This gap, this distance (Cusk)

He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion: no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

Destination

Where you thought you were going is the only impossible destination.

A prompting (Cusk)

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

New poems

+8

Those that are absurd (Pessoa)

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Fernando Pessoa

Begins

It all begins when we interpret potential as promise.

Easier

It is far easier to find someone saying what you need to hear than someone to listen to what you need to say.

New poems

+15

New tricks and treats (Grutter)

To find myself wrong is a triumph—not my brilliantly successful defense of yesterday's truth. That I endlessly can become wrong, is that not life's promise never to run out of new tricks and treats?

Theo Grutter, Dancing With Mosquitoes

On society

Society depends upon learned helplessness.

On deconstruction

Deconstruction is merely analysis without synthesis.

The limits

The limits on what we know are set by the extent of what we think.

Full (Yeats)

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

William Butler Yeats

The only wealth (Grutter)

A collection of good relationships may be the only wealth worth striving for.

Theo Grutter, Dancing With Mosquitoes

Who, indeed?

Who can recognize wisdom
who is not himself wise?

To be alive

That's what it is to be alive,
to drift but insist you drive.

Worth it?

It is well to do a thing well. But it doesn't relieve one of the responsibility of judging whether it is a thing worth doing.

Refuge

If you seek a refuge, follow the refugees.