marginalia

When I relinquish all thought of the self as is and cultivate the gaze of pure objectivity, then for the first time, as a figure in a painting, I attain a beautiful harmony with the natural phenomena around me.  The instant I revert to thoughts of my distress at the falling rain and the weariness of my legs, I lose my place in the world of the poem or painting.

—Natsume Soseki, from Kusamakura
    Picture from My Neighbor Totoro

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends.  And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flair in the darkness, a darkness that’s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.

—Roberto Bolano, “Friends are strange”
    Picture from Castle in the Sky

I understood that the decisive events of our lives are moments of stillness and silence, and that behind the visible, sensible events there lies another level, where something lazy is slumbering, a sleeping monster lodged under the sea or deep in the forest, in the heart of man, a dozy monster, some primeval creature, that rarely shifts itself, that yawns and stretches but rarely reaches for anything, and that this too is you, this monster, this otherness.

—Sandor Marai, Portraits of a Marriage
    Picture from Spirited Away

“The long days seduce all thought away, and we live like lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.”

—By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart
    Picture from My Neighbor Totoro

“I realize that the child I was, quick to love and quick to be hurt, was very lucky.  I walked on the mirror of a river of coiling snakes and dancing butterflies.  I played in orchards that in their robust old age were giving fruit.  I hid among reeds under the care of creatures strong as oaks and sensitive as birds.”

—Rene Char; picture from My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki