Category Archives: quotes

books, quotes

You see that can?

Sometimes there are so many things to say that you don’t know where to start.

I’ll say this: I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan for a book club, and here is my favorite anecdote so far.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or the sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Brittany was not as industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class – this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were suppose to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me – “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”

He found this incident highly amusing – I less so.

– Jacques Lacan, The Line And Light, “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

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books, quotes

me and the deer both dead

My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams’ truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.

– John Updike, TOWARDS THE END OF TIME

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quotes, writing

heroism

“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

– More David Foster “I Have Dara’s Initials” Wallace, quoted in this article, which is so good. I have never before posted 3 quotes from an article before reading the whole thing. Who is this “D.T. Max” person? Only one of the best article writers ever, obviously. He has also, beside having written this amazing DFW article, written a book on fatal familial insomnia. (D.T., not DFW.) So, so, good.

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quotes, writing

an abyss of loneliness

“…just as often the entries record a kind of spiritual desolation and profound isolation. The actress Hope Lange, with whom Cheever had an on-and-off affair, once said that he was the horniest man she had ever known, and sexual avidity is certainly omnipresent in the journals. They include graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, real and imagined, with members of both sexes, as well as anguished attempts to hide or rationalize or excuse his attraction to men. But what comes through most strongly is not so much lust as all-purpose yearning: for a gentle touch, a moment of closeness — for love. The journals are often so thrillingly well written that you can’t put them down, and yet there are pages where you feel you ought to look away. Reading them is like peering over someone’s shoulder into an abyss of loneliness.”

– Charles McGrath on John Cheever in the NYT Sunday magazine

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poetry, quotes

practicing the art at its highest levels

“When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being “mean” rather than as evidence of poetry’s health; we stop assuming that poems should be interesting to other people and begin thinking of them as being obliged only to interest our friends — and finally, not even that. Perhaps most disturbing, we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels.”

– David Orr, “On Poetry: The Great(ness) Game,” NYT via Jason at Bookslut, with a roundup of naysayers to all this greatness-is-so-great business.
(Addendum: I finally looked at poet-critic Jason’s own blog, and he turned me on to Dropbox, an app for syncing documents. Now that’s some greatness. )

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books, quotes

too much to be known

“Certum est,” I murmured, “quia impossibile est.”
“What’s that?” the young man asked. He did not know Latin. But, then, he might say, those who know Latin do not know the language of computers. We all know, relatively, less and less, in this world where there is too much to be known, and too little hope of its adding up to anything.
” ‘It is certain,’ I translated, ” ‘because it is impossible.’ Tertullian.”‘

– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION. I haven’t been able to get myself to return this book to the library. It’s too good.

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quotes, theater, writing

sink to the bottom

“JED: I just gave him a smile colder’n the Cumberland River and watched him sink to the bottom.”

– Robert Schenkkan, “God’s Great Supper,” THE KENTUCKY CYCLE

Schenkkan is a playwright who worked closely with a number of directors I know from my assisting days. I’d heard a lot about this work – nine short plays all set on and around the same contested plot of land in Eastern Kentucky – but never read it, until yesterday. It has enough murders in it for a television show, and so much sad history of the United States that, after reading it, I almost didn’t want to look outside. Smallpox-infested blankets. Civil War debts. Coal mining. Union strikes. Marriages and children and two families killing each other like Mark Twain.

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quotes, writing

some conceit

“You’ve got to feel that it’s not just some conceit. It’s got to be inside you. I’m very cautious about starting anything without letting time go, and feeling it’s got to come out. I’m quite good at not writing. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I’m a hesitater.”

– Novelist Ian McEwan, on writing, in the 2/23 New Yorker. I can’t find the article online.

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