Author: Lars Iyer

[On why she admires some authors rather than others:] I think too that I need a brazier of historical experience, a horizon of events, to sense a centre of political suffering, as is the case for Lispector, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bachmann. (Woolf doesn't lack this, but she comes from the same milieu as Proust, and within me there's a little Jewish girl who feels so removed from these social classes …

[On the sense that her work has offspring among contemporary writers:] I think of this often, telling myself that my future library is already in place, I can hear the breath of works already formed, that will extend beyond my death, and for me, this is happiness, this adds life to my life. 'To have children' late in life is a wonderful experience! It made Sarah laugh and thrilled Abraham. It's miraculous. One wants to be proud but once can only be humble. For one is not the cause of these marvellous 'descendants', nor the condition, but only the first person, more or less, to see the great future approaching, at which one will not be present, but where one will be recollected, kept by a person in whom one is glad to be continued.

The proofs and their correction: there you touch upon a sore point: I have never dared to continue working at this stage. I feel it's utterly forbidden by editorial reprobation; I know how much it costs. Even when I correct minimally, I apologise profusely in the margins. I don't feel at home any more once the proofs arrive, I am a guest (same with the plays, as soon as rehearsals begin, I have no more rights).

[On titling her books:] … since the title doesn't come along until after the book, coming from it, and sometimes very late […], it escapes from the book like a sigh, a sigh of regret. Or a burst of laughter. The book could get along without it. Then it accepts the yoke, while trying to play with it to the limit. Shake it up. Then it submits to the judgement of God, which liberates it from its submission.

 […] there will always be 'the two worlds' […] once, hence, the dominant, the one which is now the globalizer; the other, the impure, the hounded out, the marginalised, the 'filthy' of the clean, and which is composed of people or classes considered, on the political level, as the 'damned' of the period; but – and this matters a great deal to me – also on the cultural level composed of the 'rich' in spirit, the intolerable, the poets, philosophers, seekers of the absolute, all those whose sources of delight are found at pretty inaccessible altitudes, who live on languages, and who have found Kleist's second innocence, who desired not power but the poem, and who are hated or feared because they are not aligned and don't conform to the spirit of imitation and predation.

… the time-detached, the dead outliving those who are the inhabitants of literature.

The Bible is everywhere and from the beginning and 'naturally' present in what I write, myths, themes, leitmotivs, songs, promised lands, philosophemes. I am 'at home' in it as in the desert and with God, that is with the need of and the lack of God.

Texts that are broken, fleeting, correspond surely also to urgencies of flight, caused by the pursuit of or dream of a subject which shimmers and sweeps me along but which can't and musn't be taken, grasped, captured.

I write 'a book' and this book lodges itself within me, a passerby, a guest, it exists in flesh and words; and I get to know this complex, composed but unique being, creature. I discover it as we go along. Its vital, animal part is very strong. Moroever it uses my body to make a body, members, for itself, to increase and divide itself into characters. As when I dream and people, at times complete strangers, populate me and I myself become a novel of a kind, in which I am myself a character who has heaps of adventures, and assault and battery.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

… literature is the infinite of the finite.

… Yves Berger, Bernard Fasquelle took the book (Le prenom de Dieu), a 'crazy' book, and Dedans. I published these books 'looking the other way' because I didn't think they were books.

Dedans […] I was a little embarrassed by, aware that I hadn't written a book but a mangled 'thing'.

I was absolutely not part of [the world of prestigious iterary awards – L.I.]. There were parties and I wasn't there, I was in the hospital, out of it; I didn't see where I was headed, I saw a pit in place of my life.

Neutre was the supreme effort to dig up the secret. All I did was shift it to another grave.

Angst, to my way of thinking, but I may be wrong, is less a new direction than an attempt to conclude: I told myself, really, that if I didn't get to the root of Angst (anguish), the mortal divinity that was persecuting me, I would die, I suffered too much from repeated Angst. So I engaged it as a battle. Of course I wasn't hoping to win, the main thing in a battle is to fight it, to free oneself, in acting, from the misery of passivity. So I didn't win, but I painted its portrait.

… I can't write without feeling I am wronging all the people to whom I owe my life, and the time, to write.

… I never have any idea, either of the theme or of the object, I have only a law: head for whatever is the most frightening. To that which I cannot and do not want to write face-to-face.

As far as time, the duration goes – as I told you, I cannot write except uninterruptedly: it's impossible: hence in a trance. Otherwise I'd be sidetracked by resistances and fears. I only write red-hot, in convulsions, it's highly physical, it's exhausting, it's a gallop, I write ten hours straight, I collapse, but with paper, I don't stop, when I am too tired, I take notes in the evening, at night so as to start fresh, as if heading off to battle, at daybreak, and I do this for two months. During this time I keep in mind the book's landscape or land, its mental map, its armies, its armoires, scraps of sentences, images, dreams, its passages. But not its 'whole', not its composition. This I don't know, I discover. For the same reason, as soon as the 'book' 'ends' it withdraws like a tide, and I no longer remember anything.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

Q. Some paintings are very enigmatic. For instance, when we looked at Up the Hill and I said I thought the figure at the back looked a bit like a scarecrow, you said it wasn't intended that way but you were okay with people thinking that. Looking longer at the painting, I find myself fascinated by the very weird, somewhat ominous shadow, which seems like a tangible thing attached to the figure. Or there is the hard-to-understand setup of the two men with towels in LeBelle Cascade. And you cannot help but wonder what all that stuff is on the floor and the sideboard in Opium. Of course, there are also very straightforward portraits and outdoor scenes. So did you want a mixture of the more direct and the more mysterious (again, like putting together an album)?

A. Yeah, sure, but everything in life, directly or indirectly, has a great degree of mystery. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me." Persons, places, things … time itself is a mystery. You know, like, who can explain it? It's really difficult to define anything. What's slow can speed up. Love can turn into hate. Peace can turn into war. Pride can turn into humility. Anger to grief. How would you define a simple thing like a chair, for instance—something you sit on? Well, it's more than that. You can sit on a curb, or a fence. But they are not chairs. So what makes a chair a chair? Maybe it's got arms? A cross has arms, so has a person. Maybe the chair doesn't have arms? Okay, so it's a post or a flagpole. But those aren't chairs. A chair has four legs. So does a table. So does a dog. But they're not chairs either. So a chair is a mystical thing. It's got a divine presence.

There's a gloomy veil of chaos that surrounds it. And "chaos" in Greek means "air." So we live in chaos and we breathe it. Is it any wonder why some people snap and go crazy? Mystery is ancient. It's the essence of everything. It violates all conventions of beauty and understanding. It was there before the beginning, and it will be there beyond the end. We were created in it. The Mississippi Sheiks recorded a song called "Stop and Listen." To most music aficionados, it's but a ragtime blues. But to me, it's words of wisdom. Saint Paul said we see through the glass darkly. There's plenty of mystery in nature and contemporary life. For some people, it's too harsh to deal with. But I don't see it that way.

Bob Dylan, interviewed 2011

"I suffer from the nostalgia of a peasant-type religion, and that is why I am on the side of the servant," he says. "But I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. That is why my films are never naturalistic. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance."

Pasolini, interviewed

Despair is not a motif of theology, but a lacuna within it. It is neither disbelief, or doubt, but an unknowing so radical that it both escapes the scope of any possible epistemology and lacks all doctrinal intelligibility. Despair cannot be defined as a claim, a hesitation, denial, or uncertainty. It is an abandonment, and a plea without conceivable destination; a desertification resulting from the catastrophic disappearance of the value of being. Despair is not humble, but hubristic, and it is not pious in the least, but tragic. […]

If life were a discourse death could wait, but dreams break down, there is repetition. Bataille’s text does not anticipate death; it fractures seismically under the impact of oblivion. Each of its waves are broken recollections of the taste of death. Each beginning again – as such and irrespective of its inherent signification – moves under the influence of an unanticipated dying. Waves have no memory. They reach afresh each time to the deep ebb that undoes them in darkness, beating to a pulse that eludes them. The absent shingle-hiss of death is discursively manipulated into textual regularity, but this does not erase the multiple beginnings again; marking the contour of each retraction into silence. […]

Techniques of disintegration operate at all levels of Bataille’s text, tending to distribute it along an axis of maximal fission. The extreme instance of this is the anorexic attenuation typical of his poetry, where the line is stripped of almost all its semantic and syntactic burden to enter into a vertical series of discontinuous cries. The line collapses towards a resilient spinal core, along which shrunken stanzas unstring themselves, like beads dropping from a broken necklace into a dimension of intoxicating descent. Other techniques include extended ellipsis, the employment of two separate hears of paragraphing with both indentations and vertical line-breaks), violent narrative shifts of a various kinds…. But in the end it is not a matter of technique. The fragmentation of Bataille’s text cannot be domesticated within the subjective genitive. Death ‘itself’ dissipates, aborts, fragments. Stories forestall completion, organisation is lost, draft is spliced corrosively with acomplishment. […]

A delirial fracturing presses the dominant thematic flows to the point of narrative discontinuity; shattering the aspiration to literary accomplishment, and collapsing its remains in amongst the embers of characters who cannot complete themselves. A sterilizing malaise dithers between narrative content and the process of writing. Sketches, fragments, ruptures, suicides, drunks, impossible desire and the burning thirst to be damned …this is a world of wrecked art, nihilistic love, and death triumphant; pervaded throughout by a hideous allure.

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annhilation

MD: I know that when I write there is something inside me that stops functioning, something that becomes silent. I let something take over inside me that probably flows from femininity. But everything shuts off – the analytic way of thinking, thinking inculcated by college, studies, reading, experience. I'm absolutely sure of what I'm telling you n ow. It's as if I were returning to a wild country. Nothing is concerted. perhaps, before everything else, before being Duras, I am – simply – a woman.

[…]

SHK: So you think women have not used their intelligence.

MD: Or their silence. The silence in women is such that anything that falls into it has an enormous reverberation. Whereas in men, this silence no longer exists.

Duras, interviewed by Susan Husserl-Kapit (1975)

Q. What are you working on now?

A. Just a text. It can't be called anything else [she is referring to L'Amour – LI]. And in a very mathematical way, a little like Abahn. One could say that the text is pure imbecility. I have ceased to understand what I am writing. When a certain music is present, I know that the text is progressing. When the music stops, I stop. When it begins again, I begin again.

[…]

I don't see how one cannot be a writer (I mean in the broad sense of the term). I know all kinds of people who don't write and are writers. By that I mean that the world passes to us by way of them. They hand it on; they don't just endure it. There are many people who write and who are much farther from being writers than people who don't. One can write very well without the blank page.

[…]

Destroy is an area from which sleep has disappeared. As a consequence, dreams have disappeared, dreams that compensate …

[…]

For a long time, I held for the absolute noncommitment of the writer; now I hold that it is madness and a lie to say that the writer is not committed. A writer commits himself from the very moment he picks up the pen. Revolutionary demands and literary demands are one and the same.

Q. One doesn't destroy the other?

A. They blend. If there is a divorce between the two, there is no longer any composition. There is an absurd mechanical activity which isn't based on anything.

Duras, interviewed by Germain Bree (1972)

What do you need to be a philosopher? You discover that you are a philosopher: it is not something you ever become.

Not a logical mind, not argumentative brio: philosophy is a passion. Discover this passion as a lover and witness of Socrates. Read the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus, Phaedo, and the Apology, and you will fall in love with Socrates. You imbibe his frenzy, the madness of lover inspired by Aphrodite and Eros. You feel you can reach out and touch the feathers that grow again from the roots all over the surface of the soul to ascend to divine beauty.

To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second, the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of concentration - in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third, acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, Attention, acceptance.

Gillian Rose, Paradiso

AT One phrase you come back to again and again is “civil society.” Why did that concept capture your imagination? What does it mean to you?

RS I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone at home, but I also spend a lot of time as an activist in the streets, in gatherings and things like that, and following revolutions around the world: the Velvet Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Zapatistas . . . In those moments, I’ve discovered in myself and in others a deep happiness, an unknown desire that’s finally fulfilled to be purposeful, to be a part of history and society, to have a voice.

One of my arguments in A Paradise Built in Hell is that we have almost too much language for private needs and desires and not nearly enough for these other things. This need and desire is so profound that when it’s fulfilled, you find these weird moments of joy despite everything in disaster. The whole world is falling apart, but I am who I was meant to be: a citizen, a rescuer, a resourceful person who belongs to and is serving a community.

[…]

RS My running joke about Hope in the Dark is that it’s a book in which I snatch the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left. There are ways in which people are very attached to these despairing narratives—a lot of people got very upset with me.

AT You were trying to disabuse them of their comfortable cynicism, which they didn’t like.

RS Yeah. I’d get attacked by old, middle-class liberals and leftists who felt that you can’t be hopeful while people are suffering. I’d be like, “Well, people who are suffering are hopeful.” Look at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or the Zapatistas, who speak so beautifully about hope, and keep going.

AT Maybe despair is a privileged position.

RS That’s exactly what I realized. For some people, the alternative to hope is to surrender to the horrible things that menace them. The alternative to hope for the upper-middle class is to stay home and watch television or whatever. These alternatives don’t involve death, torture, annihilation, starvation, exploitation, or slavery. So despair is easy, or at least low cost.

Rebecca Solnit, interviewed

British publisher Frederic Warburg (who published English editions of Kafka's novels during the heavy bombing of London in World War II) mentions in his book "All Authors are Equal" (he was also George Orwell's publisher) an anecdote involving Brod, Kafka and their manuscripts. He attributes this story ("for whose authenticity I do not vouch") to Hannah Arendt, but does not provide a source. In it, Brod is strolling down a Prague street, a few days after Kafka's death, and meets a literary editor ("Let's call him Rudi," writes Warburg):

Rudi: "You look sad, Max, indeed we are all sad at the shocking news of poor Kafka's death."

Max: "… my friend Franz placed on my shoulders a heavy burden. Franz has given me instructions that I am to burn all his unpublished work, all of it."

Rudi: "Well, you must burn it, then, as Franz wishes."

Max: "It is not so easy, my friend. I have read his work, his novels and stories, all of it. These are masterpieces. How can I burn them?"

Rudi: "Masterpieces, you say. Then you must not burn them, Max. You must have them published."

Max: "Against dear Franz's wishes, Rudi?"

Rudi (thinks hard, then in an emphatic voice): "I have it, Max. Publish Franz's work and burn all your own."

Via a piece in Haaretz. (Via Literary Saloon)

It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise it would have frightened Socrates. But the judgement that death is frightening – now, that is something to be afraid of. So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves – that is, our judgements – accountable. An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.

Keep the prospect of death, exile and all such apparent tragedies before you every day – especially death – and you will never have an abject thought, or desire anything to excess.

[…] Try to influence your friends to speak appropriately by your example. If you find yourself in unfamiliar company, however, keep quiet. Keep laughter to a minimum; do not laugh too often or too loud[…] Avoid fraternising with non-philosophers. If you must, though, be bareful not to sink to their level; beacuse, you know, if a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.

Never identify yourself as a philosopher or speak much to non-philosophers about your principles; act in line with those principles. At a dinner party, for instance, don't tell people the right way to eat, just eat the right way. Remember how Socrates so effaced himself that people used to approach him seeking an introduction to philosophers, and he would graciously escort them; that's how careless he was of the slight.

[…] Sheep don't bring their owners grass to prove them how much they've eaten, they digest it inwardly and outwardly bring forth milk and wool. So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the unitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed. […]

When faced with anything painful or pleasurable, anything bringing glory or disrepute, realize that the crisis is now, that the Olympics have started, and waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.

Lead me, Zeus, lead me Destiny, / To the goal I was long ago assigned . And I will follow without hesitation. Even should I resist, / In a spirit of perversity, I will have to follow nonetheless. / Whoever yields to necessity graciously, we account wise in God's ways.

Epictetus, Enchiridon

[…] Marina Tsvetayeva  had always held her work between herself and the reality of daily life; and when she found this luxury beyond her means, when she felt that for her son's sake she must, for a time, give up her passionate absorption in poetry and look round her soberly, she saw chaos, no longer screened by art, fixed, unfamiliar, motionless, and, not knowing where to run for terror, she hid in death, putting her head into the noose as she might have hidden her head under her pillow.

Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Thus we hope that the novelty which will be the same thing as what we no longer want will come into being less rotten, less immediately GROTESQUE.

Louis Aragon, Manifesto at the second Dada manifestation, 5 Feb 1920

The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a  superior wisdom – and yet, if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it. Is this what it is to have conquered despair?

Kierkegaard, Journals

The mark and attitude of the ordinary man: never look for help or harm from yourself, only from outsiders. The mark and attitude of the philosopher: look for help and harm exclusively from yourself.

And the signs of a person making progress: he never criticizes, praises, blames or points the finger, or represents himself as knowing or amounting to anything. If he experiences frustration or disappointment, he points the finger at himself.

If he's praised, he's more amused than elated. And if he's criticized, he won't bother to respond. He walks around as if he were an invalid, careful not to move a healing limb before it's at full strength. He has expunged all desire, and made the things that are contrary to nature and in his control the sole target of his aversion. Impulse he only uses with detachment. He does not care if he comes across as stupid or naive. In a word, he keeps an eye on himself as if he were his own enemy lying in ambush.

from Epictetus, Enchiridion

Sept 16, 1956: I have no compulsion to write or to do anything except when I am possessed by routines, which can happen anytime. A lot of the time I just sit blank and narcotized letting sensations flow through me. I have a feeling that I might turn into somebody else, that I am losing my outlines.

Oct 13, 1956: I have entered a period of change more drastic than adolescence or early childhood. I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all. I can’t take time to go into all my mystic experiences which I have whenever  I walk out the door. There is something special about Tanger.

Oct 29, 1956: What I am writing now supersedes, in fact makes obsolete, anything I have written hitherto[….] I am really writing Interzone now, not writing about it.

Dec 20, 1965. I will send along 100 pages of Interzone, it is coming so fast I can’t hardly get it down, and shakes me like a great black wind through the bones …

Jan 23, 1957. Interzone is coming like dictation. I can’t keep up with it.

Jan 28, 1957. Now my power’s really coming …

Feb 14, 1957. Since sending MS. have written about fifty pages more, wilder than what you have. This is almost automatic writing. I often sit high on hash for as long as six hours typing at top speed.

August 28, 1957. I have always felt that the MS. To date was in a sense notes for a novel rather than the novel itself. This novel is now taking shape faster than I can write down.

Sep 20, 1957. As regards MS., I think any attempt at chronological arrangement extremely ill-advised[…] The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected – by theme – but separate short pieces. My feeling is that it will eventually grow into several novels all interlocking and taking place simultaneously as in a majoun dream. But I do not see organization as a problem.

Oct 28^th, 1957. If anyone finds this form confusing, it is because they are accustomed to the historical novel form, which is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening.

The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.

Nov 10^, 1957. I do nothing but work…. Given up liquor entirely. Writing the narrative now, which comes in great hunks faster than I can get it down. Changes in my psyche profound and basic. I feel myself not the same person.

Oct 10 1958. Brion Gysin living next door[….] He has undergone similar conversion to mine and doing GREAT painting[….] I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work. He is doing in painting what I try to do in writing. He regards his painting as a hole in the texture of so-called ‘reality’, through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outer space. That is, he moves into the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints.

Late July 1959. Fact is I have become a megalomaniac, but with one essential difference and advantage. I have been outside. I have come up from the area of total humiliation and failure, climbed up cell by cell with a million set-backs and debacles.

William Burroughs, Letters vol. 1

In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, 'Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything'.

A hermit was asked, 'How is it that some struggle in their religious life, but do not receive grace like our predecessors?' He replied, 'Because then love was the rule, and each one drew his neighbour upward. Now love is growing cold, and each of us draws his neighbour downward, and so we do not deserve grace'.

Hilarion once came from Palestine to Antony on the mountain: and Antony said to him, 'Welcome, morning star, for you rise at break of day'. Hilarion said, 'Peace be unto you, pillar of light, for you sustain the world'.

The hermits said, 'If an angel really appears to you, do not accept it as a matter of course, but humble yourself, and say, 'I live in my sins and am not worthy to see an angel'.

Hyperchius said, 'The tree of life is high, and humility climbs it'.

[Poemen] said, 'A brother asked Alonius, "What is humility?" The hermit said, 'To be lower than brute beasts and to know that they are not condemned'.

[Poemen] said, 'Humility is the ground on which the Lord ordered the sacrifice to be offered'.

Mathois said, 'The nearer a man comes to God, the more he sees himself to be a sinner. Isaiah the prophet saw the Lord and knew himself to be wretched and unclean'.

Theophilus of holy memory, the bishop of Alexandria, once went to the mount of Nitria, and a hermit of Nitria came to see him. The bishop asked, 'What have you discovered in your life, abba?' The hermit answered, 'To blame myself unceasingly'. The bishop said, 'That is the only way to follow'.

… Zacharias took his cowl from his head, and put it beneath his feet and stamped on it, and said, 'Unless a man stamps upon self like that, he cannot be a monk'.

Evagrius said, 'To go against self is the beginning of salvation'.

They used to say of Arsenius that no one could understand the depths of his monastic life. […]

[Antony] said, 'I saw the devil's snares set all over the earth, and I groaned and said, "What can pass through them?" I heard a voice saying, "Humility".'

[Allois] said, 'Until you can say in your heart, "Only I and God are in the world", you will not be at peace'.

[Allois] said, 'If you really want to, by the evening of one day you can reach a measure of godliness'.

A hermit said, 'Anyone who wants to live in the desert ought to be a teacher and not a learner. If he still needs teaching, he will come to harm'.

Hyperichius said, 'He who teaches others by his life and not his speech is truly wise'.

A brother sinned and the presbyter ordered him to go out of church. But Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying, 'I, too, am a sinner'.

A hermit said, 'When you flee from the company of other people, or when you despise the world and worldlings, take care to do so as if it were you who was being idiotic'.

A hermit said, 'The monk's cell is the furnace in Babylon in which the three children found the Son of God. It is the pillar of cloud out of which God spoke to Moses'.

Poemen said, 'The character of the genuine monk only appears when he is tempted'.

They said of Helladius that he lived twenty years in his cell, and did not once raise his eyes to look at the roof.

A hermit saw someone laughing, and said to him 'We have to render an account of our whole life before heaven and death, and you can laugh?'

A hermit said, 'As the shadow goes everywhere with the body, so we ought to carry penitence and weeping with us everywhere we go'.

A brother asked a hermit, 'I hear the hermits weeping, and my soul longs for tears, but they do not come, and I am worried about it'. He replied, 'The children of Israel entered the promised land after forty years in the wilderness. Tears are the promised land. When you reach them you will no longer be afraid of the conflict. For it is the will of God that we should be afflicted, so we may always be longing to enter that country'.

In Egypt once when Poemen was going somewhere he saw a woman sitting by a gravfe and weeping bitterly. He said, 'If all the delights of this world should come to her, they would not bring her out of sorrow. Just so should the monk always be weeping in his heart'.

A hermit, who had an experienced disciple, once turned him out in a fit of irritation. The disciple sat down outside to wait and the hermit found him there where he opened the door. So he did penance to him, saying, 'You are my abba now, because your humility and patience have overcome my weakness. Come inside, now you are the old abba, and I am the young disciple; my age must give way to your conduct'.

From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering. […]

In depression [the] faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. […]

Then, after dinner, sitting in the living room, I felt a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold night; I did not think such anguish possible.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible

There were also dreadful, pouncing, seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk through the woods with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above the trees ablaze with foilage; ordinarily a sight and sound that would have exhilarated me, the flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering, aware for the first time that I had been stricken by no mere pangs of withdrawal but by a serious illness whose name and actuality I was able finally to acknowledge. Going home, I couldn't rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire's, dredged up from the distant past, that for several days had been skittering around at the edge of my consciousness: 'I have felt the wind of the wing of madness'.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible

What is Poland? It is a country between the East and the West, where Europe starts to draw to an end, a border country where the East and the West soften into each other. A country of weakened forms… None of the great movements of European culture has ever really penetrated Poland, not the Renaissance, not the wars of religion, not the French Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution. Of all these phenomenon Poland has felt no more than a muted echo[….] So these plains, open to every wind, had long been the scene of a great compromise between Form and its Degradation. Everything was effaced, disintegrated…

[…] Against the Polish sky, against the sky of a paling, waning Europe, one can see why so much paper coming from the West falls to the ground, into the mud, onto the sand, so that little boys grazing their cows can make the usual use of it.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament

Ever since my childhood, the falsity of my easy, bourgeois life had been a nightmare for me. This feeling of unreality never left me. Always 'between' and never 'in', I was like a shade, a chimera. And I would not be lying if I said that it was reality for which I searched in the simplicity and the brute health of the lowest social classes, during those expeditions into the slums of Warsaw. But I also looked for that reality inside myself, in those vague internal areas, deserted, peripheral, inhuman, where anomalies flourish together with Formlessness, Disease, Abjection. For one can find reality in all that is most ordinary, most primitive, and most healthy, as well as in what is most twisted and demented. Man's reality is the reality both of health and of disease.

Yet these invesitgations did not go so far as to make me touch the depths of things. So I wasn't entitled to write a 'real' book. I was capable of no more than parody. Here style was the parody of style. Art mimicked and mocked art. The logic of nonsense was a parody of sense and of logic. And my so-called success was a parody of success.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament