henry is tired of the winter, & haircuts

Yes, I believe all their blather about the life to come, it cheers me up, and unhappiness like mine, there’s no annihilating that. I was mad of course and still am, but harmless, I passed for harmless, that’s a good one. Not of course that I was really mad, just strange, a little strange, and with every passing year a little stranger, there can be few stranger creatures going about than me at the present day.

-Beckett, Six Residua

He was holding Querelle with seemingly the same passion a female animal shows when holding the dead body of her young offspring—the attitude by which we comprehend what love is: consciousness of the division of what previously was one, of what it is to be thus divided, while you yourself are watching yourself. The two men heard nothing but the sound of each other’s breathing.

-Jean Genet, Querelle

With at your elbow for long years your father’s shade in his old tramping rags and then for long years alone. Adding step after step to the ever mounting sum of those already accomplished. Huddled thus you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible. The process continues none the less lapped as it were in its meaninglessness. You do not murmur in so many words, I know this doomed to fail and yet persist. No. For the first personal and a fortiori plural pronoun had never any place in your vocabulary.

-Beckett, Company

and if it is still possible at this late hour to conceive of other worlds

as just as ours but less exquisitely organized

one perhaps there is one perhaps somewhere merciful enough to shelter such frolics where no one ever abandons anyone and no one ever waits for anyone and never two bodies touch

-Beckett, How it is

or emotions sensations take a sudden interest in them and even then what the fuck I quote does it matter who suffers faint waver here faint tremor

the fuck who suffers who makes to suffer who cries who to be left in peace in the dark the mud gibbers ten seconds fifteen seconds of sun clouds earth sea patches of blue clear nights and of a creature if not still standing still capable of standing always the same imagination spent looking for a hole that he may be seen no more in the middle of this faery who drinks that drop of piss of being and who with his last gasp pisses it to drink the moment it’s someone each in his turn as our justice wills and never any end it wills that too all dead or none

two possible formulations therefore the present and that other beginning where the present ends and consequently beginning with the journey in the dark the mud the traveler right leg right arm push pull coming so utterly from nowhere and no one and so utterly on his way there that he has never ceased from travelling will never cease from travelling dragging his sack where provisions are dwindling but not so fast as appetite

-Beckett, How it is

so true it is that here one knows one’s tormentor only as long as it takes to suffer him and one’s victim only as long as it takes to enjoy him if as long

and these same couples that eternally form and form again all along this immense circuit that the millionth time that’s conceivable is as the inconceivable first and always two strangers uniting in the interests of torment

-Beckett, How it is

what lands all lands midnight sun midday night all latitudes all longitudes

all longitudes

-Beckett, How it is

they are not memories no he has no memories no nothing to prove he was ever above no in the places he sees no but he may have been yes skulking somewhere yes hugging the walls yes by night yes he can’t affirm anything no deny anything no so one can’t speak of memories no but at the same time one can speak of them yes

if he talks to himself no thinks no believes in God yes every day no wishes to die yes but doesn’t expect to no he expects to stay where he is yes flat as a cowclap on his belly yes in the mud yes without motion yes without thought yes eternally yes

-Beckett, How it is

She was angry at Ezra Pound because he had sat down too quickly on a small, fragile, and doubtless uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accomodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered.

-Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

[Gertrude Stein] did not want to talk about Anderson’s works any more than she would talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake.

-Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. ANd why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

-Woolf, Jacob’s Room

The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring staring at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.

Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.

After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.

But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologizing perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, “It’s none of my fault,” straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is insoluble.

-Woolf, Jacob’s Room