Skip to main content

Five Remarks

1.  The Monument

Always once -- here once sat (always) -- here is the monument.  The moment could have been embellished with light and adorned by the form of gods.  Desire quickens it until it has meaning, and on that spot, in what is now empty as space and still as time, they erected the memory.  That there would be a memory is their legacy's erection.

2. All But

The desert is a collection of sand and hills of sand.  It offers space at the behest of an unknown benefactor to a nameless god.  The wind is a voice, still singing the old song -- but breathlessly.  It exhales and it sighs, it hums and soughs.  Though it is a spirit -- though it is a memory -- repetition without rebirth, idleness but not recreation, echo without voice, sound save for thought.

3. A Tableau of Emotions

The desert is a tableau of emotions felt then passing.  They have drifted and accumulate.  In the sun they are made as pure as time.

4.  Faith

The desert is a belief -- the desert is a faith.  It hardly matters that these still regions once surged with froth and foam -- that green clothed the hills as distinctly as blue is a raiment for the sky.  It was shaggy and infested -- it groaned with propagation -- it was beset by breeze and dusk.  Then the flowers held back the blaze of the sun and the water made a reservoir of heat to decorate white ice.  Eggs were laid and hatched where the fish all swarmed.

5.  Shadows

All the men in the room were the shadows of other men -- but even those men were only the shadows of their shadows.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sample Essay On Shakespeare's Fifth Sonnet (For My Students)

The theme of Shakespeare’s 5 th Sonnet is saving time. In the poem, Shakespeare talks about how time makes beautiful things ugly. He compares growing old to the way that summer changes into winter. Though in the summer there are many beautiful flowers, in the winter all of these beautiful flowers are gone and there is “bareness every where” (8). The winter is so empty that we could almost forget there had ever been flowers at all – if we didn’t “distil” (13) the beauty of summer to make perfume. What Shakespeare means is that we need to find a way to remember being young (the summer) so that when we are older (in winter) we will still be able to remember being happy. We could do this by having children, who will look like us and make us remember who we were when we were young. I just explained the theme of Shakespeare’s poem and summarized the poem. Now I will talk about how he communicates his theme. First, Shakespeare uses metonymy to help us understand how beautiful we ar...

Genre -- In General

I've spent a bit of time recently watching YouTube videos related to the question of what makes something an RPG.  Since studying literary theory in college, I've become skeptical that you can give clean-cut definitions of the various genres.  I think two works belong to the same genre if they are similar enough across various dimensions.  The problem with similarity is that it's vague.  Everything is similar to everything else in some way, just on a general metaphysical level, and once you get to the products of human culture, each of them is much more like each of the others than it is different.  So arguments about genre tend to fixate on arbitrarily selected differences the importance of which are then magnified to the level of dogma. I believe there is no one difference that will always make X a member of genre G rather than genre G'.  The products of culture are descriptively rich, and there are any number of relevant features that make our experien...

An Empty Gesture

He finds that with propriety he cannot write about his own life.  He acts against people, but he would not make those people conscious witnesses of his actions.  He seals himself away from others, both by the barriers he places in their way and by the silence he erects to guard those barriers.  It is the assault of an animal -- the very thought is contained in the action, and the thought is nothing besides, or at least has no other expression than, that action. To the departed: it was a matter of drifting, it was a matter of harm.  The harm became a wound, the wound scarred, the scar is a rift.  I think of it like a gap that fills up with all the hostilities of the world.  It is something radical and diseased, and I want no part of it.  I also would like to be someone else.  There is now what is for me an insurmountable investment of pain required to cross it, so I would rather call it a loss.  But I feel the pain enough to remark it. ...