Honest Engine

....As far as I am concerned, a mind's arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility. Thus with Huysmans, the Huysmans of En Rade and La-Bas, I find so much in common about our ways of valuing the world, of choosing with all the partiality of despair among what exists, that though unfortunately I have been unable to know him save by his work, he is, perhaps, less of a stranger to me than any of my friends. But has he not also done more than anyone else to consummate that necessary, vital discrimination between the apparently fragile link which can be of the utmost aid to us and the dizzying array of forces which conspire together for our destruction? He has familiarized me with that tremendous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysman could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in his hours of gravest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quite involuntary reasons he still found for being and for not being — to whose advantage he never really knew — a writer! He, too, is the object of one of those perpetual solicitations which seem to come from beyond, which momentarily possess us before one of those chance arrangements, of a more or less unfamiliar character, whose secret we feel might be learned merely by questioning ourselves closely enough. Need I add how differently I regard Huysmans from all those empiricists of the novel who claim to give us characters separate from themselves to define them physically, morally — in their fashion! — in the service of some cause we should prefer to disregard! Out of one real character about whom they suppose they know something they make two characters in their story; out of two, they make one. And we even bother to argue! Someone suggested to an author, I know, in connection with a work of his about to be published and whose heroine might be recognized, that he change at least the color of her hair. As a blond, apparently, she might have avoided betraying a brunette. I do not regard such a thing as childish, I regard it as monstrous....
— Andrè Breton, Nadja, pp. 11-13.

....I shall add, in my defense, only a few words. The well-known lack of frontiers between non-madness and madness does not induce me to accord a different value to the perceptions and ideas which are the result of one or the other. There are sophisms infinitely more significant and far-reaching than the most indisputable truths: to call them into question as sophisms, it must be admitted that they have done more than anything else to make me hurl at myself or at anyone who comes to meet me, the forever pathetic cry of "Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?"
— Andrè Breton, Nadja, pp. 144.

                  The Neighbor
Unknown violin, are you following me?
In how many far cities your solitary
night must have talked to my own!
Do hundreds play you? Does one alone?

Are there in all great cities livers
who, had it not been for you,
would already have ended themselves in the rivers?
And why must I always be there too?

Why am I evermore the neighbour
of those that timidly force you to sing
and to say: This life is a heavier labour
than the heaviness of everything?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Book of Images," in Selected Works, Vol. II, Poetry, Lieschman (tr.), p. 114.

                      Death
There, a blue draught for somebody to drain,
stands Death, in a large cup without a saucer.
A rather odd position for a cup:
stands on the back of a hand. And still quite plain
and visible alog the smooth glazed slope
the place where the handle snapped. Dusty. And 'Hope'
inscribed in letters half washed down the sink.

The drinker destined for the drink
spelt them at breakfast in some distant past.
What kind of creatures these are, that at last
have to be poisoned off, it's hard to think.

Else, would they stay? Has this hard food, in fact,
such power to infatuate,
They'd eat for ever, did not some hand extract
the crusty, present, like a dental-plate?
Which leaves them babbling. Bab, bab, ba...
.........

O falling star,
seen from a bridge once in a foreign land: —
remembering you, to stand!
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Uncollected Poems 1906-1926," in Selected Works, Vol. II, Poetry, Lieschman (tr.), pp. 316-317.

Give me, O Earth, for keeping
tears, of your purest clay.
Pour, O my being, the weeping, lost within you, away.
Let the withheldness flow where
that will receive which should.
Nothing is bad but the nowhere,
all that exists is good.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 350.