THROUGH ARCADES

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[througharcades]

His father’s last drawings did not look in any way like an inhabitable building, or at least one inhabitable by humans. Spiral staircases climbed vertiginously to the heavens, joining tenuous, translucent footbridges, which brought together irregular, lanceolate buildings of blinding white, whose forms reminded you of certain cirrus clouds. Basically, Jed thought sadly on closing the dossier, his father had never stopped wanting to build houses for swallows.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

To have both his parents commit suicide, Jed went on without acknowledging the interruption, inevitably put you in an unstable and uncomfortable position: that of someone whose attachments to life lack solidity. He spoke at length, with an ease that in hindsight would surprise him, because, after all, he too felt only a hesitant love of life, and generally passed for someone rather reserved and sad. But he had immediately understood that the only way to influence his father was to appeal to his sense of duty; his father had always been a man of duty, and only work and duty had counted for much in his life.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. The only reply, she knew in her heart of hearts, was that they wanted to make money, as much money as possible; aside from a few short-term humanitarian fads, that was the only thing that really got them going. Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins, even if she avoided formulating it to herself in terms that stark.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

Every evening, while Hélène went to the beach, he went to a mass grave where they deposited the recently deceased, without precaution against predators or insects. After concentrating all of his mental faculties by trying to follow the precepts laid down by Buddha in the sermon on the direction of attention, he had thus been able to intently observe the wan corpse, the suppurating corpse, the dismembered corpse, the corpse eaten by worms. At each stage, he had to repeat to himself, forty-eight times: “This is my fate, the fate of all mankind, I cannot escape it.”

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

In the southerly direction the village ended at the Immanuel Kant roundabout, a purely urbanistic creation of great aesthetic sobriety—a simple circle of totally gray tarmac which led to nothing, enabled access to no road, and around which no house had been built.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

You never decide to write a novel, he had added; a book, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the author’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction for the process to start by itself.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

It’s impossible to write a novel, Houellebecq had told him the day before, for the same reason that it’s impossible to live: due to accumulated inertia.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

“We too are products,” he went on, “cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning of the system is identical—with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state. “But that’s nothing, that’s nothing,” he went on lightheartedly. He began to cut up a second sausage and then, with his knife in his hand, stopped to intone in a powerful voice: “To love, laugh, and sing!” His sweeping hand knocked over the bottle of wine, which shattered on the tiles.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

He slowly began to cry, big tears streaming down his face, and served himself another glass of wine. “It’s brutal, you know, it’s terribly brutal. While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product-line managers who of course know better than anyone else what the customer wants, who claim to capture an expectation of novelty in the consumer, and who in reality just turn his life into one exhausting and desperate quest, an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.”

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

“Why don’t you stop?” Jed asked. His father looked at him without reacting, with an expression of total incomprehension. “I mean, you’ve made a lot of money. You could certainly retire, and take advantage of life.” His father was still staring at him, as if the words weren’t registering, or he was not managing to give them a meaning. Then, after a minute, he asked, “But what would I do?” and his voice was that of a lost child.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

His father didn’t seem interested in much anymore; he read less and less, and was utterly indifferent to questions of dress. He was, according to the director of the nursing home, “reasonably integrated,” which probably meant that he hardly said a word to anyone.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

As much as men are often jealous, and sometimes horribly jealous, of their girlfriends’ former lovers, and as much as they ask themselves anxiously for years, and sometimes until death, if it hadn’t been better with the other one, if the other hadn’t given them more pleasure, they easily accept, without the slightest effort, everything their women might have done in the past as a prostitute. As soon as it is concluded by a financial transaction, any sexual activity is excused, rendered inoffensive, and in some way sanctified by the ancient curse of work.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

There’s a sort of emotion that manages to be born in their old heads: the son is the death of the father, certainly, but for the grandfather the grandson is a sort of rebirth or revenge, and that can be largely sufficient, at least for the duration of a Christmas dinner.

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[througharcades]

“It’s curious, you might think that the need to express yourself, to leave a trace in the world, is a powerful force, yet in general that’s not enough. What works best, what pushes people most violently to surpass themselves, is still the pure and simple need for money.”

In The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd

[proustitute]

Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci.

Paul Éluard (via proustitute)

[througharcades]

The Girl Who Never Rained

Oddly enough, there was always a city block of clear weather on every side of her, a space just large enough that the casual passerby simply thought, "What an odd spot of calm," and often even people who knew her well never quite put it together, as, after all, it's not that unusual to have a break in a storm, though they'd develop, after a while, an odd inclination to be with her without really thinking out why. Other than that, her life was neither better nor worse than most, except, of course, for the crowds.

'The Girl Who Never Rained' by Cole Swensen, in Goest (2004)

[througharcades]

Midas is an image of someone stranded in his own desire, longing to touch and not to touch at the same time, like the children in Sophokles' poem with their hands full of ice. Perfect desire is perfect impasse. What does the desirer want from desire? Candidly, he wants to keep on desiring. Midas' golden touch would be a powerful symbol of perfect, self-extinguishing, self-perpetuating desire. As such, Midas might call to mind the type of bad lover whom Sokrates and Lysias denounce in their speeches, for Midas' touch has a devastating effect on the things he loves. They turn to gold. They stop in time. So, too, the bad lover contrives to fix the living organism of his paidika at a moment of gold, that is at the akmē of his youthful bloom, so that he may be perfectly enjoyable for as long as possible. The Midas touch stops time for the lover too, permitting him to freeze his own emotional life at the high point of desire.

In Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson