Tag: modernist

  • October 26th, 2012 11:31pm

    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.

    — Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales (via andredoinel)

  • October 26th, 2012 11:18pm

    We cannot know his legendary head
    with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
    is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
    like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

    gleams in all its power. Otherwise
    the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
    a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
    to that dark center where procreation flared.

    Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
    beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
    and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

    would not, from all the borders of itself,
    burst like a star: for here there is no place
    that does not see you. You must change your life.

    — “Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • October 5th, 2012 2:25pm

    No, what my heart will be is a tower,
    and I will be right out on its rim:
    nothing else will be there, only pain
    and what can’t be said, only the world.

    Only one thing left in the enormous space
    that will go dark and then light again,
    only one final face full of longing,
    exiled into what is always full of thirst,

    only one farthest-out face made of stone,
    at peace with its own inner weight,
    which the distances, who go on ruining it,
    force on to deeper holiness.

    — The Solitary Man by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • September 18th, 2012 6:45pm

    It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all of the living and the dead.

    — James Joyce – “The Dead” Dubliners.