‘Listen up, pal, the moon is way up in the sky. Aren’t you scared? The helplessness that comes from nature. That moonlight, think about it, that moonlight paler than a corpse’s face, so silent and far away, that moonlight witnessed the cries of the first monsters to walk the earth, surveyed the peaceful waters after the deluges and the floods, illuminated centuries of nights and went out at dawns throughout centuries…Think about it, my friend, that moonlight will be the same tranquil ghost when the last traces of your great-grandsons’ grandsons no longer exist. Prostrate yourself before it. You’ve shown up for an instant and it is forever. Don’t you suffer, pal? I…I myself can’t stand it. It hits me right here, in the center of my heart, having to die one day and, thousands of centuries later, undistinguished in the humus, eyeless for all eternity. I, I!, for all eternity… and the indifferent, triumphant moon, its pale hands outstretched over new men, new things, different beings. And I Dead!“–I took a deep breath. ‘Think about it, my friend. it’s shining over the cemetery right now. The cemetery, where all lie sleeping who once were and never more shall be. There, where the slightest whisper makes the living shudder in terror and where the tranquility of the stars muffles our cries and brings terror to our eyes. There, where there are neither tears nor thoughts to express the profound misery of coming to an end.’
— Clarice Lispector, “Another Couple of Drunks” (”Mais dois bêbedos”) from the Complete Stories
There’s almost a full moon now, shining faintly behind the clouds. I read the other day that we go back two hundred thousand generations. The moon has shone for them all. A short time ago I looked up a tit from where I was standing in the yard, and paused at the thought that Dante had stared at the same moon. Cave dwellers and peoples of the savannah, hunters and gatherers, farmers and forest people. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Amerindians. My forebears. Myself, through all my life, three, nine, eighteen, thirty-seven years old. Every night, the moon has been there. But what the thought conjured wouldn’t come. I felt no sense of history’s depths, no sense of being surrounded by our colossal past. If the moon is an eye, it is the eye of the dead. What it says to us is you are alone, you too. You can believe one thing, or you can believe another. It makes no difference, my children. Fight the fight, live life, die death.
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, “At the Bottom of the Universe” from In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays
dededos
germansingergirl
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
