marginalia

Someone hands you an English thriller,
highly recommended.
You don’t read English.

You’ve worked up a thirst
for something you can’t afford.

You have deep insights,
brand new, and they sound
like an academic glossing Holderlin.

You hear the waves at night
ramping against the shore
and you think: that’s what waves do.

Worse: you’re asked out
when at home you get better coffee,
silence, and you don’t expect to be amused.

Awful: not to die in summer
under a bright sky
when the rich dirt
falls easily from the shovel.

—Gottfied Benn, This is Bad
    Picture from Out of the Past

What I made of myself, I shouldn’t have,
And what I could have made of myself, I didn’t.

—Fernando Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos, Tobacco Shop
    Picture: Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past

“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief”
— William Faulkner; picture from Out of the Past

“What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.”
–-Carl Jung