Jimmy > Recent Status Updates

I wasn’t from here anymore, from the common dream, but I didn’t enter my interior dream, either. I was in limbo, where you still live in the world, but without the reality-validating mechanism, as though you were walking on ice without hearing that voice that constantly whispers: Yes, keep going, the ice is solid, everything is okay, it will hold, nothing monstrous or illogical can happen...

...there are both intelligible and unintelligible coherences, just as there are comprehensible and incomprehensible absurdities. You can understand the intelligible, and this is calm; you can understand the unintelligible, and this is power, you can not understand the intelligible, and this is terror; you can not understand the unintelligible, and this is enlightenment.

I would see the apple trees—in all their avatars, rotating through the seasons: now they were green, green to their core, green in the depths of their stems with wooden networks of vessels gurgling with green sap, green in the ever-changing hues of their leaves, and in the evanescent flesh of their fruits that dislocated with a pop at our bite, whose weight pulled the branches down toward the earth.

“I have not lived in vain, I tell myself in every moment of my life, because I didn’t become an author, because I am a lowly Romanian teacher, because I don’t have a family, or a fortune [...] It is rather because I have asked a question and not found the answer, because I have asked and was not given, I have knocked and it has not opened, I have searched and have not found. This is the failure that frightens me.”

It was toward dawn, after they had danced all night with the obstinacy and excessive enthusiasm of those who, having reached forty, the apex of the vault, the keystone of our life’s arched back, still refuse to look toward the future. They danced in the dark, they caressed each other like teenagers, not for pleasure but as a sad, dark demonstration: I still desire you, even though I know every centimeter of your ...

I came into a world where reality is rotten, with holes in its fabric big enough for your finger, and I search precisely for these rips and tears in the stories.

The old factory’s production lines, driven by long-immobile motors, had produced—and perhaps, in a quiet isolation beyond humanity, continued to produce—the fear and grief, the unhappiness and agony, the melancholy and suffering of our life on Earth, in sufficient quantities for the surrounding neighborhood.

Dreams are also real, our first memories are real, and fiction is real (so real!), yet we feel foreign to our ashen homeland, we feel hard, prickly, stubborn, unimaginative, meaningless, or unsalvageable, the cell where we were tossed after we sipped the dark waters of Lethe. The real—our legitimate homeland—ought to be a fabulous realm, but it is instead an oppressive prison.

When you are four years old, every new place is like this. You move in the field of hallucination and vision, until the trails of memory are worn into your brain. Any new sight feels like a fable, however banal it might be, because expressions such as “in reality,” “truly,” or “as it is” are meaningless to one who sees reality the way that later we relive our earliest memories or live within our dreams.

And, more than anything, Bucharest was planned as a great open-air museum, a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.

Bucharest was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles’ noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture.

The first years passed. After another forty, I'll retire from this same school. In the end, it hasn't been that bad. There were long stretches when I didn't have lice.

I have 2 new poems published today in the Brooklyn Review! Go read them here: https://www.bkreview.org/poetry/two-p...

By definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of time is antithetical to the true spirit of the flaneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to 'wed the crowd'.

and so people who lived together would enter the cinema to have the same dream together

Why isn't "Short Stories" a category in the GR Awards?

Finally seeing the new book page. Not happy about it.

Really freaking good so far...

Still further down is the village, and behind it the plain, far off and vague in the morning mist, therefore good for sending thoughts into, for the searching out of things she would like to see, because they are absent.

That tastes good, thinks a sense of well-being in his mouth. That's a kind of brown cloud in my stomach, thinks Zund. White cloud, think Zund's eyes. Breadbox breadbox wood, thinks Zund's back. I'll fly the bread around in the forest for a bit, thinks the breadbox breadbox. Strange feet are getting to know us, think the untrodden paths in the forest. Wind mild, heavenly child, think the trees ...

He asks me if the sea will leave if there is war, and when I say no, he is satisfied.

Re-reading...

She tried to master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point in three lives—not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had happened, but—in those three lives which were touching hers with the solemn neighborhood of danger and distress.

[Rosamond] knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

For religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has still pains in store.

Those words of Lydgate's were like a sad milestone marking how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone.

Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.

We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make—you didn't know what:—in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.