death saith, "et in pulcritudo ego."

By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner had he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom, or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment face, and are up against a force majeure. Their art is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. Only you may yourself, by that time, have become one with God, and have taken a liking to it.

“Admittedly, the story of Oedipus does not seem to deal with the human at all; rather, it seems to present man with an inhuman choice. Either everything happens by chance and nothing is intelligible, or nothing happens by chance and everything is intelligible, but with this proviso: the possibility of discovering the pattern is remote, for it too depends on chance, and the pattern once discovered is sure to make life unlivable. There are either no gods or gods whose graciousness solely consists in guaranteeing that we shall never find out that they exist.”

“I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. […] Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.”