Yoon Kim

💓💓

I didn’t tag you this time because I didn’t want to trouble you too often 🥰💕

bsky.app/profile/yoon...

“Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory.”

(Proust, Time Regained)

“The real love object is constantly changing, and one can love you today only by betraying the person you were yesterday.”

— Krzhizhanovsky, “In the Pupil” (tr. Joanne Turnbull)

“Ah, but we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. . . .
. . . We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

(T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party)

[…] So much so that the amendments that at each fresh encounter I was obliged to make so as to ensure perfect accuracy were as much those of an instrument tuner or singing master as of a draughtsman.” (2/2)

(In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom 🌸 trans. by Charlotte Mandell)

Marcel Proust:

“Every person is destroyed when we stop seeing them; the person’s next appearance is a new creation, different from the one that had immediately preceded it, if not from all previous appearances. (1/2)

💓💓

“So it is that a well-read man immediately starts yawning with boredom when someone talks to him about the latest ‘great book,’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the great books he’s read...”

— Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom 🌸 (trans. by @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social)

“Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.”

(Musil, The Man without Qualities)

“A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.”

— Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (tr. Wilkins and Pike)

“. . . More than ever,
the things we can live with are falling away,
and imageless action’s usurping their place.”

— Rilke, Duino Elegies (9th Elegy), trans. Gass

“. . . Mehr als je
fallen die Dinge dahin, die erlebbaren, denn,
was sie verdrängend ersetzt, ist ein Tun ohne Bild.”

— Rilke, Duineser Elegien (9. Elegie)

“That the past and the future may become contemporary within a being—this is the possibility that reading books offers.”

— Pascal Quignard, Petits traités II

“When the season of death is here… it so happens that the sky reverts to an intense blue. The earth crunches beneath our feet. The pond is never so clean… The leaves have disappeared. Flowers, birds, people and names—everything has disappeared. It is so clear…”

(trans. Chris Turner)

“Death is like language. Death is a machine for obliterating conditions of appearance. Death, like language, brings the unseeable with it. More than this, it brings with it the *unforeseeable*.”

— Pascal Quignard, The Silent Crossing

“L’homme est l’espèce animale à deux mondes : vivants et morts.”

“Dès qu’il y a langage, il y a deux mondes : signifiant en même temps que signifié, présent et absent, oui et non, jour et nuit, printemps et automne, etc.”

— Pascal Quignard, Vie secrète

“The human being is the animal species of two worlds: the living and the dead.”

“Once language exists, there are two worlds: signifier and signified at once, present and absent, yes and no, day and night, spring and autumn, and so on.”

— Pascal Quignard, Vie secrète

“The past is a new organ which ensues from the language that is taught to the newborn. When combined with the written page, it opens up a new space we call history.”

— Pascal Quignard, The Fount of Time (tr. Chris Turner)

(from “On Chateaubriand,” in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, tr. John Sturrock)

equally monotonous but equally inimitable, one has a clear sense of what a poet is.”

“One senses beneath his words another reality, transparent beneath the words, whose physiognomy is marked, beneath the various elements of the sentence, by the correspondence of their features.” (2/2)

Proust on Chateaubriand:

“I like reading Chateaubriand because by giving us to hear every two or three pages (just as after an interval of silence on summer nights one hears the two notes, always the same, that make up the song of the owl) his own particular call, (1/2)

“Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s’élève par intervalles dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.”

— Chateaubriand, René

(yesterday’s in-flight reading)

“Sometimes a tall column rose up solitary in a waste land, as a great thought may spring from a soul ravaged by time and sorrow.”

— Chateaubriand, René (tr. Irving Putter)

“Our heart is a defective instrument, a lyre with several chords missing, which forces us to express our joyful moods in notes meant for lamentation.”

— Chateaubriand, René (tr. Irving Putter)

“But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.”

— from “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

#MelvilleMonday 🐳

approved of (or criticized). For my part, I don’t like people saying good or bad things about me; I write to be loved: by a few, but *from a distance*.” (2/2)

🙃🥰 The English edition omits the two sentences that follow:

“The advantage of writing is that one can be loved from a distance. So that was my first remark.”

For reference, here’s the fuller passage:

“…and ultimately, it seems to me, the writer doesn’t write in order to be admired, (1/2)

“Poetry = practice of subtlety in a barbaric world. Whence the need to fight for poetry *today*: Poetry should be one of our ‘Human Rights’; it isn’t ‘decadent,’ it’s subversive: subversive and vital.”

— Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel (tr. Kate Briggs)

I write to be loved: by a few, but *from a distance*.

— Roland Barthes

from The Preparation of the Novel
(lecture of December 15, 1979)