“The earthgod went outside again, feeling rather strange, with his mouth all slack and crooked. Then he tried putting a hand inside the pocket of the fox's raincoat as he lay there limp and lifeless. The pocket contained two brown burrs, the kind foxes comb their fur with. From the earthgod's mouth came the most extraordinary sound, and he burst into tears.
The tear fell like rain on the fox, and the fox lay there dead, with his head lolling limper and limper and the faintest of smiles on his face."
“If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.”
"Irrational surplus, or the ineliminable and beautiful danger of unconscious creative energy: nature with fangs. How do we hold on to this thought? It is perpetually threatened by collapse; by a reversion to a depressive philosophy of work, whether theological or humanistic.
The three great strands of post-Kantian exploration - marked by the names Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer - are constantly tempted by the prospect of a reduction to forgotten or implicit labour; to the agency of God, spirit, or man, to anything that would return this ruthless artistic force of the generative unconscious to design, intention, project, teleology. Kant's word 'genius' is the immensely difficult and confused but emphatic resistance to such reductions; the thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is historically registered as the radical discontinuity of the example, of irresponsible legislation, as 'order' without anyone giving the orders."
“Il inventa pour le Jeu des Perles de Verre les principes d’un langage nouveau, d’une langue faite de signes et de formules, dans laquelle les mathématiques et la musique eurent une part égale, où il devint possible d’associer les formules astronomiques et musicales, et de réduire en somme à un dénominateur commun les mathématiques et la musique."
“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . . ”
“I landed on the international airport at Sheremetevo some twenty miles from Moscow just before sundown. The air was surprisingly warm, the light like olive oil laying a gloss on the slender pines and birches of the woods that still crowd in on the capital. The calm was immense and not a shiver of air stirred the frail branches. Beyond the trees rose neither mountains, hills, mounds, nor even towers. On such level earth in so level an evening the sky achieved its fullness of space and height. And that, too, was very Russian.”
"In the centre of the day, tossed among the shoal of travelling sardines in a coleopter with a big white carapace, a chicken with a long, featherless neck suddenly harangued one, a peace-abiding one, of their number, and its parlance, most with protest, was unfolded upon the airs. Then, attracted by a void, the fledgling precipated itself thereunto.
In a bleak, urban desert, I saw it again that self-same day, drinking the cup of humiliation offered by a lowly button."
"The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world."
"At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one cold escape the inexorable stare of
Medusa. The only hero able to cut off Medusa's head is Perseus, who flied with winged sandal; Perseus who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield...On the relationship between
Perseus and Medusa, we can learn something more from Ovid's
"So that the rough sand should not harm the snake-haired head, he makes the ground soft with a bed of leaves, and on top of that he strews little branches of plants born under water, and on this he places Medusa's head, face down."
I think that lightness of which Perseus is the hero, could not be better represented than by this gesture of refreshing courtesy toward a being so monstrous and terrifying and yet at the same time somehow fragile and perishable.
But the most unexpected thing is the miracle that follows: when they touch Medusa, the little marine plants turn into coral and the nymphs, in order to have coral for adornments, rush to bring sprigs and seaweed to the terrible head."
"The Great Khan owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all the cities: those whose walls rest on solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares' holes gape...The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name. There is the city in the shape of Amsterdam, a semicircle facing north, with concentric canals - the princes' the emperor's, the nobles'; there is a city in the shape of York, set among the high moors, bristling with towers; there is the city in the shape of New Amsterdam known also as New York, crammed with towers of glass and steel on an oblong island between two rivers, with streets like deep canals, all of them straight, except Broadway.
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhause their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Kyoto-Osaka, without shape."