INFINITE RICHES IN A LITTLE ROOM

There is a sense in which an artist can submit to only one influence and be so completely enslaved by it that his own personality is obliterated. And there is a sense in which an artist can submit to a multitude of influences and yet always remain himself. •  Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art

Going insane is very popular these days, and it frightens me to see so many young people flirting with the idea of it. They think that going crazy will turn them into better poets. That’s just not true at all! Insanity is a terrible thing … a terrible thing! I’ve seen it first-hand in some of my friends, and it is not the “poetic" sort of thing that these young people seem to think it is. John Clare did not write glorious poetry while he was in the asylum, I’m glad to say. I’ve known a Marianne Moore extremely well over a long time. Perhaps I’ll tell my students about her some time—to show them what can be drawn from such a relatively limited life as she has had. I think it’s important that my students start to know some of these things. They have such narrow and sometimes destructive ideas about what it is to be a poet. I’ve been thinking lately that I really should say something to them about all of this. It’s a very serious matter. • Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

The house in winter creaks like a ship.

Snow-locked to the sills and harbored snug

In soft white meadows, it is not asleep.

When icicles pend on the low roof's lip,

The shifting weight of a slow-motion tug

May slide off sometimes in a crashing slip.

At zero I have heard a nail pop out

From clapboard like a pistol shot.

All day this ship is sailing out on light:

At dawn we wake to rose and amber meadows,

At noon plunge on across the waves of white,

And, later, when the world becomes too bright,

Tack in among the lengthening blue shadows

To anchor in black-silver pools of night.

Although we do not really come and go,

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

At night I am aware of life aboard.

The scampering presences are often kind,

Leaving under a cushion a seed-hoard,

But I can never open any cupboard

Without a question: what shall I find?

A hard nut in my boot? An apple cored?

The house around me has become an ark

As we go creaking on from dark to dark.

There is a wilder solitude in winter

When every sense is pricked alive and keen

For what my pop or tumble down or splinter.

The light itself, as active as a painter,

Swashes bright flowing banners down

The flat white walls. I stand here like a hunter

on the qui vive, though all appears quite calm,

And feel the silence gather like a storm.

The House In Winter • Selected Poems of May Sarton

Reading what I didn't understand was, for one blissful period of my life, the source of a profound if perverse pleasure. I also liked to look at the card pasted in the back of the book to record previous borrowings--a card that is, like so much other information, there no longer or discreetly incomplete. It gave me a good deal of satisfaction to be taking home some rarely read, symbolically dusty, arcane tome. I checked out both my books and my pride at the same desk. • William H. Gass • In Defense Of The Book

"My father once broke my mother's pinky because she talked to the mailman. My mother was 4'11", she wore braids and laced shoes and had pillows for breasts and walked like Charlie Chaplin—not your flirtatious girlie kind of woman—but my father was panic-stricken about that. So for me, married is prison. Before I got married a few years ago, I actually dreamt of prison, where all of the people in the prison were women. And my marriage didn't last, of course. It had nothing to do with my husband. He was a wonderful man. Honorable. But I would have to be by myself, you know, be alone sometimes and I would say things like 'I'm going to close the door now and it' not personal,' and I'm afraid it was taken personally. I need time away, alone. Not even going out of the house, but alone, just thinking. Friends have been known to come to my house after I've been alone three or four weeks and say 'that's enough, that's enough now." • Joan Hackett interviewed by Steve Gelman for TV Guide • August 16, 1980

He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn’t enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it, I thought. Ultimately he was enamored of failure, if not even a little smitten, I thought, had clung to this failure of his until the end. I could actually say he was unhappy in his unhappiness but he would have been even more unhappy had he lost his unhappiness overnight, had it been taken away from him from one moment to the next, which is again proof that basically he wasn’t unhappy at all but happy, and by virtue of and with his unhappiness, I thought. Many people are basically happy because they’re up to their necks in unhappiness, I thought, and I told myself that Wertheimer actually was happy because he was continually aware of his unhappiness, could take pleasure in his unhappiness. All at once this thought struck me as not at all absurd, that is to think that he was afraid of losing his unhappiness for a reason I couldn’t know and for that reason went to Chur and to Zizers and killed himself. It’s possible we have to assume that the so-called unhappy person doesn’t exist, I thought, for we first make most of them unhappy by taking their unhappiness away from them. Wertheimer was afraid of losing his unhappiness and killed himself for this and no other reason, I thought, with a subtle sleight of hand he withdrew from the world, kept a promise so to speak in which no one believed anymore, I thought, withdrew from a world that actually always wanted only to make him and his millions of other suffering companions happy, a condition he however always knew how to prevent with the greatest ruthlessness toward himself and everybody else, because like these others, in deadly fashion, he’d grown more accustomed to his unhappiness than to anything else. — Thomas Bernhard • The Loser [rendered into english by Jack Dawson]

Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren’t the way we’ve pictured them and that we absolutely don’t belong with them, as we’ve talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion. Wertheimer often described how he always failed in his effort to fit in, to be together with so-called simple folk and thus with the so-called people, and he often reported that he went to the Dichtel Mill with the idea of sitting at the table of simple people, only to have to admit after the first such attempt that it was a mistake to think that individuals like him, Wertheimer, or like me could just sit down at the table of simple people. Individuals like us have cut themselves off from the table of simple people at an early age, he said, as I recall, have been born at quite a different table, he said, not at the table of simple people. Individuals like us are naturally drawn to the table of simple people, he said. But we have no business sitting at the table of simple people, as he said, as I recall. — Thomas Bernhard • The Loser [rendered into english by Jack Dawson]

In an atmosphere of “voluntary” prayer, pupils coming from homes where other faiths prevail will feel an embarrassment by their non-participation; in the eyes of their schoolmates they will be “queer” or “different” or “irreligious.” Such a stigma for a child can be emotionally disturbing, and although we no longer hang and burn our infidels and our witches, a schoolchild who is left out in the cold during a prayer session suffers scars that are very real. • Letters of E. B. White

I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy. • Charles M. Schulz: Conversations

November is a time for departures, you know...August isn’t bad as a choice, but November is more appropriate...Ishmael joined Captain Ahab’s crew when it was November in his soul.

My bones are in his November reach...The escort. Not so very far away, the door will open and in he’ll come, wearing an old bathrobe soiled with the residues of all the times, the stains and streaks and smears . . . and tears . . . tears from a thousand eyes...A time for departure, damp and drizzly—November, you see!

— David Berry • The Whales of August

Why should their foolish bands, their hopeless hearses

Blot the perpetual festival of day?

Ravens, for prosperously-boded curses

Returning thanks, might offer such array.

Heaven comfort sends, but harry it away,

Gather the sooty plumage from Death's wings

And the poor corse impale with it and fray

Far from its head an angel's hoverings,

And count the rosy cross with bann'd disastrous things.

• Gerard Manley Hopkins