imaginedmoon

[imaginedmoon]

“When I read Susan Sontag for the first time…I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—back and forth with that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the light tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable then all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”

Valeria Luiselli, from “Lost Children Archive,” published c. 2019

[imaginedmoon]

“Sometimes in later summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds of the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning, the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t seem me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.”

— Mary Oliver, from October 

[imaginedmoon]

Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)

[imaginedmoon]

Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)

[imaginedmoon]

“In the mountain the sense of infinitude is disciplined by heights and depths and by the sheer density of what you confront; thus you yourself are limited, defined as an object among other objects. At sea there is always more than just water and sky; there is the boat to define your difference from both, giving you a human place to stand. But in the desert the sense of the infinite is unconditional and therefore truest. In the desert you’re left utterly to yourself. And in that unbroken sameness of sky and sand, you’re nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Edmond Jabès

[imaginedmoon]

According to whether we are in the same place or separated one from the other, I know you twice. There are two of you. When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me. This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons. I live in you then like living in a country. You are everywhere. Yet in that country I can never meet you face to face.

John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015)

[imaginedmoon]

John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015)

[imaginedmoon]

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

[imaginedmoon]

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

[imaginedmoon]

As Bosch foresaw in his vision of hell, there is no horizon. The world is burning. Every figure is trying to survive by concentrating on his own immediate need and survival. Claustrophobia, at its most extreme, is not caused by overcrowding, but by the lack of any continuity existing between one action and the next that is close enough to be touching it. It is this that is hell.

John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015)

[imaginedmoon]

The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together, and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled, but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.

John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015)

[imaginedmoon]

You are the second stage of creation. You fill the empty space and the desert. You may be a means to an end, but that end is the beginning of everything. Without you, there is nothing—no soil for creation.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2018)

[imaginedmoon]

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

[imaginedmoon]

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

[imaginedmoon]

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

[imaginedmoon]

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (2017)

[imaginedmoon]

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (2017)