Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul's lifted a glass and said, "To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I'd like to slice their faces with a razor."
The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.
2w ago
We do not think in words alone. We think in images, in sensations, in the movement and flow of muscle and nerve. Yet we must clothe our thought in words to communicate it, and so our words always betray the living truth a little.
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.
2w ago
The metaphor of the library is the metaphor of the world. We search for the infinite in the finite, and we find it nowhere but in language itself.
We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.
3w ago
The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
While I struggled to find Persian words for Trías's tales of quiet loss, the air outside was thick with the scent of gunpowder and the final breaths of a generation.
Every modern American dictionary that you've consulted owes something to the Third —even if that something is that the dictionary you're consulting is not the Third.
It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters.
1mo ago
The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
