Lógica de los mundos

[metaphorformetaphor]

I write the disappointments of distances

Wafaa Lamrani, from “The Wail of Heights,” The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books, 2015)

[metaphorformetaphor]

Some day you’ll be the only face I’ll recognise in the foreign landscapes of my life I’ll be the only one to see you running from the storm on the edge of lightning

Kapka Kassabova, from “Storm,” All Roads Lead to the Sea (Auckland University Press, 1997)

[metaphorformetaphor]

I force myself to write this diary, but my reluctance is exquisite. I know now why I never kept a personal diary: for me life is secretive. With respect to others (and that is what pained X. so much) but also, life must be lived through my own eyes, I must not reveal it in words. Unheard and unexposed, like this it is rich for me. If I force myself to keep a personal diary at this moment, it is out of panic in the face of my failing memory. But I am not sure I can continue. Besides, even so, I forget to note many things. And I say nothing of what I think.

Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1951-1959 (Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2008; first published 1989)

[metaphorformetaphor]

[…] as you go on living with someone, you slowly lose the power to make them happy, while your capacity to hurt them remains undiminished. And vice versa, of course.

Julian Barnes, from Talking It Over (Vintage, 1992)

[metaphorformetaphor]

One by one the stars fell into the sea, the sky drained of its last lights.

Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1951-1959 (Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2008; first published 1989)

[metaphorformetaphor]

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men. But I am a part of this universe, and the most courageous thing to do is to accept it and the tragedy at the same time.

Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1951-1959 (Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2008; first published 1989)

[metaphorformetaphor]

I name you and your absence. I pronounce you in the languidness of slippery moments.

Saadi Youssef, from “The Spring,” Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems, transl. by Khaled Mattawa (Graywolf Press, 2002)

[metaphorformetaphor]

Was everything always moving to begin with? You know the earth was—secretly. And the air, and the rivers inside your body that you don’t even feel. Are you a wheel spinning in space?

Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Spinning,” Come with Me: Poems for a Journey (Greenwillow Books , 2000)

[metaphorformetaphor]

Every smell is a memory. From far away in the dark the wind dislodges whatever lies in the city: down over fields and hills, where there is only grass scorched by the sun and soil blackened by damp. Our memory is a bitter taste, the little sweetness of the rent earth exhaled in winter in a breath from below. Every smell has faded away in the dark and in the city only the wind can reach us.

Cesare Pavese, from “Nocturnal pleasures,” Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1971)   (via metaphorformetaphor)

[metaphorformetaphor]

and I discover you in the silence conversing with this silence of my own.

Elías Nandino, from “Epilogues for a Deceased Poet,” Elías Nandino: Selected Poems, in Spanish and English (McFarland & Company, 2010)

[nevver]

Ella Frances Sanders

[metaphorformetaphor]

… I’ve become more and more impossible socially. I forget to respond when people talk to me. Often I don’t hear what they say. I wonder if I’m starting to go deaf?      And all these masks! All of them wear masks. And what’s more, it’s their greatest virtue. I wouldn’t want to see them unmasked. I wouldn’t want to appear unmasked myself, either. Not to them!     But to whom?

Hjalmar Söderberg, from Doctor Glas (Anchor, 2002; first published 1905)

[metaphorformetaphor]

How to express that? To express it absolutely, there would have to be explosions and lacerations, there would have to be words come from outer space at the speed of light, words which would obliterate everything in their path, words like streams of molten lava, words which would whistle through the air and gouge great seething craters in the earth’s surface. One must, one absolutely must get out of oneself. And one must plunge so deep into oneself that one no longer recognizes anything, that everything becomes freshly invented.

J.M.G. Le Clézio, from War (Vintage Classics, 2008; first published 1970)

[metaphorformetaphor]

Knowledge requires that things shall first have been encountered, yet has anyone encountered them? And self-knowledge requires that one should first have touched oneself like an object. Worlds – and this is what I wanted to say, above all – are beyond discovery.

J.M.G. Le Clézio, from War (Vintage Classics, 2008; first published 1970)

[metaphorformetaphor]

It’s the words inside me struggling to fight against the words outside, and they are going to lose the battle.

J.M.G. Le Clézio, from War (Vintage Classics, 2008; first published 1970)

[metaphorformetaphor]

I ask her: How did you get here? She says: By chance. I was walking on a street that doesn’t lead to a goal. I say: I walk as if I have a rendezvous … maybe my steps would guide me to an empty bench in the garden, or to an idea about the loss of truth between the imaginary and the real.

Mahmoud Darwish, from “Tuesday And The Weather Is Clear,” If I Were Another (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

[metaphorformetaphor]

You gave me a letter opener made of silver: letters like these aren’t like that. They’re torn open, torn, torn.

Yehuda Amichai, from “Love Gifts,“ Poems of Jerusalem & Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992)