Raul > Recent Status Updates

Impossible Things

There is one joy alone, but one that’s blessed,
one consolation only in this pain.
How many thronging vulgar days were missed
because of this ending; how much ennui.


A poet has said: “The loveliest
music is the one that cannot be played.”
And I, I daresay that by far the best
life is the one that cannot be lived.

The Windows

In these shadowed rooms, in which I pass
gloomy days, up and down I pace
that I might find the windows.—For a window
to be open would be a consolation.—
But there are no windows, or I can’t
find them. And perhaps it’s best I don’t.
Perhaps the light will be a new oppression.
Who knows what new things it will show.

Those two last lines. Goodness.

In The Same Space

House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.

I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.

And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.

The apparition of my body in its youth
came and also brought me cause for pain:
deaths in the family; separations;
the feelings of my loved ones, the feelings of
those long dead which I so little valued.
Half past twelve. How the time has passed.
Half past twelve. How the years have passed.

"Don't you see, Maisie, if someone loves you he loves you for everything you have been."

"She thought: and it was a moment of illumination, a flash of light: I don’t know anything about anything yet. I must try and keep myself free and open, and try to think more, try not to drift into things."

Monotony

On one monotone day one more
monotone, indistinct day follows. The same
things will happen, then again recur—
identical moments find us, then go their way.


One month passes bringing one month more.
What comes next is easy enough to know:
the boredom from the day before.
And tomorrow’s got to where it seems like no
tomorrow.

O you blessed, whole ones, you
who seem to be the beginning of hearts.
Bows for arrows, targets for darts,
more everlasting your smile shines through the tears.

Don't fear to suffer pain;
give the heaviness back to earth's weight again;
heavy are mountains, heavy the seas.

"Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds."

"...I knew what she must have gone through, seeing her past go swiftly by in front of her. What an awful thing that is, as if the ground on which you are standing is being slowly pulled out from under your feet and beneath is nothing, a hole through which you fall forever."

"...I knew what she must have gone through, seeing her past go swiftly by in front of her. What an awful thing that is, as if the ground on which you are standing is being slowly pulled out from under your feet and beneath is nothing, a hole through which you fall forever."

For we know: only love
and the hand of a friend
can lift us high

For we know: only love
and the hand of a friend
can lift us high

"My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."

“Many people prefer not to be enlightened. The world terrifies them and yet their very refusal to be enlightened terrifies them more. They are vaguely aware that ‘all is not right in the state of Denmark’, they are constantly tugged this way and shattered by this so they flee to God to protect them from their fears.”

"As for Martha, it had occurred to her that this compulsive process of analysis and comparison was nothing but an excuse for doing nothing."

"Like us, our children will reckon with the small and large shocks that overturn what today seems to them stable and conclusive. And, like us, they will learn to their cost that nothing, for good and for ill, is given to us forever, and that our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again."

"Never mind," he repeated. "Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there is good and bad yet to come, there is everything yet to come..."

"Books. Words. There must surely be some patterns of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt–isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside."

"There was nothing more paradoxical about her situation than that, while she insisted on being unique, individual, and altogether apart from any other person, she could be comforted in such matters only by remarks like 'Everybody feels this" or "It is natural to feel that."

"And dismal thoughts prevented him from enjoying himself, and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it..."

"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."