to the coast

“I am lured away by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like light an impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies.” -E.M. Cioran, Degradation Through Work

The Paris Review Interviewer: “How do you name your characters?”

Dorothy Parker: “The telephone book and from the obituary columns”

anchoress

10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
-From the twelve propositions of transition magazine, Paris 1927-1938


"This being in love is great-you get a lot of compliments and begin to think you're a great guy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald from Notebooks (The Crack-Up)

"When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment."
-E.M. Cioran Lure of Disillusion

Chytridiomycota

[Cioran on England] "The country has not produced, to my knowledge, a single anarchist."

Here's a little excerpt abut Cioran written by Duncan Fallowell:

"As the high priest of cynicism, Cioran raises negativity to the most positive of virtues. He writes like a Nietzsche streamlined by Cocteau in the 1930s and given a flick knife by Camus in the 1950s. Cioran is the only modern philosopher who is also a great writer, turning extreme anguish into supreme elegance."


On another note, last night I started reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary for the third time.
The first time was when I was in high school; the second, while I was in college, now after reading inexcusable amounts (any amount would be inexcusable) of lit-crit, and after reading the wonderfully cogent Llosa book, The Perpetual Orgy that focused on Llosa's own obsession of M. Bovary and how Flaubert's novel changed the literary landscape; I decided to embark on this particular textual voyage once again.

The most striking element I noticed is the cadence of the writing. Granted, I am reading a translation, and I am aware of how much I will lose, but this translation (as mentioned in the intro) maintains much of the cadence. I am drawn into the sentence's rhythm; it alters the measure of my own thoughts. I will have to capture some paragraphs and present them at a later entry……

This weekend: art, Western Naturalists and possibly noise……..