Oh, What A Happy Fate, To Sit In The Silent Room Of An Ancestral House Among The Quiet Things In Their
Oh, what a happy fate, to sit in the silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places, and to hear the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock. To sit and gaze upon a warm strip of afternoon sunlight and to know a great deal about girls from the past and to be a poet. And to think that I too might have become such a poet if I had been able to live somewhere, anywhere on earth, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one looks after. I would have required only one room (the sunny room under the gables). There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written.
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
More Posts from Sayingounprovoked and Others
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”
— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”
But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?
— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”
“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
doomed by the narrative but not to death. doomed to survive. doomed to stay alive inside the story. doomed to never escape the narrative, not even through death. you are allowed no exit. there is no way out for you and there never was. you couldn’t die if you wanted to. the narrative has a hold on you and it won’t let go. death is too sweet a doom for you. the story has something much worse in mind. there is no way out.
une passion pour jeanne d’arc, stella tennant by paolo roversi for vogue paris february 1994
Sketch
oh my favorite trope? two people who go through something so unique and agonizing and entirely beyond words that they have no choice but to create a bond that transcends all other types of love, thus acting as the sole point of understanding for the other person in a world that cannot fathom what they’ve been through
did you let me die in your arms in the timeloop
Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think I know. It is surprising what you learn that way. Some of the words turn out to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound can make you ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
from "The Gender of Sound" by Anne Carson
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