Mythology of Blue

This is my heimat. See also: bricoleur, librarian   [email protected]

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"First we feel, then we fall."

-James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

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"Get out there where luck can find you."

-David Sedaris, The Land and its People

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“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

-Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

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Max Ernst. La mer aux oiseaux. 1925/1926

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Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976), La mer aux oiseaux [The Sea Birds], 1925-26. Oil on board, 49 x 33.5 cm.

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"The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.”

-Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

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Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself, knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

-Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

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"Have we only one season? A single summer and it's all over."

-Frode Grytten, The Ferryman and his Wife

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Before him lay more emptiness than he had ever known.

-Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo 

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I didn't realize how much I love to hear him play. (the fiddle)

-Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

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It felt like a tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore of debris.

-Niall Williams, This is Happiness

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"But all families, houses, farms, have their time. Then the story becomes another story, or it simply fades away. Buildings no longer inhabited. Doors that soon become impossible to open. Paths that grow over, forests that grow darker."

-Frode Grytten, The Ferryman and his Wife

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I was terrified of people and of my own strangeness.

-Niall Williams, This is Happiness

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The music was more than music, at least to what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself, the sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous, those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too: things we lived through and didn't want to ever repeat, shredded imaginings, unimagined longings, fear, and also surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice, and we are in the river of our existence.

-Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

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“Sadness was so claustrophobic.”

-Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

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Somewhere inside me someone wanted to die.

-Lily King, Writers and Lovers

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My past is everything I failed to be.

-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know.

Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won't do it.

It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

-Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain