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[loverbeforethewar]

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

[loverbeforethewar]

― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

[loverbeforethewar]

― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

[loverbeforethewar]

“We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.”

- The Captive & The Fugitive; Marcel Proust

[loverbeforethewar]

“I no longer know If I wish I to drown my self in love, vodka or the sea.”

— Franz Kafka

[loverbeforethewar]

The key to creating meaningful work, I believe, is to care for something (or someone) so much even though you could get hurt in the process. I think you could be that for me…

[loverbeforethewar]

- Fight Club

[loverbeforethewar]

“One only loves that which one does not entirely possess.”

- Marcel Proust

[loverbeforethewar]

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

[loverbeforethewar]

“The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.”

Forgot where I heard this one.

[loverbeforethewar]

“Won’t you reach out your hand towards me over all this and leave it with me for a long, long time.”

- letters to milena, Franz Kafka

[loverbeforethewar]

“Strains of music alone can proudly carry their own death within themselves like an internal necessity: only they don’t exist.”

- Nausea; Jean-Paul Sartre

[loverbeforethewar]

"How unfortunate that we don't understand each other. I've alwaysadmired your way with words, and but than it's only just words, they can only let you say so much...and maybe now I kind of feel sad for you."That's what she said and probably more, I think, I should have been listening or I was and it is just that part that got stuck in my head. I still have the image of her slowly darting from one side of the room to the other, from the window to the couch, her expression changing from hysteria to being blank, as that of a mad woman. There are people who live their lifes on the extremes, on the extreme ends of some spectrum. With her it was with emotion, it was either she was too expressive or just cold, like a masonry wall facing away from the sun for the most part of the day. And now looking back I think I preferred the later, as the other extremes were always hysterical, the laughter, the anger, all made me cringe at times, I wonder how I had not smashed my head against a wall at times. Maybe I'm being too harsh myself because I think I must have cared for her to some extent, you can only be with someone for so long without caring, we grow some fondness for our possessions no matter how much we don't need them in reality, even though fondness and possession are not the right words in this case, I don't know, if only she saw me now trying to find the right words, what would she think now, not that it mattered. I didn't know or care much for what was going on in her head, and I really shouldn't now, even though it makes you wonder how we had gotten together in the first place and how it had lasted so long, 5 months is eternity in this case.

Whatever light not obstructed by the building directly across the only window in this room, took my attention away from her. I usualy get up in the early AMs and plug myself at the seat in front of the typewriter and punch away at the keys forming words, setences mostly none to my appeal, even though most people liked this stuff, and the fact that she is one of these people makes me think about the general crowd I wrote for. Today I had spent all that time thinking about the prior night, I barely even got out of bed. This is not good, I think, I've never needed any distractions, the writing is the distraction. Especially today, been looking forward to this day for sometime, I am meeting up with Dr. Franck Berg, the Nobel Laurette, to interview him. I had written to him a couple weeks back and I hadn't expected a response, since it was rumoured that he had gone mad arond the time he had received his Nobel Prize in Physics, it is said that because of the toll the research that went into his theories that had won him the price, he broke and now all he does is stay in his house, with blinds open, so some people would see him pacing up and down the house "like a mad man". I had read up on some of his theories on time, and knew then If I were to write something around time, he would be one of the people I would be interested in interviewing as part of the research that would go into the piece. And now I was writing a novel that had some time travel in it, but not your typical Sci-fi story. And I thought I was fortunate that he lived not more than 50 minutes away from where I am staying at the moment.

I get up and walk to the window to smoke a cigarette, along the way I notice how this barely had been my space for a while,not just that it still had her scent, but also how she had been able to insert herself here and make whatever changes she could from time to time, and I was too lost somewhere to have noticed this. Now I was getting a bit more interested in retracing these last 5 months. I don't open the window, I smoke with it closed, to wash away the scent I guess, or maybe partly because she hated that I smoked in doors and I had avoided doing so for a long time, even though she had a point, the smell of cigarettes is not pretty, especially in a relatively small space like this. So I eventually open it. It is little bit after 8 AM, so I have like 45 minutes to get ready before I head out for the doctors house, which is more than enough, maybe a litle bit too much. So after taking a quick shower, and assembling whatever edible thing in the fridge in a plate and calling it a breakfast, I have a couple more minutes to go over the questions I had prepared over the past couple of days.

Monday, September 23, 2019, 3:41:01 AM

Coming down off mushrooms, a first draft

[loverbeforethewar]

“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

- Franz Kafka; The Castle

[loverbeforethewar]

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

- Franz Kafka

[loverbeforethewar]

“The continous work of our life,” says Montaigne “is to build death” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit,  And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone, possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men.  In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends”

- Simone De Beauvoir

[loverbeforethewar]

JIM JOE, 2017