How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty.

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, p. 102.

Would it not be a beautiful thing, now, if you were just coming rather than going?'

Gaelic saying

“Fell a sheet of water mad With its own delight”

george macdonald, phantastes, p.193.

They are all doing what working-class people always do, wherever they find themselves and however unpromising their situation may appear; they are exercising their strong traditional urge to make life intensely human, to humanize it in spite of everything and so to make it, not simply bearable, but positively interesting. To some extent this is true of most people in any class, but is an attitude particularly encouraged by the nature of working-class life. Working-class people are only rarely interested in theories of movements. They do not usually think of their lives as leading to an improvement in status or to some financial goal. They are enormously interested in people: they have the novelist's fascination with individual behaviour, with relationships though not so as to put them into a pattern, but for their own sake. 'Isn't she queer?'; "Fancy saying a thing like that!' "What do you think she meant by that?' they say; even the simplest anecdote is told dramatically, with a wealth of rhetorical questions, supplementary illustrations, significant pauses, and alternations of pitch.

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p.106.

“As though some title could confirm who you are. Some house or car could prove your worth. I suppose that it works for some. Men think it attracts women, I suppose, but what type of man is that? And what type of woman is that, JP? Be thankful to God for what you've got, I say, and stop all the time chasing after the next new shiny thing. Sure, that makes us no better than the magpie.” audrey magee, The colony p. 117 

Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair rests on the distinction between a human being and a self. A human being, he explains, is a synthesis of opposites: “of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.” But this he continues, “is not yet a self.” To be a self, a human being—who is already a composite of relations—must develop a relationship to itself. This involves both consciousness and desire. Relating to ourselves means being aware (or unaware) of ourselves and wanting (or not wanting) to be ourselves. It also means recognizing that we did not cause or create ourselves. We are brought into being and sustained in existence by something other than ourselves [...] For Kierkegaard, people who fall into despair are spiritually disconnected from themselves: There is nothing in their lives that holds together that entire composite of relations that makes them who they are. [...] Especially compelling is his diagnosis of the different forms of despair that arise from an imbalance between the various pairs that make up the human synthesis (those first folds in our sheets of paper). Too much necessity, and we lose all imagination and hope—we cannot breathe; too much possibility, and we float airily, ineffectually, above our own lives. Too much finitude, and we lose ourselves in trivial things; too much infinitude, and we’re disconnected from the world. Since life is so rarely in balance, despair is the inevitable state—but understanding this, for Kierkegaard, opens up a renewed perspective on how to live with this inevitability/ [...] Kierkegaard explains that balancing infinitude and finitude involves a double movement of reaching out to God while also staying fully invested in the present moment. Through this process, the self becomes entirely present and simultaneous…with itself in that small portion of the task that can be accomplished right now, so that in being infinitized, it in the strictest sense comes back to itself, so that in being farthest away from itself (when it is most infinitized in purpose and decision) it is at that same instant nearest itself in accomplishing that infinitely small portion of the work which can be accomplished even today, even at this hour, even at this instant.

Clare Carlisle, Søren Kierkegaard Dared to Ask | The Nation

One of the greatest weapons of capitalism is its ability to confuse

John McGrath, programme note to Swings and Roundabouts, quoted in ‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’ by Elizabeth MacLennan, p.89.

The important thing in any creative act is joy - W.H. Auden 

language, a great, oxymoronic wizardry which simultaneously captures and obfuscates, declares and reduces, signifies and misses. Language creates a membrane between the world and reality, trapping humankind within a subjective womb; herein lies the separation between human and nature; therein the separation between human and human. [...] And who else can say that language is not humankind’s greatest attempt to make love with the world; to be in relation with all of it at all times, with one another, to be understood, to be heard, to be. Who cannot say that they have never been moved by language? Called by language? Truth exists in the belly of changeability; the descent begins when the ore of meaning turns cold, turns sharp, stays.

Rachel DonaldThe Written Word or the Written World?

A toy is a trap for dreamers.  [...] These are dreams that a child would know. Dreams in which objects are renamed and invested with imaginary lives. [...] In that world one plays the game of being someone else. This is what Cornell is after... How to construct a vehicle of reverie, an object that would enrich the imagination of the viewer and keep him company forever.

Charles Simic on Joseph Cornell

"You think an artist's job is to speak the truth. An artist's job is to captivate you, for however long we've asked for your attention. If we stumble into truth we get lucky."

The West Wing from a fictional US poet laureate played by Laura Derne Why It's Never Been Harder to Make a Living as a Writer

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance.

Alain de Botton

Innovative literature happens where people have room to play, and it happens where no one is watching. It happens among groups that initially aren’t taken seriously. . . . It happens in darkness. And after a while, people become aware of it. And after an even longer while, it’s called literature. That’s a good thing. That is the way of the world. Mushrooms and literature grow in the shade, but eventually must enter the cold light of day to be eaten by yuppies at $14 a pound.

Patrician Lockwood, quoted in 30 Years of Writing on the Internet by Megan Marz, 2023.

call it a love song. i’ll get the bathtub ready. i’m in. we in ceramic. let’s say black. i’m bp you’re shell. we all in. we in the black. we both in a barrel. call it a village. we both in the pumping. the people no get no nothing. no crabs in the river. no periwinkles to pick. no day de pas where they no dey cry suffer dis kind suffer like dis. we no care for them. i just want you to seep. blacken my lot.

Gboyega Odubanjo, Oil Music SEPTEMBER 2023 – Rebel Library

“the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep [a writer who is writing for their own wellbeing] from falling into the gutters”

-Henry Adams quoted in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, p.82.

In the _Confessions_, Augustine realizes that hubris must inevitably end in failure; he must, therefore, eschew the things of this world. Bute autobiography is born out of hubris, it requires that the self be woven into the very design of material society. In [Benjamin] Frankoins case, his autobiography grows out of the hubris of America's emerging pwoer - its myths and ideals - a power that actually thrives on mistakes. [...] Autobiography amplifies that power: since a person is literally creating a new being, he can smooth out the rough transitions in his life, clean up the mistakes, to produce a polished and attractive literary self. The writer presents his life as he thinks it should have been. Thus, every autobiography is in some ways a declaration of independance, as the writer bids farewell to his baggy historical self, embracing a new, tidy, authorized and public one. It is an act of willful liberation. [paraphrasing rest: benjamin franklin invented autobiography where his fictional self became fact. He measures himself against the american constitution throughout that text. Constitution is vital to this narrative when the story of self is shifting. To show it is constituted, turned by values, not whimsy]

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, pp.76-7.

With the alphabet both text and self became possible, but only slowly, and they became the social construct on which we found all our perception as literate people.

Writing the history of the self is as difficult as writing the history of the text.

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, pp.72-3.