#original compilations

[acosmic]

Knowledge of other people is unendurable. … The truth about Albertine is /that close/. Marcel does not investigate. Knowledge of other people is unendurable.

“appendix 29 on kimonos,” from anne carson’s the albertine workout

[acosmic]

38. The pictorial multiplicity of Albertine evolves gradially into a plastic and moral multiplicity. Albertine is not a solid object. She is unknowable. When Marcel brings his face close to hers to kiss, she is ten different Albertines in succession.

anne carson, the albertine workout

[acosmic]

They are sitting stock-still in the car. You cannot help but wonder if it gave him a pain in the neck to hold his head that way for the numerous minutes of the exposure. Or what the two of them talked about under their breath that day, as the photographer fiddled with his lenses and the cicadas sang in the hawthorn hedge and a summer afternoon at the farthest edge of human love extended itself before them into, apparently, eternity. Maybe they discussed "a small cabin." Maybe "it burned down."

from “appendix 59 on a bad photograph,” the last section of anne carson’s the albertine workout.

[acosmic]

18. ... Marcel's theory of desire ... equates possession of another person with erasure of the otherness of her mind, while at the same time positing otherness as what makes another person desirable. ... 20.  His fascination continues.

the albertine workout, by anne carson.

[acosmic]

8. The problems of Albertine are (from the narrator's point of view) a) lying b) lesbianism and (from Albertine's point of view)  a) being imprisoned in the narrator's house. 9. Her bad taste in music, although several times remarked on, is not a problem. 10. Albertine does not call the narrator by his name anywhere in the novel. Nor does anyone else. The narrator hints that his first name might be the same first name as that of the author of the novel, i.e. Marcel. Let's go with that. 11. Albertine denies she is a lesbian when Marcel questions her. 12. Her friends are all lesbians. 13. Her denials fascinate him. 14. Her friends fascinate him too, especially by their contrast with his friends, who are gay but very closeted. Her friends "parade themselves" at the beach and kiss in restaurants. 15. Despite intense and assiduous questioning, Marcel cannot discover what exactly it is that women do together ("this palpitating specificity of female pleasure"). 16. Albertine says she does not know.

the albertine workout. anne carson, 2014.

[acosmic]

ESTRAGON [on one leg]: I’ll never walk again! VLADIMIR [tenderly]: I’ll carry you. [Pause] If necessary.

waiting for godot, by samuel beckett

[acosmic]

Swans are of course migratory birds. This one for some reason failed to fly off with its fellow swans when the time came. What a weird and lonely shadow to cast on these two love affairs, the fictional and the real; what a desperate analogy to offer of the lover's final wintry paranoia of possession. As Hamlet says to Ophelia, accurately but ruthlessly, "You should not have believed me."

from section 57 of anne carson’s the albertine workout

[acosmic]

All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ ...  It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.

percy bysshe shelley, a defence of poetry.