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The Death of the Author // Roland Barthes

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.

#barthes #excerpt

Ode on a Grecian Urn // John Keats

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

#keats #excerpt

The State and Revolution // Vladimir Lenin

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

#excerpt #lenin

Susan Sontag in Partisan Review (Winter 1967)

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Ballanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

#sontag #excerpt

You're Ugly, Too // Lorrie Moore

"You act," said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, "like your opinion is worth more than everyone else's in the class."

#excerpt #moore

Proofs and Theories // Louise Glück

Out of terror at its incompleteness and ravenous need, anorexia constructs a physical sign calculated to manifest disdain for need, for hunger, designed to appear entirely free of all forms of dependency, to appear complete, self-contained. But the sign it trusts is a physical sign, impossible to sustain by mere act of will, and the poignance of the metaphor rests in this: that anorexia proves not the soul's superiority to but its dependence on flesh.

#gluck #excerpt

We Are Nothing and So Can You // Jasper Bernes

basically, you have three choices: jail, mall, museum

whose hapless invariance repeats as edges leaping away from each problematic

crossing to defeat all possible reply.

jail + museum = university; mall + jail = airport; mall + jail + museum = home sweet home

#bernes #excerpt

Water // Fred Leebron

She touches his hair by the river.

I am in our apartment, working. Her hand moves down his back.

I empty the trash and unclog the kitchen sink. His former girlfriends have turned into lesbians.

I take the key to his apartment, which he gave me so I could water his plants during the summer. He bends his kissing face to hers.

I walk over to his apartment, just two blocks away. Their legs dangle in the river.

I unlock the door and bolt it behind me. The room smells of feet and stale ashtrays. In the kitchen is a gas stove. I turn it on without lighting it.

Down by the river is a flock of geese, which they admire while holding hands. Soon he will take her back to his apartment. Soon they will lie there, readying cigarettes.

I relock the apartment and slip into the street. The air smells of autumn, burnt. In the sky, birds are leading each other south.

I know there is nothing left between us, that she looks at me each morning as if I were interrupting her life.

#leebron

Brilliant Silence // Spencer Holst

Two Alaskan Kodiak bears joined a small circus where the pair appeared in a nightly parade pulling a covered wagon. The two were taught to somersault, to spin, to stand on their heads, and to dance on their hind legs, paw in paw, stepping in unison. Under a spotlight the dancing bears, a male and a female, soon became favorites of the crowd. The circus went south on a west coast tour through Canada to California and on down into Mexico, through Panama into South America, down the Andes the length of Chile to those southernmost isles of Tierra del Fuego.

There a jaguar jumped the juggler, and afterwards, mortally mauled the animal trainer, and the shocked showpeople disbanded in dismay and horror. In the confusion the bears went their own way. Without a master, they wandered off by themselves into the wilderness on those densely wooded, wildly windy, subantarctic islands. Utterly away from people, on an out-of-the-way uninhabited island, and in a climate they found ideal, the bears mated, thrived, multiplied, and after a number of generations populated the entire island. Indeed, after some years, descendants of the two moved out onto half a dozen adjacent islands; and seventy years later, when scientists finally found and enthusiastically studied the bears, it was discovered that all of them, to a bear, were performing splendid circus tricks.

On nights when the sky is bright and the moon is full, they gather to dance. They gather the cubs and the juveniles in a circle around them. They gather together out of the wind at the center of a sparkling, circular crater left by a meteorite which had fallen in a bed of chalk. Its glassy walls are chalk white, its flat floor is covered with white gravel, and it is well-drained, and dry. No vegetation grows within. When the moon rises above it, the light reflecting off the walls fills the crater with a pool of moonlight, so that it is twice as bright on the crater floor as anywhere else in that vicinity. Scientists speculate that originally the full moon had reminded the two bears of the circus spotlight, and for that reason they danced. Yet, it might be asked, what music do the descendants dance to?

Paw in paw, stepping in unison... what music can they possibly hear inside their heads as they dance under the full moon and the Aurora Australis, as they dance in brilliant silence?

#holst

No Longer Human // Osamu Dazai

My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than the vanishing "ghosts of science." This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood as dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't collect three grains of rice from everybody.

#excerpt #dazai

No Longer Human // Osamu Dazai

"Then what's a synonym for woman?" "Entrails." "You're not very poetic, are you? Well, then, what's the antonym for entrails?" "Milk."

#dazai #excerpt

A Gate at the Stairs // Lorrie Moore

"You can't get blood from a stone," he said sadly. Referring, I supposed, to love. It was an expression he liked and had used before with me. "Yes, you can," I said. I was always trying. "You can?" "One can. You can." "How is that done?" "You go to a quarry." "A quarry?" "Yeah, if you go to a quarry there is always some body that's been dumped there."

#excerpt #moore

On the Genealogy of Morality // Friedrich Nietzche

It is not unthinkable that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. "What are my parasites to me?" it might say. "May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!"

#nietzche #excerpt

Crime and Punishment // Fyodor Dostoevsky

He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

#excerpt #dostoevsky

Regarding the Pain of Others // Susan Sontag

So far as we feel sympathy we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a consideration of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways that we prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only the initial spark.

#sontag #excerpt

Crime and Punishment // Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Yes, it was to avoid this shame that I wanted to drown myself, Dunya, but I thought, as I was already standing over the water, that if I've considered myself a strong man all along, then let me not be afraid of shame now […] Is that pride, Dunya?" "Yes, it's pride, Rodya." […] "And you don't think, sister, that I simply got scared of the water?" he asked, with a hideous smirk, peeking into her face.

#dostoevsky #excerpt

Sand and Foam // Khalil Gibran

A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.

#excerpt #gibran

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