A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
When hit by boredom, go for it. Let Yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves scrutiny is that it represents pure undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
– Joseph Brodsky in On Grief and Reason.
“You’ve nothing else to give the world which no one else can give except yourself” – Quentin Crisp
Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:
To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,
That there is always a changing at the root,
And a real world in which time really passes.
— Philip Larkin, from “New Year Poem,” Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. – Tom Waits
And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. (Penguin Classics; New Ed edition, December 31, 2002) Originally published 1982.
Fernando Pessoa — The Vale of Soul-Making
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea. (New Directions Publishing Corporation January 1, 1975) Originally published 1938.
Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
― Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski — The Vale of Soul-Making
“You can’t have it all [in life] where would you put it…”
– Lemmy Kilmister, Lead Singer Motörhead
O my poor words, bear with me.
— Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, ed. David Wagoner (Copper Canyon Press November 1, 2006)
Theodore Roethke — The Vale of Soul-Making
I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express.
— Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book] trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)
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