Michael > Recent Status Updates

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table
There must be one which I will never read.
…..
There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that
fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

(from LIMITS)

“Without knowledge of death, we would be unable to appreciate the true value of our finest feelings, we would be unable to know that some of them are never to be repeated and that we can only understand them in all their richness at the moment they occur. Until that point we aren’t destined to do so, and afterwards it’s too late.”

“The most natural thing to do would have been for me to say to her: ‘My dear, you aren’t mistaken in thinking that this conversation bears no relation at all to what I’m feeling now, or to what you, too, are probably feeling. And you know the words I should be saying right now just as well as I do.’”

“Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed. Ever since the moment it happened, I cannot remember one day passing when I haven’t regretted it.”

I was carried to this ruinous hour
by the intricate labyrinth of steps
woven by my days from a day that goes
back to my birth. At last I’ve discovered
the mysterious key to all my years,
the fate of Francisco de Laprida,
the missing letter, the perfect pattern
that was known to God from the beginning.
In this night’s mirror I can comprehend
my unsuspected true face. The circle’s
about to close…

Events in the Osamu Saga do not explain ‘why’ something happened and what its effects were (which, Dazai felt, is what autobiography does), but only shows ‘that’ things happen. Relieved of their explanatory burden, events allow Dazai to create a story, they do not force him into what he felt to be the restrictions of an essay. The stuff of autobiography is unique and limited; … fiction is inexhaustible.

“But one still wants to imagine. Literature is the desire to dwell inside the mind of another person, like an intruder in a house, to see the world through someone else’s eyes, from the interior of those windows where no one ever seems to peek out.”

Under the spell of the refreshing darkness
and intimidated by the threat of dawn,
I felt again that tremendous conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares the world
an activity of the mind,
a dream of souls,
without foundation or purpose or volume.

(from DAYBREAK)

“A rather sickly disciple of Borges, I had loved in excess, like he says, the sunsets, the slums and misery. Now I was learning to love the mornings, the downtown and serenity.”

I was discovering a capacity I had rarely exercised in my life: the ability to radically change my circumstances and immerse myself in the unexpected; to forget what I had left behind; to lose myself, like in a jungle in the things that really interested me, a novel, a film, a song, an emotion; to disappear entirely, without a trace, not even a thread that could guide me back, no remorse, no nostalgia, no memory.

“He took his time. He enjoyed driving while drinking a cold beer and listening to country music. He liked the somgs of Johnny Cash most of all. Sunglasses, shirt open at the chest, elbow resting on the open window, the moist ocean breeze blowing on his face—he saw himself as if from outside, in disbelief and admiration, like watching a movie or reading a novel where he was the protagonist…”

“One goes into a movie theater to cease to exist. It is because of that, not the size or quality of the image, that something crucial is lost when a film is experienced on a television set, in the domestic light of one’s home, in the calcareous shell of one’s identity. If there are other people in the theater, your shadow becomes one with all the others, it dissolves in a collective stare.”

“My stories are, in a sense, outside of me. I dream them, shape them, and set them down; after that, once sent out into the world, they belong to others. All that is personal to me, all that my friends good-naturedly tolerate in me — my likes and dislikes, my hobbies, my habits — are to be found in my verse. In the long run, perhaps, I shall or fall by my poems.”

“Literature and film fed a solitude without introspection, like an adolescence. I only paid attention to myself and even so I could not see who I really was. Once, in an argument with my girlfriend, or maybe she was already my wife at that point, she said: ‘All that sensibility for characters in books and films, yet you’re completely oblivious to those who are actually here with you.’”

“The world is a moving maze of signs, electric shocks, sound waves, brief flashes of light in the dark. The brain re-creates it entirely in its hermetic box, locked within its vault of bone. He believed that it was possible to guide from a distance the steps and actions of someone who has been hypnotized, order them to murder, plant a bomb, or rob a bank.”

“Humanity’s journey toward easier, safer, and more abundant life for all has been progressing for years, decades, centuries, and millenia. We truly have trouble imagining what life was like even a century ago, let alone before that. Our accelerating progress, with substantial gains over the past few decades and profound evolution over the next few decades, will catapult us forward in this positive direction…”

“Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut-off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust.”

“Nights were always too quiet at Harriet’s house. The clocks ticked too loud; beyond the low corona of light from the table lamps, the rooms grew gloomy and cavernous, and the high ceilings receded into what seemed endless shadow. In autumn and winter, when the sun went down at five, it was worse; but being up and having no one but Allison for company was in some ways worse than being alone.”

“Yet sometimes — at home, mostly — Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation. The roses were the wrong color: red not white. The clothesline wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but where it was before the storm blew it down five years ago. The switch of a lamp ever so slightly different, or in the wrong place.”

“In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling. To the number of such characters belongs the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who once played out a terrible drama, after which our gentlefolk, in someone’s lucky phrase, started calling her ‘the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’.”