After Gide

1

Value is the layered feeling that envelops action.

2

In each day, a central action, from which order and heft can grow.

3

We become, yet this becoming takes place in a field of sensibility―‍true freedom emerges from the exploration of its limits. Boundlessly bounded, we can act in a direction.

4

Even the perfunctory exercise-exertion can call upon a hidden nerve plexus.

5

A well-loved idea is never discarded. The unconscious is a cunning smuggler.

6

Every problem thrust our way must be assimilated in the refracting atmosphere of our greater vision.

7

From onomatopoeia to the creation of a style, there is an ongoing need for exteriorization. Style, in its farther reaches, is the act of self-understanding.

8

Concrete pains are not always expressed through familiar terms. They may take on the form of a semicolon, of an unexpected omission, or of a jarring and insistent assonance in an otherwise uplifting passage. Time establishes proportion. We play with adequacy―‍if at all.

9

The supreme distinction and blemish of a virtuoso performance is that of reaching a dead end. The crowd will marvel once and resent the captivity later.

10

The seriousness of artists mingles inextricably with levity. In their hands, philosophical systems, scientific theories, and complete theologies become malleable, which irresistibly conjures up the temptation to distort. Thus, the dignitaries from whom they borrow are destined to misinterpret them.

11

Our works can be truly ours only when the fog of attachment gives way to the clear contours of foreignness. We become lucid when we are willing to forego the habit of privileged access.

12

To become the world at hand, one sinks into the elemental.

13

Justification is in the work or it is nowhere. Yet it is no small tonic to presuppose oneself condemned.

14

Self-forgetfulness is not the highest state of creation. If one endures repossession and the subsequent torpor, there is the light-footed lucidity of the marginal.

15

At a sufficient level of abstraction, perhaps that of geometry, all lives resemble one another. Only obsession, the begetter of symbols, animates identity and difference at a human scale.

16

Without carefully defined hatreds, there is no foreground.

17

A choice: the bridge that would save the abyss or the searchlight. Love or imagination.

18

Tensions reveal that ideas have come to life, that their generic outline has been repurposed for the jagged terrains of embodied consciousness. Harmony betrays the approach of a select window-shopper, always in tune with seasonal discounts and upcoming trends.

19

Why do lovers forget? To add texture to time, to ritualize its incomprehensible passing. Why do consumers forget? To enclose time in a solipsistic nostalgia. Lovers love. Consumers consumed.

20

The great rhythms of our loves: like waves toward the coast, we gather our lust, we explode in the heights, then gently recede; like rain toward the earth, we saturate ourselves with desire, we fall, then percolate to the utmost depths. Satiety is the confinement of lucidity to the orgasm.

21

Our gains and our losses hinge on our power to evoke.

22

We become spacious for the fruits of pleasure and restricted for those of discipline.

23

An instance of grace: the idea that shelters under our greatest frailty.

24

In every contact we add relief to time. Solitude is the tangential light.

25

Pride defeats the purpose of loneliness, which is to vanish into the background of impersonality.

26

Each generation declaims what it has achieved, and it is the suspicion of rote memorization that leads newcomers to test for life. They never find it. To have achieved is an irremediable configuration of the past. And life manifests itself to the newcomer as a stance toward the present.

27

Longevity to everything that reveals itself as it crumbles, to everything that suggests how it is to be rebuilt.

28

There exists a form of beauty that could silence us, but most must wait for death.

29

A wild abandon to life tends to induce satiety and therefore a degree of contempt. As we approach the extremes of action, imagination should complete the trajectory.

30

To resign is the most voluptuous of temptations. By a godlike act of naming, the imprisoning epidermis is suddenly the horizon―and all the rest, theoretical entities.

31

How does one succumb to time? By trusting that the way into an emotion is isomorphic to the way out.

32

We lose the specificity of the world in the incantatory abstractions of concurrent voices.

33

The collapse of culture is always imminent. Here, too, only incessant activity can redound in faith, the precarious faith of the child who builds in a race against the tide.

34

Is God dead? To some, perhaps. To others, the question is the rhetorically heightened version of a perennial conflict.

35

Is life worth living? No question depends more on timing, no question bears more repeating to get right.