Pages

Friday, September 11, 2015

from "Ready-Made Bouquet" by Dean Young

... Loving someone who does not
love you may lead to writing impenetrable poems
and/or staying awake until dawn, drawn to airy,
azure rituals of space ships and birds.
Some despairs may be relieved by other despairs

as in not knowing how to pay for psychoanalysis,
as in wrecking your car as in this poem. Please
pass me another quart of kerosene. A cygnet
is a baby swan. Hat rack, cheese cake, mold.
The despair of wading through a river at night

towards a cruel lover is powerfully evoked
in Chekhov's story "Agafya." The heart seems
designed for despair especially if you study
embryology while being in love with your lab
partner who lets you kiss her under the charts
of organelles but doesn't respond yet

later you think she didn't not respond either
which fills you with idiotic hope very like
despair just as a cloud can be very like
a cannon, the way it starts out as a simple
tube then ties itself in a knot. The heart,
I mean.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Great Thinkers on Solitude

“In solitude, we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.” Explained Virginia Woolf.

“Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.” Professed Ingmar Bergman.

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Wrote Charlotte Brontë.

Jules Verne disagreed: “Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.”

Rainer Maria Rilke encouraged: "Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” According to Thomas Mann.

And according to Aldous Huxley: "The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

The religion of Henry David Thoreau: “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Laurence Sterne: “In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.”

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” Albert Einstein believed.

“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.” So sayeth Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Solitude is the place of purification.” Preached Martin Buber.

“Solitude is independence.” — Hermann Hesse.

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” Claimed Stendhal.

Rainer Maria Rilke, again on the topic: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

Robert Louis Stevenson felt that: "There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” Said Harold Bloom.

Perhaps he was reiterating Marcel Proust’s idea that: “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

“I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.” Insisted Franz Kafka.

Mary Shelley explained: “Solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”

Guy de Maupassant countered: “Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms.”

Speaking of peopling the void with phantoms, Bohumil Hrabal once wrote: “I can be by myself because I’m never lonely; I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

"Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone.” Revealed Lord Byron.

“Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.” The words of Joseph Roux.

Paul Tillich: “Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.”

Or, as May Sarton put it: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“Solitude sometimes is best society.” Admitted John Milton.

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” Thought Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.” Asserted Octavio Paz.

Aristotle explained: “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

Jean-Paul Sartre: “God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”

via The Scofield, Issue 1.1, Summer, 2015