June 2013
31 posts
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“It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.”
—Norman Rush (via theparisreview)
“They say that time goes faster after you pass sixty. No question about it, it’s true. Where are the long, lazy summers of my youth when I sat moping from morning till night unable to think of anything interesting to do? I recollect walking up to a mirror and repeating with greater and greater conviction, “Life is boring.” On such days, the old clock barely budged, just to spite me. You fool, I’m thinking today, that was pure bliss. The mystery of happiness was right there in that cheap clock your mother bought at Woolworth. Time graciously came to a stop in it; eternity threw open its doors and you hesitated or grew wary on its threshold and breathed a sigh of relief when the door shut in your face and the hand of the clock moved on.”
—
Charles Simic on aging, an exquisite read. Pair with Montaigne on death and the art of living.
Simic’s latest anthology, New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012, offers a lyrical meditation on mortality.
(via explore-blog)
May 2013
26 posts
“
writeworld: de profundis \dey proh-FOON-dis, adverb:
out of the depths (of sorrow, despair, etc.).
Once he spoke to himself in a low voice that shook as if with difficulty dominating sobs that were rising in his throat. “De profundis—” he said. — Robert Smythe Hitchens, The Garden of Allah, 1904
Her letters were written in varying spirits, sometimes cheery, sometimes de profundis. — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Haunted Lives, 1868
De profundis means “out of the depths” in Latin. It is the opening of Latin translation of Psalm 130 which continues “Out of the depths I cry to you.” Today the term can be used as a phrase to convey sadness or as an adverb.
” —My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning: Word of the Day: De profundis
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“Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”
—Raymond Chandler vs. Atlantic proofreader (via explore-blog)
