Life Matters

Sometimes there is no there there.

Stephen Spender writes, "It might seem then, that autobiography was the most stimulating of forms for a writer. For here he is dealing with his life in the raw at the point where it is also his art in the raw.... The basic truth of autobiography is: I am alone in the universe." Rabbi Hillel said it somewhat differently: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I for myself alone, what then am I? And if not now, then when?" And finally, Borges writes, "I always said that there is at least a moment in the life of a man when you can see him. I have tried to find such a moment." It was this moment, and only this moment, that Dostoevsky considered relevant within an entire life. But it is too demanding a stricture, this loneliness.
— Michael Tobias, "On Thinking About Oneself," Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1982, pp. 17-18.

Tar-baby ain't sayin' nuthin', en Brer Fox, he lay low.
— Uncle Remus, Legends of the Old Plantation (1881), Chap. 2.

For the Cabala, that letter [Aleph] stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it is the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; ....
— Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"

Today — twenty years later — despite all the time I have had to waste, I feel (with a touch of sadness) that I was right. Because (apart from the prose pieces, the early poems, and the others which echo them in the first issues of various literary reviews) I have always dreamed of, and attempted, something else; patient as an alchemist and ready to sacrifice all vanity and satisfaction to it, just as men used to burn their furniture and the beams of their house to feed the furnace of the Great Work. What work? It is hard to explain. I mean a book, simply; a book in many volumes; a book which is a book, architectural and premeditated, and not a miscelleny of chance inspirations, however marvelous they may be. I will go even further and say: the Book, for I am convinced that there is only One, and that it has been attempted by every writer, even by Geniuses. The Orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the poet's sole duty and the true function of literature. For the very rhythm of the book, impersonal and alive even in its pagination, would then be juxtaposed to the equation of this dream, this Ode.
— Stephen Mallarme, from "Autobiography" (a letter of biographical information to Paul Verlaine), in Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, Bradford Cook (tran.).

Upon being asked his opinion about an Assertiveness Training course which he was required to take during corporate training for management, Richard Bebeau said: "Some of us are lambs, some of us are lions — why do you want to turn all of us into sheep?"

Smoking is repetitive, unmerited sighing.
— Donald Elgeti

Never wrestle with a pig — you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
— attributed to Roger Hilsman in a letter to the Atlantic, May 1982, at "ancient aphorism."

I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out.
— Letter by Hawthorne to Longfellow, 1837.