dataobscura

The hours of August still wind you
in scents of the mild garden air,
Ivy and speedwell still bind you
A wreath for your wind-tangled hair.

Like gold is the wavering wheat, though
Perhaps less exultant and full,
Late-blooming roses still great, though
The sheen of their colours grew dull.

Then let us conceal what defies us
And turn to felicity, for
The one thing which is not denied us
Is walking together once more.

Stefan George
from The Year of the Soul (1897)
(trans Olga Marx & Ernst Morwitz)

Surrounded by a void,
as a constellation is by space,
with infinite distance between its luminous points,
its timeless manifestation of itself.

So in complete calm,
in dead perfection,
lives the Truth about the great Nothing.
The soul of the void.

Like a constellation
named after an utterly forgotten divinity.

Pär Lagerkvist
(trans W.H. Auden)

“April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1914

Words have beautiful dead sweethearts
on whose graves they sometimes lay flowers.

Edmond Jabès
(trans.)

A writer is somebody for whom writing
is more difficult than it is for other people.

Hermann Hesse

 
While old photogrphs fill out our mental image
of the past, the photographs being taken now
transform what is present into a mental image,
like the past.

Susan Sontag
(from The Image World 1977)