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"It is a glorious summer, and I often sit up in the trees of Lotle’s orchard and take down with a long pole the pears from the highest branches. She stands below and catches them when I lower the pole.” Werther is telling his story, ready and speaks in the present tense, but his scene already has the vocation of a remembrance; in an under- tone, the imperfect tense murmurs behind this present. One day, I shall recall the scene, I shall lose myself in the past. The amorous scene, like the first ravishment, consists only of after-the-fact manipulations: this is anamnesis, which recovers only insignificant features in no way dramatic, as if I remembered time itself and only time: it is a fragrance without support, a texture of memory; something like a pure expenditure, Japanese haiku has been able to such as only the articulate, without
recuperating it in any destiny.
(To gather the figs from the high branches in the garden in B., there was a long bamboo pole and a tin funnel stamped with rosettes that was fastened to it: this childhood memory functions in the same way as an amorous one.)
There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we must return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you—a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away.
"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
can't believe i read this a decade ago without really paying attention to the socialism part. i could have been converted A DECADE AGO
though tbh I don't really agree with his pro-Christianity points but the argument isn't bad for people who are pro-Christian
[...] we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, "Wait till you can see what your computer can become." But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
(I assume that by work he doesn't necessarily mean that which is exploited by the capitalist, but rather, what you accomplish in your life)
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favourite joke.
oh man I remember this from when I first read it!!! memory lane etc
i think i actually read this book BEFORE he died which makes it even harder to read this passage now
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.
I CAN'T BELIEVE I DIDN'T LOOK UP IN THESE TIMES BEFORE. OMG. TALK ABOUT WASTED OPPORTUNITY. I COULD HAVE READ IT + WRITTEN SOMETHING FOR THEM AGES AGO
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity--the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I felt like doing it.
She lived in so many places, experienced so much—it was enough to fill several lives. We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, or early molestation, or a rapturous love affair, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling, or a tedious job, difficult fellow workers, a demanding boss, or a deceitful friend, not to speak of awe in the presence of the natural world—Hereford cattle knee deep in Indian paintbrush, a field of bluebonnets, a pink rocket flower growing in the alley behind a hospital. Because we have known some part of it, or something like it, we are right there with her as she takes us through it.
Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn’t see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays.
She died on a Monday and I never went back to the San Juan. The super found her. I don’t know how.
Oh ho ho ho, Mrs. Robinson. He has over two thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment and five records. Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and three Beatles.
lmao