Status Updates From Águalisa

"The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty. What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Like the dogs, names, down there, starving."

"Perhaps Anna will come today. A train arrives at half past three. Once she telephoned from somewhere in the north. I had not seen her since winter...Her answers on the telephone are notable for what phenomenologists call 'thickness.' In a voice one may hear a rocky coast...'No trains were going where you were,' she answered."

"It was blacker than olives the night I left. As I ran past the palaces, oddly joyful, it began to rain. What a notion it is, after all—these small shapes! I would get lost counting them. Who first thought of it? How did he describe it to the others? Out on the sea it is raining too. It beats on no one."

"But the poet’s task, Kafka says, is to lead the isolated human being into the infinite life, the contingent into the lawful."