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256 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2006
Every sentence is a kiss.
Yes, that’s it: I searched and searched for them through the tenement inside my head and presto – they suddenly rejoin the conversation.
All the voices of history.
All the voices of history speaking to me.
Prince Bismarck being a good student – never a prodigy, mind you, never a sensation, but a solid worker nonetheless.
Every sentence is a kiss and every paragraph an embrace.
You should have been composing with wind because every writer in your country has become a journalist and for them words are panes of glass through which to see how cows move in unison when you clap your hands and in the next breath it will come to you writing isn’t expansion but compression a texturing into fragment saying in seven sentences what everyone else says in a book saying in seven sentences what everyone else doesn’t say in a book employing the figure of aphorism because you do not want to be read but learned by heart and this is how you will construct a particle philosophy for a particulate world bringing together what is shard and riddle and chance engineering with your flesh and from that day forward this will be what you will mean when you say the word tongue.
"For the last fifty years or so, The Novel’s demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can’t in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language—especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end?"
"Temple, basilica, duomo."
"Brick or rock or rough wood."
"This bath, that catacombs, and the other arch."
"The grassy fragrance. The gauzy air. The fertile afternoon."
"Friedrich stalls. The wall is there. The wall is not there."
"My mother reading. The story unfolding. My imagination hurrying forward."
"We have been here before. We will be here again. The galaxy comes to a standstill around us."
"These things happen. To everyone. Incessantly."
"First, why do I live? Second, what lesson have I to learn from life? And, third, why do I suffer from being what I am?"
"Every sentence is a kiss and every paragraph an embrace."
"For most philosophers, philosophy is nothing in the end besides a longing to reach home."
"I can no longer seem to remember whether I'm remembering or believing I'm remembering when I'm not remembering at all..."
"Assuming what I am experiencing is called memory, and not something else. Not, say, the nature of a wish."
"He is groping through the attic...this infinite attic...What good is an attic if there is nothing in it?...This unlit space seems to unravel without cessation."
"He is in actuality dreaming within a larger dream within a larger dream, like a succession of Russian nesting dolls..."
"Somewhere in a succession of dreams, Friedrich hears them. Then hears them less. Then hears nothing at all."
"Would Friedrich behave himself? Friedrich would. Friedrich did."
"Friedrich became aware of himself becoming aware again. Language resettled his head syllable by syllable."
"Language is a flirt."
"The idea that his head is inside the head of another person, and that that head is in turn inside still other heads: everyone is someone else and no one is himself..."
"He can't stop believing how plentiful the universe is, how thrillingly hectic with potential..."
"It is as if his soul were gazing beyond the limits of infinity, endlessly distant from human affairs...What we are witnessing is the inception of a new evolutionary stage in understanding...a resurrection of consciousness."
"Did he actually kiss her, or almost actually kiss her, or only look as if he might actually kiss her, but knew she would never go along with such a silly wish?"
"And so, once upon a time, you tell yourself, passing this passing, once upon a time there was a kiss."
"Love yourself, Fritz, you've got to love yourself like mad, do you hear me?"
"Drifting...They are drifting...He is kissing the future..."