As if your hand fumbling to reach inside
reached inside

As if light falling on the surface
fell on what made the surface

As if there were no scarcity of sun
on the sun

Frank Bidart, “The Third Hour of the Night”, in Star Dust

His friend displayed too much pleasure for the two of them, and not enough for him alone.

Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education

It grew at that slant
alone, down there
beneath the cordons
of pitch pines
some lapse in definition
unsteadying
the trunk state—
the bristled shot branch
deposits its blossoms through branches.
The parts have no proportion why not?
They cannot be counted why not?
They make the thing whole?
It grew at that slant.
Tints flashing up
from the buds
from the scaling off
barks, sap in the germ-slots of cones.
It had to stoop to come up.
A thing can’t be saved from its parts?
It had to be blunt.
It grew at that slant.
And blooms back up in the branches.

Emily Wilson, “Prospect”, in Micrographia

By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves in me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself. It is not granted him to exist without tending toward this being which will never be.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

V E I L,—as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
high at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see

catches, clinging to its physiognomy.

Frank Bidart, “The Poem Is a Veil”, in Star Dust

[The] effort to proclaim the grand homogeneity of work has commanded, for different reasons, the support of remarkably numerous and diverse groups. To economists, it has seemed a harmless and, indeed, an indispensable simplification. It has enabled them to deal homogeneously with all of the different kinds of productive effort and to elaborate a general theory of wages applying to all who receive an income for services. Doubts have arisen from time to to time, but they have been suppressed or considered to concern special cases. The identity of all classes of labor is one thing on which capitalist and Communist doctrine wholly agree. The president of the corporation is pleased to think that his handsomely appointed, comfortably upholstered office is the scene of the same kind of toil as the assembly line and that only the greater demands in talent and intensity justify his wage differential. The Communist officeholder could not afford to have it supposed that his labor differed in any significant respect from that of the comrade at the lathe or on the collective farm with whom he was ideologically one. In both societies, it served the democratic conscience of the more favored groups to identify themselves with those who do hard physical labor. A lurking sense of guilt over a more pleasant, agreeable, and remunerative life can often be assuaged by the observation, “I am a worker too,” or, more audaciously, by the statement that “mental labor is far more taxing than physical labor.” Since the man who does physical labor is intellectually disqualified from comparing his toil with that of the brainworker, the proposition, though outrageous, is uniquely unassailable.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

Boys have long been under pressure to shed what the sociologist Laura Carpenter has called the “stigma of virginity.” But maybe more American boys are now waiting because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.

Amy T. Schalet, “Caring, Romantic American Boys”

A person has other concerns, but at each moment in its life, a cat has only one concern. This is what gives it such perfect balance, and this is why the spectacle of a confused or frightened cat upsets us: we feel both pity and the desire to laugh. It faces the source of danger or confusion and its only recourse is to spit a foul breath out between its mottled gums.

Lydia Davis, “The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall”, in Almost No Memory

Once, changing vehicles beside some tennis courts at Bayonne, in France, I turned an ignition key and found myself hearing the Four Serious Songs, by Brahms.

Though I am possibly thinking about the Four Last Songs, by Richard Strauss.

In either event it was not Kathleen Ferrier singing.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress