collected

selected from other authors or sources

Imperfect

“I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing.”

—Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), translated by Richard Zenith, 2015

The King’s maths

“What is seven times six?”

Rabbit wondered what to say. “Forty-two” was the right answer. But the King, who could do no wrong, even in arithmetic, might decide, for the purposes, that “fifty-four” was an answer more becoming to the future of the country. Was it, then, safe to say “Forty-two”?

“Your Majesty,” he said, “there are several possible answers to this extraordinarily novel conundrum. At first sight the obvious solution would appear to be ‘forty-two.’  The objection to this solution is that it lacks originality. I have long felt that a progressive country such as ours might well strike out a new line in the matter. Let us agree that in future seven sixes are fifty-four.”

The King scratched his head. “The correct answer,” he said, “is, or will be in the future, fifty-four.”

“Make a note of that,” whispered the Chancellor to the Chief Secretary.

—A. A. Milne, “Prince Rabbit,” 1924, a little altered

Nullus & other pansies

“These poems are called ‘pansies’ because they are rather ‘pensées’ than anything else… I wish these pansies to be taken as thoughts… casual thoughts that are true while they are true… I offer a bunch of pansies, not a wreath of immortelles. I don’t want everlasting flowers, and I don’t want to offer them to anybody else. A flower passes, and perhaps that is the best of it. If we can take it in its transience, its breath, its maybe mephistophelian, maybe palely ophelian face, the look it gives, the gesture of its full bloom, and the way it turns upon us to depart — that was the flower, we have had it, and no immortelle can give us anything in comparison. The same with the pansy poems; merely the breath of the moment, and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment. Only don’t nail the pansy down. You won’t keep it any better if you do.” —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies, March 1929

Man Reaches a Point—

I cannot help but be alone
for desire has died in me, silence has grown,
and nothing now reaches out to draw
other flesh to my own.

Grasshopper is a Burden—

Desire has failed, desire has failed
and the critical grasshopper
has come down on the heart in a burden of locusts
and stripped it bare.

Basta!

When a man can love no more
and feel no more
and desire has failed
and the heart is numb

then all he can do
is to say: It is so!
I’ve got to put up with it
and wait.
This is a pause, how long a pause I know not,
in my very being.

Tragedy

Tragedy seems to me a loud noise
louder than is seemly.

Tragedy looks to me like man
in love with his own defeat.
Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.

I can’t very much care about the woes and tragedies
of Lear and Macbeth and Hamlet and Timon:
they cared so excessively themselves.

And when I think of the very great tragedy of our material-mechanical civilisation
crushing out the natural human life
then sometimes I feel defeated; and then again I know
my shabby little defeat would do neither me any good
nor anybody else.

After all the Tragedies are Over—

After all the tragedies are over and worn out
and a man can no longer feel heroic about being a Hamlet—

When love is gone, and desire is dead, and tragedy has left the heart
then grief and pain go too, withdrawing
from the heart and leaving strange cold stretches of sand.

So a man no longer knows his own heart;
he might say into the twilight: What is it?
I am here, yet my heart is bare and utterly empty.
I have passed from existence, I feel nothing any more.
I am a nonentity.—

Yet, when the time has come to be nothing, how good it is to be nothing!
a waste expanse of nothing, like wide foreshores where not a ripple is left
and the sea is lost
in the lapse of the lowest of tides.

Ah, when I have seen myself left by life, left nothing!

Yet even waste, grey foreshores, sand, and sorry, far-out clay
are sea-bed still, through their hour of bare denuding.
It is the moon that turns the tides.
The beaches can do nothing about it.

Nullus

I know I am nothing.
Life has gone away, below my low-water mark.

I am aware I feel nothing, even at dawn.
The dawn comes up with a glitter and a blueness, and I say: How lovely!—
But I am a liar, I feel no loveliness, it is a mental remark, a cliché.

My whole consciousness is cliché
and I am null;
I exist as an organism
and a nullus.

But I can do nothing about it
except admit it and leave it to the moon.

There are said to be creative pauses,
pauses that are as good as death, empty and dead as death itself.
And in these awful pauses the evolutionary change takes place.
Perhaps it is so.
The tragedy is over, it has ceased to be tragic, the last pause is upon us.
Pause, brethren, pause!

—D. H. Lawrence, Pansies, 1929