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Look with all your eyes, look.

-Jules Verne

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And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged…

—Raymond Carver. Short Cuts: Selected Stories. 1993.

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Jim: We played with life and lost.

Jules et Jim. François Truffaut. 1962.

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“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless.”

Lorrie Moore. Referential. The New Yorker

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Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. I need like, what, an accomplice. We have to first get out of this bar, then the hotel, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out?

—Bob Harris. Lost In Translation.

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Cop 663: Since she left, everything in the flat is sad. Everything needed lulling to sleep.

[to a bar of soap] 

Cop 663: You’ve lost a lot of weight, you know. You used to be so chubby. Have more confidence in yourself. 

[to a threadbare wet dishcloth] 

Cop 663: You have to stop crying, you know. Where’s your strength and absorbency? You’re so shabby these days. 

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Good Morning David!

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of a sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.

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I remember the first time I realized I could make myself see something that wasn’t there. I was ten years old, walking home from school. Some boys from my class ran by shouting and laughing. I wanted to be like them. And yet. I didn’t know how. I’d always felt different from the others, and the difference hurt. And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe.

So I tried.

And I found I could.

The History of Love. Nicole Krauss. 

Photo by Colleen Plumb

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

• Valentine: Well, it is odd. Heat goes to cold. It's a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It'll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature. When your hermit set up shop nobody understood this. But let's say you're right, in 18-whatever nobody knew more about heat than this scribbling nutter living in a hovel in Derbyshire.
• Hannah: He was at Cambridge--a scientist.
• Valentine: Say he was. I'm not arguing. And the girl was his pupil, she had a genius for her tutor.
• Hannah: Or the other way round.
• Valentine: Anything you like. But not this! Whatever he thought he was doing to save the world with good English algebra it wasn't this!
• Hannah: Why? Because they didn't have calculators?
• Valentine: No. Yes. Because there's an order things can't happen in. You can't open a door till there's a house.
• Hannah: I thought that's what genius was.
• Valentine: Only for lunatics and poets.
• Hannah:
• 'I had a dream which was not all a dream.
• The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
• Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
• Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
• Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. . .'

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There are bees on this tree.

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Let me explain: the pleasure I experienced came directly from being too vividly aware of my own degradation, from the feeling of having gone too far; that it was foul but that it couldn’t be otherwise; that there’s no way out for you, that you’d never make yourself a different person; that even if there remained enough time and faith to change yourself into something different you most probably wouldn’t want to change yourself. And that even if you did want to, you’d end up by doing nothing because there might in fact be nothing to change yourself into. But finally, and most importantly, all this proceeds from the normal, fundamental laws of heightened consciousness and from the inertia which is the direct result of those laws and therefore not only could you not change yourself, you’d simply do nothing at all. 

Notes From Underground. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1864.

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“He knew now what this thing was—hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is … a world of doorknobs.”

Miss Lonelyhearts. Nathanael West. 

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Annie Hall premiered on this day in 1977. 

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A piece I wrote for Proxart Magazine about my friends in the amazing band River Whyless, from Asheville North Carolina is now up. Check it out! There’s a story in there from when we all were in creative writing class together.