
Baby, think twice, maybe its not all, maybe its not alright.

Finally a decent picture of the exodus,
I don't know much but other singers know less, and
can we control ourselves for once?

Keep our hands off each other, keep our minds on the sum.
Keep our hands off each other, keep our minds on the sum.
Keep our hands off each other, keep our minds on the sum.
Keep our hands off each other, keep our minds on the sum of each other.

So should you go looking for a Testament to Youth in Verse,
dedications to the same old curse, don't blame the stations
when they play you like a fool and like a fool you get played with.
Baby, think twice, maybe its not all, maybe its not alright.

Oh my sweet witness, cant you hear the voices?
They're telling the children to rock for their choices.
The bells ring no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no....

Herzog - pg. 148

I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities - yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a biblical sense of personal experience and destiny.

Herzog - pg. 116

"Feel? Don't give me that line of platitudes about feelings. I don't believe in it. I believe in God - sin - death - so don't pull any sentimental crap on."

Herzog - pg. 110

An eager, hasty, self-intense, and comical person.

Herzog - pg. 105

He sucked it deep into his lungs - a stirring foulness; he raptly breathed in the swampiness of old pipes. The wheels were speeding with a sharp racket, biting the rails. The cold fall sun flamed over the New Jersey mills. Volcanic shapes of slag, rushes, dumps, refineries, ghostly torches, and presently the fields and woods. The short oaks bristled like metal. The fields turned blue. Each radio spire was like a needle's eye with a drop of blood in it. The dull bricks of Elizabeth fell behind. At dusk Trenton approached like the heart of a coal fire. Herzog read the municipal sign - TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES!

Herzog - pg. 84

"Well, when you suffer, you really suffer. You're a real, genuine old Jewish type that digs the emotions. I'll give you that. I understand it. I grew up on Sangamon Street, remember, when a Jew was still a Jew. I know about suffering - we're on the same identical network."

Herzog - pg. 70

The lawn was on an elevation with a view of fields and woods. Formed like a large teardrop of green, it had a gray elm at its small point, and the bark of the huge tree, dying of dutch blight, was purplish gray. Scant leaves for such a vast growth. An oriole's nest, in the shape of a gray heart, hung from twigs. God's veil over things makes them all riddles. If they were not all so particular, detailed, and very rich I might have more rest from them. But I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. They are too exciting. Meantime I dwell in yon house of dull boards. Herzog was worried about that elm. Must he cut it down? He hated to do it. Meanwhile the cicadas all vibrated a coil in their bellies, a horny posterior band in a special chamber. Those billions of red eyes from the enclosing woods looked out, stared down, and the steep waves of sound drowned the summer afternoon. Herzog had seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Opening

PART ONE: SUMMER

SLEEP well, dear."

Perigee Books
are published by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
200 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016

Copyright 1965 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Academic Press
Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in Japanese as Gogo No Eiko
by Kodansha, Tokyo, in 1963. Lyrics for the song which
appears on pages 17-18, "I Can't Give Up the Sailor's Life,"
are from a poem by Ryo Yano.

This is an authorized reprint of a handcover edition
originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Second Impression

Herzog - pg. 47

The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enamelled shells of the commuters' cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.

Herzog - pg. 38

Everyone close to Madeleine, everyone drawn into the drama of her life became exceptional, deeply gifted, brilliant. It had happened also to him. By his dismissal from Madeleine's life, sent back into the darkness, he became again a spectator.

Herzog - Opening

IF I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

To Pat Covici, a great editor and,
better yet, a generous friend,
this book is affectionately dedicated

Third Printing, September 1964

First published in 1964 by The Viking Press, Inc.
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Published simultaneously in Canada by
The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited


Set in Times and Carolus types
and printed in the United States of America
by H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Co. Inc..
M B G

Two section of this book appeared, in slightly different form,
in Esquire, another selection in The Saturday Evening Post, and
other sections in Commentary and Location.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 48

Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself in the "You" of its mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses round which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion "I believe in You" - of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 46

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that "understanding" only reveals itself in"standing", not apart from it.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 39

Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God.

J. M. Coetzee: Samuel Beckett, the short fiction

Though, it is not a description he would
have accepted, Beckett can justly be called a philosophical
writer, one whose works can be read as a
series of sustained sceptical raids on Descartes
and the philosophy of the subject that Descartes founded.
In his suspicion of Cartesian axiomatics Beckett aligns himself
with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and with his younger
contemporary Jacques Derrida. The satiric interrogation to
which he subjects the Cartesian cogito (I am thinking,
therefore I must exist) is so close in spirit to Derrida's
programme for exposing the metaphysical assumptions
behind Western thought that we must speak, if not of
Beckett's direct influence on Derrida, then of a striking case of
sympathetic vibration.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 33

This means that the old equation of truth and being is replaced by the new one of truth and factuality; all that can be known is the "factum", that which we have made ourselves. It is not the task of the human mind - nor is it within its capacity - to think about being, but about the factum, what has been made, man's own particular world, for this is all we can truly understand. Man did not produce the cosmos and its bottommost depths remain opaque to him. Complete, demonstrable knowledge is attainable only within the bounds of mathematics and in the field of history, which is the realm of man's own activities and can therefore be known by him. In the midst of the sea of doubt which threatened to engulf man at the beginning of the modern period after the collapse of the old metaphysics, the factum was here discovered as the dry land on which man could try to build a new existence for himself. The dominance of fact began, that is, man's complete devotion to his own work as the only certainty.

The Sea, The Sea - Closing

My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 500

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is the final forgiveness that James spoke of.

ALGO POR ESTILO

PARRA SI RIE como condenado
¡cuándo no se rieron los poetas!
a lo menos declara que se reí

pasan los años pasan
los años
a lo menos parece que pasaran
hipótesis non fingo
todo suede como si pasaran

ahora se pone a llorar
olvidando que es antipoeta

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 350

'A rather unattractive sort of courage,' I said.
'There was a rather unattractive sort of war on,' said James.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 325

My act, my will would create a new family.

2666

Oakley Hall

Rest In Peace

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 291

I know what sort of person you are, I've read about you, you're a rotten man, a shit, a destroyer, you're filth.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 233

After looking at the bright candles I could at first see nothing, and it struck me in an odd way that while I was talking to Hartley I had forgotten about the sea, forgotten it was there and now felt confounded and at a loss to find myself half blind among those terrible rocks.

Concert Music Buys

- The Fire Bird Igor Stravinsky
- Hungarian Rhapsodies - Franz Liszt
- Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin in D Minor - Johan Sebastian Bach

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 209

It was certainly not dark as I came towards the house, but the day had that luminous, gauzy blandness which in the midsummer season celebrates the approach of a twilight which, for a few final days, will never entirely darken. The evening star was just visible, and would now for along further period of daylight blaze in splendor alone. The sea was as flat as I had ever seen it, quite still and held up brimming as if it were in a bowl, the tide being in. The water was the colour of very light blue enamel...

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 204

And now, fleeing from worldly vanities, I have come to the sea, and to you.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 174

James did not always, in talking to me, avoid a perhaps instinctive reversion to a slightly patronizing jokey tone which used to madden me when we were boys, especially since he was the younger. The banal phrase 'the bustle of the theatre' and the equation of me with 'retired people' seemed with an easy gesture to consign my activities past and present to unimportance. Or perhaps I was still being too sensitive.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 121

The nature of our converse had never been spoilt, and in that blundering conversation its note could unmistakably be heard again. Perhaps I would indeed, through her and through our old childish love, now irremediably chaste, be enabled to become what I had hoped to become when I came away to the sea, pure in heart.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 102

'I am part of your life, you now. Yes, you are frightened, Charles. It's interesting, it's a revelation, it's so easy to frighten people, to bewilder them and persecute them and terrify them out of their wits and make their lives a misery. No wonder dictators flourish.'

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 79

I must try to describe Hartley. Oh, my darling how clearly I can see you now. Surely this is perception, not imagination. The light in the cavern is daylight, not fire. Perhaps it is the only true light in my life, the light that reveals the truth. No wonder I feared to lose the light and to be left in the darkness forever. All a child's blind fear was there, the fear that my mother so early inspired in me: the kiss withheld, the candle taken. Hartley, my Hartley. Yes, I see her clearly, jumping over a rope, higher and higher it was raised, Hartley still flew over, the watchers sighing each time with sympathetic relief; and I hugging my heart in secret pride. She was the champion jumper of the school, of many schools, the champion runner, Hartley always first, and I cheering with the rest and laughing with secret joy. Hartley, in a breathless stillness, crouched upon a parallel bar, her bare thighs gleaming. The games master spoke of the Olympics.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 69

For lunch made my heavenly vegetarian stew of onions, carrots, tomatoes, bran, lentils, pearl barley, vegetable protein, brown sugar and olive oil. (The vegetable protein I brought with me from London.) I add a little lemon juice before eating. With that (it is very light) a baked potato with cream cheese. Then Battenburg roll and prunes. (Carefully cooked prunes are delicious. Drain and add lemon juice or a dash of orange flower water, never cream.) If any one wonders at the absence of 'eating' apples from my diet let me explain that this is one case where I have spoilt my palate with an aristocratic taste. I can eat only Cox's Orange Pippins, and am in mourning applewise from April to October.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 52

The dear girl never made me feel guilty ! A light of courage and truth shines on her in my memory. She is possibly the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me. And the remembrance of her sufferings often filled me with a kind of tender joy, whereas when I think of the sufferings of other women I tend to feel indifference, even annoyance.

The Sea, The Sea - pg. 32

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theatre is always popular and indeed why it exists : why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts.

Introduction to Christianity - Opening

BELIEF IN THE WORLD OF TODAY

I. DOUBT AND BELIEF - MAN'S SITUATION
BEFORE THE QUESTION OF GOD

ANYONE who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought by calling or convention soon comes to sense the alien - and alienating - nature of such an enterprise.

TO MY AUDIENCES
IN FREISING, BONN, MUNSTER
AND TUBINGEN

INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY

by
JOSEPH RATZINGER

Translated by J. R. Foster


HERDER AND HERDER

1970
HERDER AND HERDER NEW YORK
232 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016

This is a translation of Einfuhrung in das Christentum
(Kosel-Verlag, Munich, 1968)

Nihil obstat: John M. T. BARTON, S.T.D., L.S.S., Censor
Imprimatur: PATRICK CASEY, Vicar General
Westminster: 31 July 1969

English translation 1969 by Burns & OAtes Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States

The Sea, The Sea - Opening

Prehistory

The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

To
ROSEMARY CRAMP

Copyright Iris Murdoch, 1978
All rights reserved
Published in 1978 by The Viking Press
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Monotype Baskerville

Diary of a Bad Year - Closing

All that I will promise him, and hold his hand tight and give him a kiss on the brow, a proper kiss, just to remind him of what he is leaving behind. Good night, Senor C, I will whisper in his ear: sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 197

My case can certainly not be unique. Among middle-class Indians, for example, there must be many who have done their schooling in English, who routinely speak English in the workplace and at home (throwing in the odd local location for colouring), who command other languages only imperfectly, yet who, as they listen to themselves speak or as they read what they have written, have the uneasy feeling that there is something false going on.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 193

The classic case is that of Tolstoy. No one is more alive to the real world than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace. After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didactism that culminated in he aridity of the late short fiction. Yet to the older Tolstoy the evolution must have seemed quite different. Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 141

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were, in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 135

Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius composed within the bounds of symphonic form a music of heroic rebirth and/or transfiguration. Wagner and Strauss did much the same in forms of their own invention. Theirs is music that relies on parallels between harmonic and motival transmutation on the one hand and spiritual transfiguration on the other. Typically, the progression is through murky struggle transfiguration on the other. Typically, the progression is through murky struggle toward clarification - hence the note of triumph on which so much of the symphonic music of the period ends.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 124

In the orthodox, neo-liberal view, socialism collapsed and died under its own contradictions. But might we not entertain an alternative story: that socialism did not collapse but was bludgeoned to the ground, did not die but was killed?

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 117

Liberals, in Australia as in South Africa, feel that it should be left to the market to decide who shall rise and who shall not. The role of government should be self-limited: to create conditions in which individuals can bring their aspirations, their drive, their training, and whatever other forms of intangible capital they have, to the market, which will then (here comes the moment when economic philosophy turns into religious faith) reward them more or less in proportion to their contribution (their "input").

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 104

During the years when Cape Town was my home, I thought of it as "my" city not just because I had been born there but above all because I knew the history of the place deeply enough to see its past in palimpsest beneath its present. But to the bands of young blacks who roam its streets today looking for action, it is "their" city and I am the outsider. History has no life unless you give it a home in your consciousness; it is a load no free person can be forced to take on.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 45

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotions that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one's feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 23

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 21

... the situation of the suicide bomber is not without tragic potential. Whose heart is so hardened as to feel no sympathy at all for the man who, his family having been killed in an Israeli strike, straps on the bomb-belt in full knowledge that there is no paradise of houris waiting for him, and in grief and rage goes out to destroy as many of the killers as he can? No other way than death is a marker and perhaps even a definition of the tragic.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 9

Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, supra-political discourse about politics is futile.

Diary of a Bad Year - Opening

One

Strong Opinions
12 September 2005 - 31 May 2006


OI. On the origins of the state

Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that "we" - not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one - participate in its coming into being. But the fact is that only "we" know - ourselves and the people close to us - are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.

A portion of this book is first appeared in The New York Review of Books

Publisher's Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Two Serious Ladies - Closing

"Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint," reflected Miss Goering, "but is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield?" This latter possibility Miss Goering thought to be of considerable interest but of no great importance.

Two Serious Ladies - pg. 187

"But do you know," said Andy, "how beautiful and delicate a man's heart is when he is happy for the first time? It is like the thin ice that has imprisoned those beautiful young plants that are released when the ice thaws."

Two Serious Ladies - pg. 107

Mrs. Copperfield started to tremble after the girl had closed the door behind her. She trembled so violently that she shook the bed. She was suffering as much as she had ever suffered before, because she was going to do what she wanted to do. But it would not make her happy. She did not have the courage to stop from doing what she wanted to do. She knew that it would not make her happy, because only the dreams of crazy people come true. She thought that she was only interested in duplicating a dream, but in doing so she necessarily became the complete victim of a nightmare.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire

Ivan The Terrible

Two Serious Ladies - pg. 42

The woman seated in front of the particular house was rather old. She sat on a stool with her elbows resting on her knees, and it seemed to Mrs. Copperfield, who had now turned to look at her, that she was probably a West Indian type. She was flat-chested and raw-boned, with very muscular arms and shoulders. Her long disgruntled-looking face and part of her neck were carefully covered with a light-colored face powder, but her chest and arms remained dark. Mrs. Copperfield was amused to see that her dress was of lavender theatrical gauze. There was an attractive gray streak in her hair.

Two Serious Ladies - Opening

Christina Goering's father was an American industrialist of German parentage and her mother was a New York lady of a very distinguished family. Christina spent the first half of her life in a very beautiful house (not more than an hour from the city) which she had inherited from her mother. It was in this house that she had been brought up as a child with her sister Sophie.

Toba Tek Singh

Toba Tek Singh is a short-story by Manto. In the short-story, a man named Toba Tek Singh is going progressivley deranged as he is trying to find his way to the right side of the newly-partitioned state of Punjab. The story is mostly a single-stroked comment on the correlation, loosely formulated as, of self with the place/belonging. As the newly independent states were being created, there were places and people who were withering away in the process. Toba Tek Singh was one such individual who stood in the story as the agent representing the Punjab, the people and the place, being neatly cut into two, by the Partition Plan of June 3, 1947.

What then Toba Tek Singh would do. To which side of his land would he belong to? Could he be thrust into opposing the forces that had moved against him, his people and by extension his land? Did he have a choice? Was insanity his refuge against Them who'd gone and done it sitting in their Brown Sahib luxuriance in the remote colonial capitals, reason be damned.

Kenzaburo Oe's heart-wrenching novella "Prize Stock" reminded me, though somewhat obliquely, of Toba Tek Singh. In Prize Stock, an American pilot crash landed in a remote Japanese village and the story was told through the perspective of a ten year old boy in the village. The questions Oe seemed more interested in to explore were about Japanese
"character" and its relation to the War (implicative, passive?) and its interface with the "Other", here an African-American captive being treated as an animal, a Prize Stock.

To Do List

• End of chapter 4
• Matlab Simulations
• Stephan Meeting
• 
  

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness - Opening

In the winter of 196-, an outlandishly fat man came close to being thrown to a polar bear bathing in a filthy pool below him and had the experience of very nearly going mad.

Prize Stock - Closing

A burst of louder shouts and laughter and a soft skimming through the grass, but no sled cleaved the sticcky air to appear before me. I thought I heard the dull thud of an impact and stood as I was, peering into the dark air. After a long silence I finally saw the airplane tail sliding toward me down the slope, riderless, spinning as it came. I threw the artificial leg into the grass and ran up the dark slope. Alongside a rock jutting blackly from the grass and wet with dew, both hands limply open, Clerk lay on his back grinning. I leaned over and saw that thick, dark blood was running from the nose and ears of his grinning face. The noise the children made as they came running down the sslope rose above the wind blowing up form the valley.

Prize Stock - pg. 32

The chain from the boar-trap cut into the black man's ankles, the cuts became inflamed, blood trickled onto his feet and shriveled and stuck there like dried blades of grass. We worried constantly about the pinkish infection in the wounds. When he straddled the barrel the pain was so bad it made the black soldier bare his teeth like a laughing child. After looking deep into one another's eyes for a long time and talking together, we resolved to remove the boar-trap. The black soldier, like a dull black beast, his eyes always wet with a thick liquid that might have been tears or mucous, sat in silence hugging his knees on the cellar floor -- what harm could he do us when we removed the trap? He was only a single head of black man!

Prize Stock - pg. 12

Straining to catch a sound, we watched an orange light go on inside the long, narrow skylight window that ran between the floor of the storehouse and the ground. We could not find the courage to peek through the skylight. The short, anxious wait exhausted us. But no gunshot rang out. Instead, thhe village headman's shadowed face appeared beneath the partly opened trapdoor and we were yelled at and had to abandon even keeping watch at a distance from the skylight; the children, carrying with them expectations that would fill the night hours with bad dreams, ran off down the cobblestone road without a word of disappointment. Fear, awakened by their pounding feet, pursued them from behind.

Prize Stock - Opening

My kid brother and I were digigng with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium, the makeshift crematorium in the valley that was simply a shallow pit in a clearing in the underbrush. The valley bottom was already wrapped in dusk and fog as cold as the spring water that welled up in the woods, but the side of the hill where we lived, the little village built around a cobblestone road, was bathed in grape light. I straightened out of a crouch and weakly yawned, my mouth stretching open. My brother stood up too, gave a small yawn, and smiled at me.

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - Closing

His bayonet clanking at his side, he crawls toward the stone steps at the bank entrance where a certain party waits, bullet-riddled, an army sword held high in one hand, the other outstretched to embrace him, shot in the back and dying. His eyes, filled with tears and his own blood, are already blind to all things in reality, but the colossal chrysanthemum topped with a purple aurora illuminated the darkness behind his closed lids more radiantly than any light he has ever seen. His head nothing more than a dark void now, the blood all drained away, he is no longer certain whether the person awaiting him at the top of the stone steps is a certain party, but if he can crawl just one yard more, digging at the hot ground with his bullet-broken hands, he will reach the feet of the person unmistakably awaiting him, whoever may be, and his blood and his tears will be wiped away.
[[Exasperated by his refusal to remove the head-phones, a resourceful doctor plugs a microphone into the tape recorder, connects the headphones to a monitor and begins to speak through them, It's time we started being honest with one another about your condition, you must understand and cooperate. Your condition ... Having swiftly broken the connection to his consciousness, "he" is deaf to any further disturbance from the outside. Gasping in the shrill voice of a ten-year-old on the verge of death, distorting the melody in a multitude of ways, "he" continues to sing, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again!]]

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - pg. 98

August fifteenth, 1945, the Emperor swiftly descended to earth to announce the surrender in the voice of a mortal man. August sixteenth, his Majesty was circling upward in a swift ascent again. Though it was inevitable that he die in a bombing once, now truly he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum, would cover Japan and all her people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and himself. Who is to say that the many gods who have figured in the history of our land did not on that day require of the Emperor who had descended to speak in a mortal voice, in order that the dignity of our national essence be elevated once again, the ritual purification of death by bombing at the hands of martyrs in a plane?

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - pg. 95

His heart pumped vigorously and the pressure in his blood vessel surged until hhis eardrums sang and all he could hear on the other side of that curtain of piercing sound was the silence of all things.

To Do List

• DIFS summation plots
  

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - pg. 42

Since the mere possibility that a man having intercourse with her could experience anything but undiluted sweetness terrified the actress as if she had seen a portent of the end of her career, they had finally separated.

Fragment #113

There's nothing now
We can't expect to happen!
Anything at all, you can bet,
Is ready to jump out at us.
No need to wonder over it.
Father Zeus has turned
Noon to night, blotting out
The sunshine utterly,
Putting cold terror
At the back of the throat.
Let's believe all we hear.
Even that dolphins and cows
Change place, porpoises and goats,
Rams booming along in the offing,
Mackerel nibbling in the hill pastures.
I wouldn't be surprised,
I wouldn't be surprised.

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away - pg. 13

At the end of the tape which the acting executor of the will would play when he had entered a coma he wanted to record the following words to his mother, who would be coming alone from the house in the valley: Please make sure you stay to observe my body decomposing; if possible I would like you to observe even my putrefied and swollen insides burst my stomach and bubble out as gas and muddy liquid. But it was not easy to deliver such lines without disagreeable masochistic overtones; besides, if the state of his stomach should oblige him to belch just as he began to record and his voice should falter or tremble, he could imagine carrying his chagrin with him right into the world of the dead, so he merely assembled these sentences in his silent head.

Fragment #72

Soul, soul,
Torn by perplexity,
On your feet now!
Throw forward your chest
To the enemy;
Keep close in the attack;
Move back not an inch.
But never crow in victory,
Nor mope hang-dog in loss.
Overdo neither sorrow nor joy:
A measured motion governs man.

Fragment #62

The highly polished minds
Of accomplished frauds.

Fragment #50

Watch, Glaukos, Watch!
Heavy and light buckles the sea.
A cloud tall and straight
Has gathered on the Gyrean mountain-tops,
Forewarning of thunder, lightning, wind.
What we don't expect comes fearfully.
War, Glaukos, war.

Fragment 26

Attribute all to the gods.
They pick a man up,
Stretched on the black loam,
And set him on his two feet,
Firm, and then again
Shake solid men until
They fall backward
Into the worst of luck,
Wandering hungry,
Wild of mind.

Correction - Closing

We're always set toward that predetermined moment, "predetermined moment" underlined. When that moment has come, we don't know that it has come, but it is the right moment. We can exist at the highest degree of intensity as long as we live, so Roithamer (June 7). The end is no process. Clearing.

Correction - 232

We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they're actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it's a matter of human nature, that it's very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years or for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look, so Roithamer. People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people, so Roithamer, enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this, so Roithamer, why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of that bargaian, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be? that this highly intelligent, extraordinary, exceptional man could attract and marry this utterly common and ordinary, even thoroughly vulgar person and could even go on to make children with this person, it's nature, we say, it's always nature, every time, that nature which remains incomprehensible to us and unknowable as long as we live, that nature in which everything is rational and yet reason has nothing whatever to do with it, so Roithamer.

...locus...

Heart, Heart, if you're beset by invincible
griefs, rise!, withstand contrary-wise
offering up your chest, and against the tricks
of the enemy steel yourself firmly. And should you come out
victorious, dissemble, heart, don't boast,
nor, defeated, should you debase yourself crying
at home. Don't let them matter too much
your joy in success, your sorrow in failure.
Understand that in life alternation rules.