57 books
—
3 voters
Mitch Wiley
https://letterboxd.com/mitchwiley/
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
― The Weight of Glory
― The Weight of Glory
“Ambergris"
This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Proclaims itself the very whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase.
Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.
Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The sould to rise upon its fleshly wing.
If gentle heart be scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bather every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemied will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)”
― The Collected Poems
This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Proclaims itself the very whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase.
Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.
Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The sould to rise upon its fleshly wing.
If gentle heart be scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bather every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemied will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)”
― The Collected Poems
“Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…
I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…
That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.
Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.”
―
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…
I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…
That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.
Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.”
―
“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
― Gilead
― Gilead
“I think that if we examine our lives, we will find that most good has come to us from the few loyalties, and a few discoveries made many generations before we were born, which must always be made anew.
These too may sometimes appear to come by chance, but in the infinite web of things and events chance must be something different from what we think it to be. To comprehend that is not given to us, and to think of it is to recognize a mystery, and to acknowledge the necessity of faith.
As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most ware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath ....”
― An Autobiography
These too may sometimes appear to come by chance, but in the infinite web of things and events chance must be something different from what we think it to be. To comprehend that is not given to us, and to think of it is to recognize a mystery, and to acknowledge the necessity of faith.
As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most ware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath ....”
― An Autobiography
Mitch’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mitch’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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