danny

“One can see in the description of the earnest game of Ernst, the eldest grandson of grandfather Freud, not a theoretical argument that would allow one to conclude that there is a repetition compulsion or a death drive or a limit to the pleasure principle—you know that he does not do this—but an auto-biography of Freud, not simply an auto-biography of Freud writing his life but living description of his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, especially in Beyond, the fascination this story of the spool holds for readers stemming perhaps less from its demonstrative value than from its value as a repetition en abyme of what Freud does in Beyond, this value of a repetition en abyme of Freud's writing, having itself a relation of structural mimesis with the relation between the pleasure principle and the death drive, this latter not being opposed to the former but hollowing it out, en abyme, orignarily, at the origin of the origin.”
― Jacques Derrida

“What struck me on the beach–and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow–was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to say to Mamma: “Go along with the child.” Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.”
― Ben Lerner