Repetition

Is this really all there is—
A perpetual state of
nerves, nerves, nerves?

The Initiation

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

— T.S. Eliot

children's hour

les jeunes

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gantlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan's steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

— J. Joyce

Und die Versammeln Erde

seulement

I opened like a locket,
If you're ever cold, I wrote,
there's warmth inside me,
I'm the pocket of an old winter coat,

But where she used to say
I need you,
more rather,
I don't.

— A. Weiss

narcissus

this breath i wear
on my wrists

and,

the abyss i love
from which
i struggle to emerge

The vigil

It is the privilege of loneliness;
in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing—this susceptibility—in [] society; not weeping at the right time, or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought...Why, Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which...had exhausted him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip, of one impression after another down into that cellar where [he] stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one's breath away, these moments; there coming to him...one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death...

— V. Woolf

alas

What will be my fate...is very simple. My...dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me. But the strength I can muster for that portrayal is not to be counted upon: perhaps it has already vanished forever, perhaps it will come back to me again, although the circumstances of my life don't favor its return. Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that very purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying.

— F. Kafka

The Morning After

Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don't understand,
it dies, or it's me, I don't understand, that either.
I ask the words that remain—sleeping, waking, morning, evening.
They have nothing to say.

— S. Beckett