Beauty and Sadness

simply put, this is a literary side-blog.

[crucifiedlovers]

Desire is about vanishing. You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice.

Anne Carson, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

[crucifiedlovers]

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.

Ezra Pound, "Alba"

[crucifiedlovers]

This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

André Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism" from First
Manifesto
of
Surrealism
in
Art
in
Theory
1900­1990:
An
Anthology
of
Changing
Ideas

[crucifiedlovers]

And the universal subject of poetry? How did it happen there were so many landscapes, woods, gardens, beaches, rivers, trees, sunsets in poems to the beloved? Because poets more easily than others saw in nature the inevitable reference. Ancient towers, clouds, cataracts, mysterious tombs, sobbing of surf on rocks, bending of branches to the storm, loneliness of gravel banks in the afternoon, it was all a clear statement made to her, to the woman we love, the one who has the power to burn us to ashes. Everything in the world plots with everything else in the world in the wisest conspiracy of all, to bring us to the one we love.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

What would he do without her? How could he go on? [She was] for him was the earth itself, life, blood, sunlight, glory, wealth, the realization of all his dreams. 

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

A very simple secret: Love. Everything in all the inanimate world that fascinates us, forests, plains, mountains, rivers, seas, valleys, steppes, and more, and more, cities, palaces, stones, more, the sky, sunsets, storms, yet more, the snow, still more, the night, the stars, the wind, all these things, empty and indifferent in themselves, were charged with meaning for us because, without our suspecting it, they held a foregleam of love.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

Love is a terrible disease.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

Was there perhaps some dark pleasure to be got from those painful fantasies? Did those perverse day-dreams only serve to make [her] ever more exciting, strange, and unattainable and therefore ever more deserving of his desire and his love?

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

If gentleness can be brutish, cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that it is hard to know which is what. 

Mary Gaitskill, Lost Cat

[crucifiedlovers]

[crucifiedlovers]

 ...thoughts of her, always of her, of that particular mouth, of those lips made in a certain way, of an arrangement of taut muscles (do you remember?), soft and fluid, with a curvature unlike all the others, of a fold, of a fullness, of a depth, of a warmth, of a dampness, of a surrender, of a descent, of a burning abyss.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

thoughts like his, both obscene and exquisite...

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

Once the date was made, his whole body began to wait; it was painful but at the same time marvellous, hard to explain, almost the feeling of being the victim offered in a sacrifice, the whole body naked, with an abandoned outpouring of burning energy that flowed through every part of his limbs and his guts and his flesh. A charge of tremendous power, not at all animal or blind—on the contrary, poetic, full of dark obscenities.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

Love? It’s a curse on your head and heart and you can’t escape it.

Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair (trans. Joseph Green)

[crucifiedlovers]

You hurt me With your desire For other. I am Who I am and I Am fond of myself.

Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse In The Suburbs Of Hell

[crucifiedlovers]

i keep falling / in and out / of myself / just as i fell out of paradise

Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse In The Suburbs Of Hell

[crucifiedlovers]

My health was perfect / Until you fell / On my head and pressed / Your lips of mist and ice / To mine / You burnt my tongue

Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse In The Suburbs Of Hell