Raul > Recent Status Updates

"I felt emptied-out and peaceful - like when you've had a toothache and it stops for a bit, and you know quite well it's going to start again but just for a bit it's stopped."

It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else, to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.

"History is messy for the people who must live it."

The eighteenth century followed the same path with a touch of perversity: the more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man. Viewed from outside the West, with its extraordinary increase in both philosophical musings and concrete attention to colonial practice, the century of the Enlightenment was also a century of confusion

“The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.’”

"When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse."

"Archives assemble. Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. Archives set up both the substantive and formal elements of the narrative."

"Between killing and dying there is a third alternative: living."

"Why do I go on living if not to learn the things one learns before death?"

"The classification of all non-Westerners as fundamentally non-historical is tied also to the assumption that history requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity. Yet Ibn Khaldhún fruitfully applied a cyclical view of time to the study of history."

"History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

"The suffering was simply too great to take in: ‘It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupefied by seeing the pain.....Boccaccio noted that people in Florence stopped weeping at funerals and started cracking jokes instead – a phenomenon he seems to have regarded unsympathetically, although it is a common enough form of emotional self-defence."

"Not all contemporaries shared Gasquet’s views in detail, but there was widespread agreement that the plague had wrought a cataclysmic change, not only in society but within the individual. All the old certainties of the ‘high’ middle ages had been swept away: the feudal system collapsed; respect for social hierarchy and order was undermined; and the intellectual authorities of the past ceased to be believed."

"The truth is nothing like as simple or as straight-forward a thing as Lymie believed it to be. It masquerades in inversions and paradoxes, is easier to get at in a lie than in an honest statement. If pursued, the truth withdraws, puts on one false face after another, and finally goes underground, where it can only be got at in the complex, agonizing absurdity of dreams."

"For many contemporaries the plague fitted easily into the chronology of the Last Days. Its horrors – along with the earthquakes and wars which had preceded it – were identified with the devastation which would follow the unleashing of Gog and Magog. William Dene of Rochester made the connection explicitly, and it is implicit in the biblical phrases used by other writers in their descriptions of the plague."

"Fundamentally, life was so arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank."

"To know the world's injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at fifteen did not have."

"Be careful with your life
even when risk seems minimal.
Be careful with your trust
even when love is being claimed.
Be careful to speak exactly what you mean,
lucidness is the first step in becoming.
Honor your every loyalty,
the first being to yourself."

You wanna sleep on my chest?
You wanna listen to my heart beat
all through the night?
It’s the only jazz station
with a twenty-four-hour signal
if you wanna listen.
If you know what I mean.

"Oh Time, the past still present,
pregnant with all about to come,
you walk with me on the cold path,
weaver of the threads of hope and impatience!"

"If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it’s OK:
gold is chosen for coins."

"Words are what one lives for, the things that one really breathes. "

"And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the edge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed..."