statuam salis.

“The practice of text is the practice of being. To dig into the word means digging into ourselves. I am the one whom I write—who writes himself with the words that write me… I am the word which in expressing itself expresses me.”

“Will he come? Will he come across the night of words? Across the silence of speech? Across the starry rose at the center of night? Bright as the blade of words across the flesh of darkness?”

Worse, thanks to what is called “shifting baseline syndrome,” changes that initially seem extreme come to be accepted as normal over time. The next generation of children, who will never remember how many birds (or butterflies or hedgehogs or manatees) once existed in the wild, will not hear anything eerie in the silence. Once a mass murder is complete, its victims tell no tales. When humans killed the last of the giant “Steller sea cows” several hundred years ago, the memory of these mega-manatees faded away quickly, and now they seem like something fantastical. We know that “in just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years,” but when nobody is left alive who remembers the old forests, the loss is not felt.

“3/ 1/ 66. The essence of life is to welcome a challenge, even though not being quite sure how to meet it.”

“Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.” And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man.”