feralprodigy

[feralprodigy]

"And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness."

A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

[feralprodigy]

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing."

A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

[feralprodigy]

A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

[feralprodigy]

“Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He'll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim's head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements.”

“Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays, Euripides translated by Anne Carson

[feralprodigy]

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

“Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays, Euripides translated by Anne Carson

[feralprodigy]

“Translation is like a seance with the dead and what comes out on the planchette will often read like urgent nonsense.”

Introduction to Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature by Robert Irwin

[feralprodigy]

“There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a specter related to environmental change. In antiquity people corresponded with spirits that took animate form, spirits that came from other realms and dictated moral lessons. But what is most cryptic about animals in this moment, many people suspect, are things we cannot yet gauge about our own impacts on their habitats and their bodies.”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“My unease lingered on and later changed shape into a kind of tension snapped taut between the mercy of the green dream, toxic as it was, and the unintended cruelty of the greenhouse, swallowed whole by the sperm whale. Did we owe whales greater distance or more intervention? And who was the “we” in that sentence? At the very least, I reasoned it included myself and the crowd drawn down onto the beach by wonder. The duty of awe was—wasn’t it—care?”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“The whale’s eye—the color of midnight, mid-ocean—had no eyelashes and, according to another wildlife officer, no tear ducts (for what would be the point of crying in the ocean?).”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“Whales elicited our smallness set against the largess of nature: they proved nature’s sovereignty and its resilience. Whales gave people cause to reflect, too, that governments had been known to be benevolent, that industries could be restrained, and that the protection of wonderment was a value shared across the planet.”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“Would we know it, the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

[feralprodigy]

“The spectators fostered their own suspicions as to why this young humpback whale had drawn up on the sand. Hadn’t a shooting star flared icily over Rottnest Island last week? Astral debris was said to have sprinkled down over the Goldfields. Comets and meteorites were believed, by many, to be connected to whale beachings, though few could say why—maybe the animals confused night for day when stars fell, or changes in the stellar positions led whales to misreckon their nearness to land.”

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Griggs

[feralprodigy]

“Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal — and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.”

All the Sad Young Men, F. Scott Fitzgerald

[feralprodigy]

“Where other animals walk on all fours and look to the ground, [85] man was given a towering head and commanded to stand erect, with his face uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven.”

— Metamorphoses, Ovid

[feralprodigy]

“One day, Prosérpina, Ceres’ daughter, was there in the woodland, happily plucking bunches of violets or pure white lilies, filling the folds of her dress or her basket in girlish excitement, vying to pick more flowers than her friends – when Pluto espied her, no sooner espied than he loved her and swept her away, so impatient is passion.”

“CALLIOPE’S SONG: THE RAPE OF PROSERPINA” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

[feralprodigy]

[…] our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls –. L’effet c’est moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out of many “souls”: from which a philosopher should claim the right to understand willing itself within the framework of morality: morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon of “life” arises. –

Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche