Archive of Longing

books I read

[archiveoflonging]

[archiveoflonging]

On a friend's recommendation, I read "An Expedition to the Pole."

"How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep laughing out loud?" 

"They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can found, here or there -- around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. For they were people ... Despite the purity of their conceptions, they man-hauled their humanity to the Poles."

Must use: "floe" "man-hauled" "rascally" "frail flesh" "sweet human absurdity"

"Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand -- that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us." "I hope we seem as endearingly stupid to God" "The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry; whole unfilled systems litter the ice."'

[archiveoflonging]

"It always hurts to hear one’s defects and difficulties referred to by others simply as facts."

"The degree of my self-preoccupation is appalling."

[archiveoflonging]

"God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love."

[archiveoflonging]

"After many interviews with him, I feel that I only almost know him, and that what I write about him will have the vague, vaporous quality that our most indelible dreams take on when we put them into words." "the pleasures of late-night conversations on abstract subjects (beauty, reality, the good) with men who do not want to marry you and to whom you are not attracted" "But perhaps even stronger than the room's aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss ... No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one'a own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal."

[archiveoflonging]