-
ProsePorn: Words that get you excited. By - @reddit2telegram
The Cipher by Kathe Koja
It wasn't hard to find, either, just where you'd expect: under her bed, plastic box of bullets beside. A neat bedroom, tidy little piles of paperbacks and sweaters, above her bed a shitty-looking plaque, obviously handmade, its burned-in sentiment peculiarly appropriate to my mood and mission: "When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade." Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap. Or more succinctly, life had given me a Funhole, and I was making a grave.
It took me a few minutes to figure out how to load it, I'd never loaded a gun in my life. Few more minutes to position myself at the end of her bed. Eyes open, or closed? Death's etiquette. Let's try not to screw this one up, shall we? And I felt not even happy or good but at least not bad and that was surely more than enough and certainly much better than I deserved.
Open your mouth, I said to myself.
The tip of the barrel lay on my tongue, holy metal. The light in the room was exceptionally bright, even on my closed lids. Maybe, I thought, this is what people say car wrecks are like, even to swallow seemed to take forever. My mouth was full of saliva, my heart all at once beating fast and light.
I remember thinking, Why, I've made a choice. I don't want to be part of this anymore, and I'm, I'm opting out. Imagine. An actual decision, and I was very much enjoying my novel sense of resolve and picturing, in a self-indulgent way, the manner in which the bullet would come flying up the barrel, when something new came to me: shame.
Not disgust. I was intimate with that. Not self-hate either because I was, if not done with it, then so possessed by it that I could no longer feel it, as a perfect swimmer no longer consciously feels the sea as an element apart. But: instead a profound and simple shame, a sensation as immediate and irresistible as pain or heat. In my big, my unique moment of decision I was behaving as heedlessly, as stupidly, as typically as ever, because by this action I would bring trouble on Nora, big trouble, on a person who had actually tried to help me, who had given me what I asked for.
Typical.
I lowered the gun.
That's just like you, you cheap piece of shit.
But not the shame.
And not the action prompted by the shame, either.
I put the gun away. I went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, the cereal and yesterday's dried orange rinds and slightly smelly coffeemaker, thinking all the while. Another novelty. Not running from the bad feeling, not avoiding this new shame. Feeling it, as deeply as I felt the fresh pain in my hand, the victorious ache. In the glare of the shame I saw that if I must be myself, if there was no changing the aimless scramble that was me, if I must be in the end a victim, then: yes.
But not this way. Not at another's expense, or at least not an innocent other. Because that was mutable.
https://redd.it/1c21g9j
@r_proseporn
V. - Thomas Pynchon
It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the worst time of the year. Time for rumbles in the park and a lot of kids getting killed; time for tempers to get frayed, marriages to break up, all homicidal and chaotic impulses, frozen inside for the winter, to thaw now and come to the surface, and glitter out the pores of your face.
https://redd.it/1by1epz
@r_proseporn
Gotta Love David Mitchell - Number9Dream opening.
A galaxy of cream unribbons in my coffee cup, and the background chatter pulls into focus. My very first morning in Tokyo, and already I am getting ahead of myself. Jupiter Cafe sloshes with lunch-hour laughter, Friday plottings, clinking saucers. Drones bark into cell phones, she-drones hitch up sagging voices to sound more feminine. Steam bears coffee, seafood rolls, detergent. I have a fine across-the-street view of PanOpticon’s main entrance. Quite a sight, this zirconium gothic skyscraper. Its upper floors are hidden by cloud, and so is the real Akikio Kato. City weather is a mystery. Under its tight lid Tokyo swelters at 34 C in 86 percent humidity--a big Panasonic display says so. Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head–dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. Reflected airplanes climb over mirrored buildings. I always thought Kagoshima was huge, but you could lose it down a single side alley in Shinjuku. I light a cigarette–I am smoking Kools today, the brand chosen by a biker with hair dyed blackcurrant in the line ahead of me–and watching the traffic and passersby on the intersection between Omekaido Avenue and Kita Street. City office drones, lip-pierced hairdressers, midday drunks. Nobody is standing still. Rivers, snowstorms, traffic, bytes, generations, a thousand faces per minute. Back on Yakushima you might get a thousand minutes per face. Crowds make me thoughtful. All these people have boxes of memories labeled “Father,” “Dad,” “Pa.” Whatever. Photogenic pix, shots in poor light, scary figures, tender poses, fuzzy angles, scratched negatives–it makes no difference. Unlike me, they know who it was who ushered them into the world. Crowds make me too thoughtful.
https://redd.it/1bwsqxd
@r_proseporn
The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
The story is full of some great work, but I’m deciding to share the opening lines from the story.
My first Conrad; I’ll be venturing into Heart of Darkness tomorrow.
Pieces of the first paragraph:
“On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon.”
https://redd.it/1bs4c8p
@r_proseporn
My Struggle: Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
At the intersection by the top of the gentle incline the traffic lights began to tick. Soon after, the street below was free of cars. Two middle-aged women came out of the entrance below me and lit up. Wearing white hospital coats, they squeezed their arms against their sides and took small, stabbing steps to keep warm. To me they looked like some strange kind of duck. Then the ticking stopped, and the next moment cars shot out of the hilltop shadow like a pack of baying hounds into the sunlit street below. The studded tires lashed the pavement. I put the mobile back in my pocket, wrapped my hands around the cup. The steam from the coffee rose slowly and mingled with the breath from my mouth. On the school playground that lay squashed between two blocks of flats twenty meters up from my office the shouts of children suddenly fell quiet, it was only now that I noticed. The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?
This was the question I asked myself, sitting in a suburb of Stockholm drinking coffee, my muscles contracting with the cold and the cigarette smoke dissolving into the vast mass of air above me.
(Translated by Don Bartlett)
https://redd.it/1br6n8u
@r_proseporn
Sula - Toni Morrison
There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it wasn’t a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills—collecting rent or insurance payments—he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of “messing around” to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve. He’d have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew’s and let the tenor’s voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain.
https://redd.it/1bqu0pm
@r_proseporn
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
First thing's first. Let's bone up on history. If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed? Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. Somewhere we let go of the hot gorilla's paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore's teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few lifetimes. Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels. It was a nice new idea and we were afraid we'd lose it, so we put it on paper and built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in and out of these buildings chewing it over, that one new sweet blade of grass, trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different. I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gave over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness. So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.
https://redd.it/1boamn1
@r_proseporn
the will to power - nietzsche
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
https://redd.it/1bo6s3b
@r_proseporn
the question concerning technology - heidegger
then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself.
https://redd.it/1bngfwy
@r_proseporn
Christine -Stephen King
Engines. That's something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to all of them and you start them up and you don't know what the fuck they are or what they're supposed to do. There are clues, but that's all. The drug thing is like that, and the booze thing, and the sex thing, and sometimes other stuff too--a summer job that generates a new interest, a trip, a course in school. Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that's really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside.
Engines.
https://redd.it/1bma66r
@r_proseporn
As I Lay Dying-William Faulkner
Jewel and Vernon are in the river again. From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface. It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion, and seeing and hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in itself quiet with stagnation. Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.
https://redd.it/1blean3
@r_proseporn
There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden -- Leon Forrest
Curled, Lord, then rising and falling in a dark, river-deep tunnel. Down down down through up and under a well of raining stars. . . . Searching back back back for mother and the light that precedes the sun’s birth, past the rosary chain of crossed stars to the accusing beginning.
And the night sucking my soul upwards out of itself. Out and UP like a veil swooped violently away from itself; covering the well-deep cup. Fitful, rootless, mouth frothy, Lord, taking wing into a world where all light is fractured into snow-blazed hypodermic needles. I am comfortless and alone. Robed in a floating tunic with strange, coffin-shaped wings, my bare feet bloody, my sides bleeding, my eardrums split, my ankles bruised, my hands splayed, my back lacerated, I feel the wing feathers trembling. . . . Out here and over there, Lord, on Your word alone, without shoes: homeless, motherless, rootless and crownless. . . . (My hand desperately hurrying downwards now to grasp and feel away atm my loins, pulling away at my tunic). . . . Thankful to be alive. . . . Or am I?
And atop each star, milk-white angels dance—yet some are kneeling and praying with tears in their dreaming eyes like waves gushing through lily-white sands. And behind them those angels—black skeletons tossed and driven, clacking together, as if they had been hatcheted down from the uppermost tops of the most massive trees in Eden, then caught and divided into black dancing limbs and branches. . . .
I know that the first lessons, memories, historical in-the-beginnings can quake the most luminous power. Glory-bent and drum-driven, I am on my way. The black angels shift inside of the balloon-jawed rhythms as if a streak of lightning had shot up and through them and made their heads, shoulders, hips, fingers and feet move with a supple, switchblade swiftness. And they oblivious of its genesis. . . . Were they drum-driven too . . . ?
My arms aching like apple-tree ladder ascending (seeing now through my frozen tears) and aching from my wings to my fingertips, full of the stuffings of patches. . . . The wings, lamblike on the outside but yellowed like an ancient scroll, greasy, black and purplish blue, like bruised blood, tough and wolfish underneath. . . .
Ascending now towards the cathedral spire of chained but falling stars, that were pealing and sobbing some song (a valley of cross-eyed rosary beads laced about the dazzling wine cups)—yes, and inside their sobbing did I hear heartthrob drums talking about troubles and sorrows, Lord God. . . ?
And to the west, a faint, somber, Sabbath tolling away and then a train’s whistle crying down a long-ago-gone switchblade track (like that streaking scar on old man Dickson’s face). . . .Afloat like a tambourine hurled up into the raven-made night, like a boat that swims the waters of Jordan. . . . But I was not swimming, I was flying, even though I could taste a salty substance in my mouth. . . . And thinking: Lord, Lord, LORD? Am I going home to see my mother . . . ?
After the trembling rains-from-faraway had somehow found slumber, and the eagle-proud sun spangled like a fallen star, surging from the handless house of the dead, where it had been imprisoned in a sepulcher bedecked by enchaining, flower-bilious cottonseeds; under ghost-pale clouds, riding a carefully thought out house-drawn route of memphis raven snow’s funeral parlor, a route carved through the funk-crackling, wolf-howling streets (the same route of the horse-drawn peddler wagon) and leading like a chariot and livid like the last stages of a noon nightmare.
Slowly slowly slowly hoofing and picking its easy-assed way down and through the muddy waters, coming on across bottom street and then suddenly hooking and swinging right on down good old hungover douglass—so that you knew you were back home for sure all right (no matter the resonance and the abundance of your grief) . . . and douglass hungover and sunken with cracks deep like the very cavities in uncle dupont’s bad wisdom teeth and dark when you
Thomas the Obscure -- Maurice Blanchot (trans. Robert Lamberton)
On his knees, his back bent, Thomas was digging in the earth. Around him extended several ditches on the edges of which the day was packed down. For the seventh time, leaving the mark of his hands in the soil, he was slowly preparing a great hole, which he was enlarging to his size. And while he was sidding it, the hole, as if it had been filled by dozens of hands, then by arms and finally by the whole body, offered a resistance to his work which soon became insurmountable. The tomb was full of a being whose absence it absorbed. An immovable corpse was lodged there, finding in this absence of shape the perfect shape of its presence. It was a drama the horror of which was felt by the village folk in their sleep. As soon as the grave was finished, when Thomas threw himself into it with a huge stone tied around his neck, he crashed into a body a thousand times harder than the soil, the very body of the gravedigger who had already entered the grave to dig it. This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body. There was, then, henceforth, in all the sepulchers where he might have been able to take his place, in all the feelings which are also tombs for the dead, in this annihilation through which he was dying without permitting himself to be thought dead, there was another dead person who was there first, and who, identical with himself, drove the ambiguity of Thomas’s life and death to the extreme limit. In this subterranean night unto which he had descended with cats and the dreams of cats, a double wrapped in bands, its senses sealed with the seven seals, its spirit absent, occupied his place, and this double was the unique one with which no compromise was possible, since it was the same as himself, realized in the absolute void. He leaned over this glacial tomb. Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave, even so Thomas felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death. Neither his body, which left in the depths of himself that coldness which comes from contact with a corpse and which is not coldness but absence of contact, nor the darkness, which seeped from all his pores and even when he was visible made it impossible to use any sense, intuition or thought to see him, nor the fact that by no right could he pass for living, sufficed to make him pass for dead. And it was not a misunderstanding. He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death. In death itself, he was deprived of death, a horribly destroyed man, stopped in the midst of nothingness by his own image, by this Thomas running before him, bearer of extinguished torches, who was like the existence of the very last death. Already, as he still leaned over this void where he saw his image in the total absence of images, seized by the most violent vertigo possible, a vertigo which did not make him fall but prevented him from falling and rendered impossible the fall it rendered inevitable, already the earth was shrinking around him and night, a night which no longer responded to anything, which he did not see and whose reality he sensed only because it was less real than himself, surrounded him. In every way, he was invaded by the feeling of being at the heart of things. Even on the surface of this earth which he could not penetrate, he was within this earth, whose insides touched him on all sides. On all sides, night closed him in. He saw, he heard the core of an infinity where he was bound by the very absence of limits. He felt as an oppressive existence the nonexistence of this valley of death. Little by
The Runaway Soul -- Harold Brodsky
Then it weakens in the democratic rush of fragments, portions of the soul and body in pre-orgasm, a flash of more than private value. I resist. I stiffen. One tries to preserve the walls—the old sense of things. She does that, too. I grow giddily cold. And burned at the edges high in some stratosphere. Ora did not follow me here. And when she breathed, it intruded. It distracted me. Me, in my self-change; she offered herself, as a tail for me in my self-change in the amphibious moment—a dawn thing, dawn transportation . . . absurdly immense and unreal, artificial, inner light is a pivoting within a peculiar cowardice: one is on top—is up there—but one is upended, bleeding light—one is bleeding with light—heartlessly. The second silence is very large—is full of dismissal—I am very young. The slide and glop of Ora’s companionship—her presence—and a potency of sexual-hallucinatory-neural-quicksilver-milk, milky stuff at the end of the world in an informative spasm. Alliance, complicity. Patience with the airy space of moonish-mindlight: one has no need of gender now. The mid-body, which is literally full of shit and which has its courage and its odor—now a bright, awful stench—sweatily convulses with physical emanations of the odd, inner, tremendous, and shuddering and sailing-off, or shattering light, in what I suppose is the pagan caliber of the moment. Love such as it was with us . . . “Ora, tighten on me . . .” She didn’t though. Perhaps I didn’t speak it out loud. Unmoored. Unrooted. The orphan at genesis feels breath, silence, the turnings inward coerced by the welling spasm, the weird foreshivers of the crotch-wing; the not-quite-pigeon-body prick throbs. Then the repetitive flight and explosion, marvelously hot, shapeless, ungrasping, the dismasted weird uncurtaining in terms of light and heated quicksilver milk as an explanation of the beginning of the world. “Go ahead,” she whispers as in the fuck before this one. The sexual event brought me here. An orbital and veering solar light, a partly emptied, largely unemptied solar expenditure in lunar light among linked shadows forming signs in spasms of linked, extraordinarily piercing, piercingly wonderful comprehensibilities—not comprehensible in language. See, I told you, the wicked self whispers. See what is here? Everyone knows about this. But differently. Knows differently. My heart’s rhythm was like a goose cackle, a rhythmic thing, in the labor of the second spasm among the scary whirr of nerves and the contractions and puckers of muscle and electric and chemical horse-whinnies inside oneself, oddly—more or less laughably here—then the phallic shovel unearths quicksilver and throws it in some sort of lateral and downward and yet upward and prayerful fountainingness, and well, the flesh is drenched in it jerks squirtingly into phosphorescence, neurally aflame, indescribably present—the clench and pound and the being pried open for the hemorrhage of light, the eerily delighted fatality of the spurting. Spurting hot quicksilver light irreversibly. I am young. I am with her. On her. In her. It is not a symbol, this giddy-gaudy, good, goody-goody American stuff. The truce between good-looking murderers. This sweat on the cheeks of my face . . . and on the buttocks . . . I AM NOT DEAD IN THIS LIGHT . . . It isn’t her flesh that I do this for, but it is with its help that I do it. The third spasm, rockingly silver, pumps and swings and back and forth, tearingly existent in me . . . Hi . . . Ah . . . Ora said once (upon a time), What can you do to me, Wiley? I’m not a virgin, I’m an unhappy young woman . . . Let’s live together . . . So we did. In the real world as opposed to the drawn world in a story, assuming I could write one, I cannot ask her anything really truthful about this stuff, since she does not know these inmost terms. She said in her flesh, I am used to cold guys . . . male selfishness at orgasm. This weight of lunacy . . . The fourth spasms weak. It is accompanied by slyness—an impudent daring—
Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria from the year 1792 to 1798 - W. G. Browne
The transit from the coasts of Britain to those of Egypt was marked by nothing that can interest or amuse, unless it be the contrast between the phenomena of winter on the former, with those which strike the view on approaching the latter. A sea voyage is always tedious, except to the merchant and the mariner; and therefore, though our’s was attended with every favourable circumstance, and occupied no more than twenty-six days, there is scarcely any thing relative to it that can afford entertainment in the recital. I arrived in Egypt on the 10th of January 1792.
Alexandria now exhibits very few marks, by which it could be recognized as one of the principal monuments of the magnificence of the conqueror of Asia, the emporium of the east, and the chosen theatre of the far-sought luxuries of the Roman Triumvir, and the Egyptian queen. Its decay doubtless has been gradual; but fifteen centuries, during which it has been progressive, have evinced its antient opulence by the slowness of its fall.
https://redd.it/1bj65q0
@r_proseporn
V. - Thomas Pynchon
Only the brave escape. Come Sunday nights, with golfing done, the Negro maids, having rectified the disorder of last night's party, off to visit with relatives in Lawrence, and Ed Sullivan still hours away, the blood of this kingdom exit from their enormous homes, enter their automobiles and proceed to the business districts. There to divert themselves among seemingly endless vistas of butterfly shrimp and egg foo yung; Orientals bow, and smile, and flutter through summer's twilight, and in their voices are the birds of summer. And with night's fall comes a brief promenade in the street: the torso of the father solid and sure in its J. Press suit; the eyes of the daughters secret behind sunglasses rimmed in rhinestones. And as the jaguar has given its name to the mother's car, so has it given its skin-pattern to the slacks which compass her sleek hips. Who could escape? Who could want to?
https://redd.it/1by754c
@r_proseporn
2666 - Roberto Bolaño
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
https://redd.it/1bxh49s
@r_proseporn
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
(When young Marcel first meets his favorite author, the fictional Bergotte, whom he’d always pictured in a certain way.)
“The name Bergotte made me jump like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, for appearance’s sake, I bowed; there, straight in front of me, as by one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon has just fluttered, my salute was returned by a young common little thick-set peering person, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a black tuft on his chin. I was cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had constructed, like a temple, expressly for itself, but for which no room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood-vessels, bones, muscles, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black beard who stood before me. All the Bergotte whom I had slowly and delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop, like a stalactite, out of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased (I could see at once) to be of any use, the moment I was obliged to include in him the snail-shell nose and to utilise the little black beard, just as we must reject as worthless the solution of a problem the terms of which we have not read in full, having failed to observe that the total must amount to a specified figure.”
https://redd.it/1bwn93y
@r_proseporn
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own reflection I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty. I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds but I - I shall be dumb, from spite.
https://redd.it/1bs1jn3
@r_proseporn
the blind owl by Sadegh Hedayat
"I retired as deep as I could into the depths of my own being like an animal that hides itself in a cave in the wintertime. I heard other people’s voices with my ears; my own I heard in my throat. The solitude that surrounded me was like the deep, dense night of eternity, that night of dense, clinging, contagious darkness which awaits the moment when it will descend upon silent cities full of dreams of lust and rancour. From the viewpoint of this throat with which I had identified myself I was nothing more than an insane abstract mathematical demonstration. The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death. …..Only death does not tell lies! The presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life."
https://redd.it/1br15ac
@r_proseporn
From THE MAN OF THE CROWD by Edgar Allan Poe
It was well said of a certain German book that "er lasst sich nicht lesen"---it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes---die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.
https://redd.it/1bq0yeu
@r_proseporn
some good old-fashioned landscape description from Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop
The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains. The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak. These raindrops, Father Latour kept thinking, were the shape of tadpoles, and they broke against his nose and cheeks, exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air. The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-coloured. On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbones of mountains. The sky was very low; purplish lead- coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in that singular light.
Father Latour rode first, sitting straight upon his mule, with his chin lowered just enough to keep the drive of rain out of his eyes. Father Vaillant followed, unable to see much,—in weather like this his glasses were of no use and he had taken them off. He crouched down in the saddle, his shoulders well over Contento's neck. Father Joseph's sister, Philomène, who was Mother Superior of a convent in her native town in the Puy-de-Dome, often tried to picture her brother and Bishop Latour on these long missionary journeys of which he wrote her; she imagined the scene and saw the two priests moving through it in their cassocks, bareheaded, like the pictures of St. Francis Xavier with which she was familiar. The reality was less picturesque,—but for all that, no one could have mistaken these two men for hunters or traders. They wore clerical collars about their necks instead of neckerchiefs, and on the breast of his buckskin jacket the Bishop's silver cross hung by a silver chain.
They were on their way to Mora, the third day out, and they did not know just how far they had still to go. Since morning they had not met a traveller or seen a human habitation. They believed they were on the right trail, for they had seen no other.
https://redd.it/1bo6pcj
@r_proseporn
the Unnamable - Samuel Beckett
unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.
https://redd.it/1bns11t
@r_proseporn
Eve's Diary by Mark Twain
>He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright, and is sensitive about it and wishes to conceal it. It is such a pity that he should feel so, for brightness is nothing; it is in the heart that the values lie. I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches, and riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.
Although he talks so little, he has quite a considerable vocabulary. This morning he used a surprisingly good word. He evidently recognized, himself, that it was a good one, for he worked it in twice afterward, casually. It was good casual art, still it showed that he possesses a certain quality of perception. Without a doubt that seed can be made to grow, if cultivated.
Where did he get that word? I do not think I have ever used it.
No, he took no interest in my name. I tried to hide my disappointment, but I suppose I did not succeed. I went away and sat on the moss-bank with my feet in the water. It is where I go when I hunger for companionship, someone to look at, some one to talk to. It is not enough—that lovely white body painted there in the pool—but it is something, and something is better than utter loneliness. It talks when I talk; it is sad when I am sad; it comforts me with its sympathy; it says, “Do not be downhearted, you poor friendless girl; I will be your friend.” It IS a good friend to me, and my only one; it is my sister.
https://redd.it/1bmifx2
@r_proseporn
either / or - kierkegaard
Let other complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy...This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.
https://redd.it/1blnuak
@r_proseporn
contemplated them, like the very face of jamestown himself (brim overflowing like a cup) and those local delapidated-faced wine drinkers and their emptied, broken-at-the-nape wine bottles spinning in the streets, but the blood from one of the bottles, recalling those extreme unctions, projected across the screen, quaking a landscape of the tossed and driven mind and the bruised blood erupting brain; yes and the streak of blood oozing from a bird’s bashed-out brain and that other tender little brown skull split open and the brains staining the concrete from where it (at age four) had fallen from funky-butt’s burning building and the bluish fleeing-fire figures, their clothing and faces dancing off of their bodies like streaking zombies whirling and winging through the flaming building—blazing like the bloodshot savage eye of the setting sun in a gaunt and evil autumn . . . and slowly approaching this fifteen-foot (rarely pried open) coal shed, where those rock-jawed little boys and those little sassy-mouthed, slender-legged girls leapt forth and out into space—ceremoniously; and then dropped off to where they landed rather precariously—yet not without finesse—upon a split-down, burnt and ashy-edged mattress, in the backyard of this sacked, haunted building screaming with crashing glass, clanging like tambourines stomped deep down in the ground. . . .
And i shuddered and trembled as we fairly floated past this building from which they had flown off into space: rocketed, sacrificed, yoked and bedazzled, raggedy, transfixed, auctioned, looted and howling scarecrows into the breathing jungles of this soft and easy, stormy-out-of-eden country, funky-jawed and joy ripping, grease trapped, babbling wind . . . and in the extreme right corner two mammoth bloodhounds lapped, tongued and gnawed down the bony skeletons and the nostril-gutting spoils of this building’s bowels bursting like water bags, cast away from its moorings to land-lostness and humpback prayers spinning amid hovels and clapboard whispers of dreams and citadels, psalms, bales of cotton—laughing to mouth down the bad yoke, which weaved its way through the house built upon the pale riggings of a vessel afire in a docking bay, which had become a castle for rats, making potlicker of the blood, flesh, feces, skeletons, eyes, ears and throat and tongue of the looted, discarded ship-wrecked spoils in the bowels of the swinish hole . . . ah but the little children pied-pipered in their pitch, from where they knew not/whereof and plunged down singing as if they were back in the low red-clay country and stealing up now and winging off, and then vaulting over the pale ghost of a harpooned yet thunderously devouring sun in flight—as if even in their looted youth they were possessed by wings. . . .
https://redd.it/1bkx3uo
@r_proseporn
little the emanations of an acrid and damp leaf-mold reached him. Like a man waking up alive in his coffin, terrified, he saw the impalpable earth where he floated and transformed into an air without air, filled with smells of the earth, of rotten wood, of damp cloth. Now truly buried, he discovered himself, beneath accumulated layers of a material resembling plaster, in a hole where he was smothering. He was soaked in an icy medium among objects which were crushing him. If he still existed, it was to recognize the impossibility of living again, here in this room full of funereal flowers and spectral light. Suffocating, he managed to breathe again. He again discovered the possibility of walking, of seeing, of crying out, deep within a prison where he was confined in impenetrable silence and darkness. What a strange horror was his, as, passing the last barriers, he appeared at the narrow gate of his sepulcher, not risen but dead, and with the certainty of being snatched at once from death and from life. He walked, a painted mummy; he looked at the sun which was making an effort to put a smiling, lively expression on its indifferent face. He walked, the only true Lazarus, whose very death was resurrected. He went forward, passing beyond the last shadows of night without losing any of his glory, covered with grass and earth, walking at an even pace beneath the falling stars, the same pace which, for those men who are not wrapped in a winding-sheet, marks the ascent toward the most precious point in life.
https://redd.it/1bkxc6v
@r_proseporn
the insolence of conscious half-emergence, of hope. Now I notice that she coos a little . . . This pretty mindlessness . . . Love, a comedy . . . Some sense of that in her. An apish buffoonery—murderous. I see the healthily pale, dramatically boned face, dark-eyed, colossally present below me. Ora has said, You were never SERIOUSLY hurt, Wiley. Carelessly, filthily, resigned-to-be-sneered-at, one is brave—and experienced in tonight’s orgasm—and one rides in its subsiding—this stuff as happiness—uh uh uh . . . —and is more and more aware. One exits, one enters through veils of fading event. Her body watched me. It’s loony—the undry, not austere not-turning-away THING of a pretty body if the person is interested in you, death, genius really, fluttering on the flagpole. The lash-inflected small poem of eyes erotically unpromising now: reality. I am here among a separate order of meanings in a field of her breath.
https://redd.it/1bkwmqn
@r_proseporn
Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T.E. Lawrence
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.
As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible—they have lost the world—and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.
https://redd.it/1bk0fpc
@r_proseporn
michael proust - in search of lost time
Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when—in this moment of deprivation—the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult; to assuage—the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.
https://redd.it/1bgczff
@r_proseporn