the nabokovian

A heady mixture of high literature and mental masturbation

[inderjitsanghera]

To rest in the shade, pale and thoughtful, by a sun-hot garden wall listening among thorns and brushwood to the cry of blackbirds, the hiss of snakes. In cracks in the soil or amongst the vetch to spy on the files of red ants now scattering now intertwining at the top of miniscule mountains. To observe among the leaves the distant quivering scales of the sea, while the tremulous cries rise from cicadas on the naked hills. And walking in the dazzling sun to feel with a saddened wonder how all of life and its travails is in this following a wall topped by bright shards of glass.

Eugenio Montale

[inderjitsanghera]

I recall your smile, and for me it is limpid water witnessed by chance among the stones of a riverbed. slight mirror in which you see an ivy and its inflorescence, and over all the embrace of a serene white sky. This is my recollection; I cannot say, O distant one, if an ingenuous spirit is freely expressed in your face, truly you are a wanderer whom the world’s ills exhaust, and who carry your suffering with you like a talisman.

Eugenio Montale

[zolotoivek]

The sun would fail in the observant height, In clear air, the shining stars would vanish, The world would sink into a smoke lavish, And thunders – into silence of the night, – On the sad moon, invisible and black – In its dark deeps – would rise the awful fire, And by the tracks, lost in the Lethe’s mire, Life would be gone without coming back, – A dust would lie instead of all these grasses, All nightingales would cut their loving plea, All wars and funs would melt like snow masses, – With a deep sigh, would flee a spirit trustless, It’d be the same – to be or not to be – Sooner than I might cease remembering thee.

- Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942)

[inderjitsanghera]

Marcel Proust; Finding Time Again

Across all that part of the city dominated by the towers of the Trocadero, the sky looked like a vast turquoise-coloured sea on the ebb, disclosing a whole slender line of black rocks, which might even perhaps have been a row of simple fishing nets, but which were really clouds

[inderjitsanghera]

Marcel Proust; Finding Time Again

“a dish whose border depicts a little Chinese boy catching with rod and line a fish, the azured silvering of whose belly is an enchantment of nacreous colour.”

[inderjitsanghera]

Marcel Proust; Finding Time Again

“At the day’s end, amid a soporific fading of all the colours, when the only source of light was an almost curdled sea, tinged with the milky-blue of whey.”

[inderjitsanghera]

“I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily towards a blue horizon.”

Marcel Proust; The Prisoner 

[inderjitsanghera]

O HURRY where by water among the trees The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh, When they have but looked upon their images -- Would none had ever loved but you and I! Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky, When the sun looked out of his golden hood? -- O that none ever loved but you and I! O hurty to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry -- O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.

W.B Yeats; The Ragged Wood

[introspectivepoet]

As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Pablo Neruda (via introspectivepoet)

[inderjitsanghera]

I don't believe in age. All old people carry in their eyes, a child, and children, at times observe us with the eyes of wise ancients. Shall we measure life in meters or kilometers or months? How far since you were born? How long must you wander until like all men instead of walking on its surface we rest below the earth? To the man, to the woman who utilized their energies, goodness, strength, anger, love, tenderness, to those who truly alive flowered, and in their sensuality matured, let us not apply the measure of a time that may be something else, a mineral mantle, a solar bird, a flower, something, maybe, but not a measure. Time, metal or bird, long petiolate flower, stretch through man's life, shower him with blossoms and with bright water or with hidden sun. I proclaim you road, not shroud, a pristine ladder with treads of air, a suit lovingly renewed through springtimes around the world. Now, time, I roll you up, I deposit you in my bait box and I am off to fish with your long line the fishes of the dawn!

Pablo Neruda; Ode to Age

[magictransistor]

[inderjitsanghera]

Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave Whose soul is sere and paler Than time's wan wave. Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest A wonder wild In gentle eyes thou veilest, My blueveined child.

James Joyce

[inderjitsanghera]

The noon's greygolden meshes make All night a veil, The shorelamps in the sleeping lake Laburnum tendrils trail. The sly reeds whisper to the night A name-- her name- And all my soul is a delight, A swoon of shame.

James Joyce

[inderjitsanghera]

“If ever Brest seems less austere, it is when is a feeble sun gilds the waterfront, where the facades are as noble and grand as those in Venice; or again, when its narrow streets are thronged with a tumult of carefree matelots; or finally, under fog and rain.”

Jean Genete; Querelle of Brest 

[inderjitsanghera]

“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; Wind, Sand and Stars

[inderjitsanghera]

After the dead words, after the ones still said and spoken, what do you expect? Some flying leaves, more scattered papers. Who knows? Some dissolving words, like the light or the echo dying out there in the great night.

Vicente Aleixandre

[excursio]

Marjane Satrapi is the queen of everything