Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
(Source: emmatleena, via wrapyourtroublesupindreams)
Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves. The work of Ai Weiwei survives; the artist himself has an increasingly difficult life. The poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea by a displeased Augustus Caesar, and spent the rest of his life in a little hellhole called Tomis, but the poetry of Ovid has outlived the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered in Spain, by Generalissimo Franco’s goons, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived the fascistic Falange. So perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.
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The opening lines of The Saviors of God, by Nikos Kazantzakis, begun in 1922 and revised up until 1944. In Greek: Ερχόμαστε από μια σκοτεινή άβυσσο· καταλήγουμε σε μια σκοτεινή άβυσσο· το μεταξύ φωτεινό διάστημα το λέμε Ζωή.
Having just read these lines for the first time, I was immediately reminded of the opening lines of Nabokov’s autobiographical work Speak, Memory, published in 1967, which was a revision of an earlier work from 1951 called Conclusive Evidence: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
(via superfluidity)
a bit of quaint ambivalence
Do you know that feeling? It is quite an odd one—standing here, balanced atop a high fence, a towering wall, stepping cautiously along with a tinge of trepidation in the heart, a slight lurching in the stomach that comes with the thought of losing one’s footing—an odd feeling indeed, of wanting something yet not wanting it at the same time. But I’d much rather remain here, teetering contentedly on the in-between, smiling, swaying as a fragile branch of a tree does in the wind, suspended in the air, unconcerned by the taunting of gravity on both sides. What could be more exhilarating? I am suddenly unafraid of falling; instead, I feel like singing, humming quietly to the rhythm of your gait, the melody of your words—the captivating music to which I am drawn.
Why don’t you climb up, too? You need not to worry, for there is nothing to fear: I’ll show you what the world looks like from up here.
something about the night
He has always dreaded the late hours of the night. At times, he’d rather slip on his earphones and turn up the music, anything to drown out the discomfiting anxiety the night brings, anything to blanket his burgeoning thoughts, in which fears not about the world but about himself stirs from within. There is something about the night, something about the night that makes people think the things they don’t want to think as if tiredness wears away their strength to keep them at bay and they finally catch up. Something about the night brings to surface the vulnerabilities of the innermost mind, the haunting emptiness that is life, and no one but the agonizing silence is there to listen—oh, how the conscience just cries out at this terrible time! The deepest emotions long kept silent throughout the day flow out and, as a writer, he cannot help but write them down—they’re words, they’re words infused with emotion, words he’d rather just shove back to the recesses of his mind yet he can’t afford to lose them because they’re his. He’s held on to them for so long and he must let them go. Release them from his grip, let them pour onto a page, let it slip out of the mind and linger into his dreams, and in the light of the next morning it’ll all appear quite silly and he can move on—at least, he thought, until night creeps in with its insidious darkness, as it always does, the deep, irrepressible sense of vanity within him uncovered once again.
