Is it possible to know the truth about ourselves?

 

William H. Gass, quoting Katherine Anne Porter remembering an anecdote about Tolstoy:

It's a marvelous picture.  Tolstoy was merely roaring in the frenzy roused in him in face of his wife's terrible, relentless adoration; her shameless fertility, her unbearable fidelity, the shocking series of jealous revenges she took upon him for his hardness of heart and wickedness to her, the whole mystery of her oppressive femaleness.  He did not know the truth about women, not even about that one who was the curse of his life.  He did not know the truth about himself.  This is not surprising, for no one does know the truth, either about himself or about anyone else, and all recorded human acts and words are open testimony to our endless efforts to know each other, and our failure to do so.


Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America #186)

All love goes by as water to the sea. Le pont Mirabeau by Apollinaire

 

Guillaume Apollinaire

(from Alcools: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series))

Le pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
           Et nos amours
     Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

           Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
           Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
           Tandis que sous
     Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

           Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
           Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
           L'amour s'en va
     Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

           Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
           Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
           Ni temps passé
     Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

           Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
           Les jours s'en vont je demeure

 

Mirabeau Bridge

Translated by Richard Wilbur

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
            Must I recall
     Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again

            Let night come on bells end the day
            The days go by me still I stay

Hands joined and face to face let's stay just so
            While underneath
     The bridge of our arms shall go
Weary of endless looks the river's flow

            Let night come on bells end the day
            The days go by me still I stay

All love goes by as water to the sea
            All love goes by
     How slow life seems to me
How violent the hope of love can be

            Let night come on bells end the day
            The days go by me still I stay

The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken
            Neither time past
     Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

            Let night come on bells end the day
            The days go by me still I stay

 Click here to listen to Apollinaire reading this poem.

In America one feels not solitude but isolations.

From "Liste de Americains," by Charles Dantzig, in his Encyclopedie capricieuse du tout et du rien (French Edition).  Translated from the French by Lorin Stein.

Charles Olson---or was it Melville?---said that America has replaced history with geography.  What makes for boredom, which in America can be so violent, is the unfilled urban space.  In contrast to Europe or Asia, which are stuffed to overflowing, in the United States the population density per square kilometer is very low.  Whence those depressing suburbs, depressing because one can always find a parking place.  In America one feels not solitude but isolations.

They are a people without balconies.  Yet they cannot help interfering in other people's business, according to the Protestant custom.  And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS.  It is a country fascinated by lust.

The terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation

Excerpted from Lewis H. Lapham's essay in Harper's Magazine (subscription required for the whole article).

I’ve tried to live every day in the present tense, piecing together the consolations of philosophy from writers choosing to look death in the face and to draw from the encounter the breath of life. The reluctance to do so I take to be a root cause of most of our twenty-first-century American sorrows (socioeconomic and aesthetic as well as cultural and political), and as a remedy for our chronic states of fear and trembling I know of none better than Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage). ...  A professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, Critchley declares his purpose on the first page of the introduction. Absent a philosophical coming to terms with death, we are, he says,

Led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather old age) sophistries.

....

Where then is the blessing to be found in the wish to live forever? Never before in the history of the world have so many people lived as long, as safely, or as freely as those of us now living in the United States. Never before in the history of the world have so many of those same people made themselves sick with the fears of an imaginary future. We magnify the threat in all the ills the flesh is heir to, surround ourselves with surveillance cameras, declare the war on terror against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun, buy from Bernie Madoff the elixirs of life everlasting. And what is it that we accomplish other than the destruction of our happiness as well as any hope of some sort of sustainable balancing of our account with nature, which, unlike the Obama Administration, isn’t in the business of arranging bailouts?

Absent a coming to terms with death, how do we address the questions of environmental degradation and social injustice certain to denominate the misfortunes of the twenty-first century? Our technologists provide us with new and improved weapons and information systems, our politicians with digitally enhanced sophistry and superstition, but it is from Critchley’s council of dead philosophers that we’re more likely to learn how not to murder ourselves with our fear of the dark.

We all start out as animists.... Objects survive because we need them....

 

Excerpted from Francine Prose's review of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, as it appeared in Harper's Magazine.

We all start out as animists, as toddlers vaguely uncertain about whether our beloved doll or pull-toy puppy might be a living being. When I was a child, my favorite cartoons were those that played to that confusion, films in which toasters or teapots or slippers sprouted legs and faces and revealed their true natures as menacing agents of mayhem and chaos.

In time, we learn to distinguish the creature from the object, and, later, consumer society conditions us to detach ourselves from our stuff so effectively that we can dedicate ourselves to the perpetual quest for nicer stuff and embrace the necessity of regularly exchanging older models for newer ones. But some vestige of the child remains, evidenced by the tenacious hold material things have over us, as objects of desire and, more mysteriously, as personal mementos and totems—as clues to our secret selves, and as signposts along the circuitous route that has taken us from the past into the present. I’ve come to think that the first cartoonist who sketched a threatening kitchen appliance or rebellious shoe might have experienced a recent confrontation with a desk drawer crammed with old letters, business cards, canceled checks, and unlabeled keys defiantly daring their owner to discard them. Objects survive because we need them, or because we are convinced that we need them. The unreconstructed animist will see a Darwinian triumph in the rapidity with which a crumpled boarding pass evolves into an all-important and indispensable detail in the narrative of some meaningful chapter in our lives.

It is increasingly important that we love people and use things, instead of the other way around

Quotations from William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and then defends them in the name of morality.

Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Love measures our stature:  the more we love the bigger we are.  There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.

Those who fear disorder more than injustice invariably produce more of both.

Nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race.

The police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful digestion for the rich.

Hell is truth seen too late.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

There are people and things in this world, and people are to be loved and things are to be used. And it is increasingly important that we love people and use things, for there is so much in our gadget minded, consumer-oriented society that is encouraging us to love things and use people.


Once to Every Man: a Memoir