A Night Sea Journey

“The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.”

“Everyone goes through a period of traviamento—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

“But why, one wonders, do the Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady, unwavering witness of Magdalene is not even noticed?”

“It had been a mild, serene spring day; one of those days which towards the end of March or the beginning of April, rise shining over the earth as heralds of summer.”

“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”

“Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing ‘arguing.’ Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.”

Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty- six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other’s side.

When you start to know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.

“Sensation is the break-up of every system,” says Levinas. Sensation, like speech, he gives a transcendental function, which seems to me a more compelling basis for his ethics. This means that ethics is, and must be, a corporeal matter; the imperative is received not only by our rational faculties, but by our carnal sensibility, which is fundamentally an affective capacity and an irreducible component of intercorporeal survival. Our responsiveness to other bodies, which at once conditions our sensitive responsibility to them, is anterior to our competent manipulation of tools within a system of equipment, instruments, and projects. To sense the other and be sensitive to them is a condition for stabilizing our own bodies within the world and figuring out how to work with others toward a pluralistic future.

Can is not the same as must… But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.

“I have seen on Twitter, I’ve seen it at a distance, people have a feeling at 9am quite strongly, and then by 11 have been shouted out of it and can have a completely opposite feeling four hours later. That part, I find really unfortunate…I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind. I don’t want to be bullied out of it…We should be able to retain the right to be wrong…I’m wrong almost all the time. It’s OK to be wrong. It really is OK, you just have to sit in the feeling and deal with it. I never feel that certain in the first place, so this kind of succession of mistakes is just what I call my novels.”

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent, to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

What I want is the soul of something buried deep inside me before it became these words.

Why couldn’t one set oneself afire and be destroyed in the flames? Or obey, even if one hears no command? Or sit on a chair in the middle of one’s empty room and look at the floor?

Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.

You have such a February face, So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.