“‘There will come a time,’ I told him, ‘when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten, and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it’s millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, you should ignore it, because God knows that’s what everyone else does.’”
-John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
“Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day and tonight they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wing tip passing over.”
-Up in the Air
TV taught me how to feel.
Now real life has no appeal.
Poetry
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that, for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
(Robert Frost)
at first, we couldn’t put our finger on what was wrong. and i think we eventually decided that nothing was wrong, at least nothing more than usual, nothing for us to touch here. once more we kept our hands to ourselves. we have overestimated our knowledge of each other, our willingness to breach and be breached. i’m reminded of generations of rivers carving canyons into rocks, but i am only your first deluge. the myth about the flood in every desert culture goes like this: “it will save us. it will destroy us all.” one day you will look up at the sound of rolling thunder. will your sands be washed away?
(anonymous)
it is at moments after i have dreamed
it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed
with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds
the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;
moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:
one pierced moment whiter than the rest
-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.
(e.e. Cummings)
A Little Love Poem
Someone who hates scrabble.
Someone who sleeps on her back near an open window in winter, her breath rolling like a river into night.
Someone who wants me to wake her in the morning by reading ee cummings’ love poems, giving a small candle-flicker of a smile just before opening her eyes.
Someone who appreciates the architecture of churches, but refuses to step inside.
Someone who has hands fit to hold hurt sparrows and robins.
Someone who would swerve a new car into the ditch to avoid a frog crossing the road.
Someone who would tattoo my name on her arm in writing the same colour as her skin, so it would appear slowly from nowhere when she suntanned, people thinking her blood was telling secrets to the world of its own accord.
Someone who learned Spanish to read Marquez, or Lorca, or Neruda.
Someone whose hips whisper their own stories of the serpent and the garden of Eden.
Someone whose smallest movements amaze me: her hair falling over her eyes, the soft swell of her hips when she lies down, a deep sigh when she sleeps.
Someone who burns through my chest like that first shot of scotch.
Someone who practises her signature with her wrong hand, in case of accidents or a sudden arrest.
Someone whose fingernails smell faintly of her hair.
Someone who reminds me of the soft tickle of fog.
Someone who would rush outside in the middle of the night, setting a spider onto the lawn, never admitting it’s because she hates rain.
Someone who understands the unforgivable importance of ravens.
Someone who has searched for me like a near-sighted woman groping for her glasses, stubbing her toes and swearing in Yiddish.
Someone who would just happen to cut my wrist shortly after reading Ondaatje’s “The Time Around Scars. “
Someone who’ll stare softly but straight at me, smiling reassuringly when I tell her how my 73 year old Medieval lit prof looked up from Chaucer, stared blankly over the class’s heads and said that even the happiest marriage will end in death.
Someone who understands the efficiency inherent in suicide.
Someone who knows that love can be the thickest slice of hell we’ll ever taste.
Someone who would dance with me by the sides of highways.
(Andy Weaver)
