C. Ruf James Joyce (1918)
Nick Duggan ‘Frank Sargeson’s desk’
There have been nights, admit it, when you’ve thought you heard your name in the air, your name being sung, a recognition that you’re a part of the star-resplendent sky, and the must vapours of the earth - they know who you are, you owe them for this special focus.
—Albert Goldbarth
Rosamond Purcell ‘Bird of Paradise’ from A Glorious Enterprise
Rosamond Purcell ‘Cleaned and Stained Specimens of Young Horse-Eye Jacks’ from A Glorious Enterprise
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. For only as long as they abstain from importuning one another with giving and taking, discussion and implementation, control and function, is there space enough between them for the delicate connecting filigree of external forms in which alone the internal can crystallise.
—Theodor Adorno from Minima Moralia: Reflections of Damaged Life
To be a bird is to be more intensely alive than any other living creature, man included. Birds have hotter blood, brighter colors, stronger emotions… they live in a world that is always present, mostly full of joy.
—Norman J. Berrill, quoted in Caspar Henderson’s wondrous Book of Barely Imagined Beings
(Source: invisiblestories)
Rosamond Purcell from Illuminations:a Bestiary (1986)
Heidegger’s term Geworfenheit: being thrown without explanation into an existence governed by obscure rules
Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens
