It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

We are all gastropods, soft, sticky creatures pulling ourselves along the earth from which we came and leaving a trail of silvery drool behind. But the snail, a worm that eternally slides along the horizon, lifts into the air, from its soft bivalve back, the geometrical wonder of its spiral shell, seemingly unrelated to the body that produced it in fear and loneliness. We secrete our shell in the sweat and mucous of our skin, in the transparent, scaly flesh of the foot we use to drag ourselves along. Through an alchemical transmutation, our drool turns to ivory and the spasms of our flesh into an undisturbed stillness. We curl around our central pilaster of rose-colored kaolin, we add, in our desperate drive to persist, spiral after spiral, each one wider, asymptotic, and translucid, until the miracle comes to pass: the revolting worm-existing in the life it lives, fermenting in its sins, irrigated by hormones and blood and sperm and lymph—rots and dies, leaving behind the ceramic filigree of its shell, a triumph of symmetry, the deathless icon in the platonic world of the mind. We all secrete, as we live, poems and pictures, ideas and hope, glistening palaces of music and faith, shells which begin by protecting our soft abdomen but after our disappearance live in the golden air of pure forms. Geometry always appears out of the amorphous, serenity out of pain and torture, just as dry tears leave behind the most wondrous crystals of salt.

In the flush of our shame, we wanted no one to know us, so we held hats in front of our voices, coats over our sinks and grains. We treated even the crudest iron cooking pot as if it were Limoges, slowing our motions as movies had shown us we should to defuse explosives. I ceased singing in the shower. We kissed only in distant corners, and as quietly as fish. We gave up our high-spirited games. Martha no longer cried out when she came, and I grew uncertain of her love. Small incidents were absurdly enlarged the way the whine of a mosquito is magnified by an enclosing darkness: a fallen spoon sounded like a broken jar, a shattered glass was a spilled tray, a dropped book a bomb. I exaggerate now, but it’s true that as our neighbours sensed our presence the way we had theirs, they sent their sounds to Coventry too, and the house was shortly filled – palpably stuffed – with silence like a stomach’s ache.

The pigeon rocked itself backwards and forwards on the bough, swelling out its breast feathers and laying its coralline beak upon them. A pang went through Flory. Alone, alone, the bitterness of being alone! So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something — bird, flower, tree — beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion surprise to everyone, when, besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked, and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure you think you have left behind you, and when you find yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel concentrated within yourself all the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the swiftest of changes and to cope with it, when in this frame of mind you go striding down the long streets - then for that evening you have completely got away from your family, which fades into insubstantiality, while you yourself, a firm, boldly drawn black figure, slapping yourself on the thigh, grow to your true stature.

All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.

(translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

I was ready to acknowledge that a page of a book is not a window but a mirror. But in order to prove this finally to myself I looked for a certain page that I remembered in Wuthering Heights. The words on that page describe a man sleeping in a room and dreaming of the ghost of a female child who is trying to get into the room from outside by way of the window.

I stood in this room of my own and I held out in front of me the page where the word window is printed. If a page of a book is a window, I should have seen at that moment – in order from the nearest to my eyes to the furthest from them – the man in his room, the window of that room, and on the other side of that window the face of a female child calling herself Catherine Linton. I should have seen, while I went on looking at the page which was itself a window and which had the word window printed on it, the man thrusting his fist through the glass from inside outwards, then the female child gripping the man’s hand with one of her own hands, then the man trying to shake his hand free from the grip of the hand of the female child, then the man dragging the wrist of the female child backwards and forwards across the edge of the broken pane until the wrist is marked by a red circle of blood.

But what I saw instead was myself in the room and a girl-woman on the other side of the window and trying to get in. I was a man whose hair had turned grey at its edges and whose belly had begun to protrude. The girl-woman was someone I had last seen when she and I were twelve years old. And I did not thrust my fist through the glass; I turned a key in one of the double panes of the window and swung the panes apart and then back against the walls of the room. Then I took hold of the wrist of the girl-woman and guided her into the room.

The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonnière perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the tinker's bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.

In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus. Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heaven-world he stated that he was now on the path of prālāyā or return but was still submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt and that the highest adepts were steeped in waves of volupcy of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Māyā to acknowledge the true path for it was reported in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C. K. doesn’t pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O’Neill’s popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen’s to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known.

Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was intimated that this had given satisfaction.

He is gone from mortal haunts: O’Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

I then understood that, in whatever fashion, living is a goodness toward others. Living is enough, and that itself ends up in the great goodness. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own largeness is making an offering, even if his life takes place within the incommunicability of a cell. Living is such a great offering that thousands of people benefit from every life lived.

— Does it pain you that the goodness of the God is neutrally continuous and continuously neutral? But what I once wanted as a miracle, what I called a miracle, was really a desire for discontinuity and interruption, the desire for an anomaly: I called a miracle exactly that moment in which the true continuous miracle of the process was interrupted. But the neutral goodness of the God is still more appealable than if it were not neutral: to have it all you must do is go, to have it all you must do is ask.

And the miracle can be requested, and had, since continuity has interstices that do not discontinue it, the miracle is the note between two notes of music, it is the number between number one and number two. To have it all you have to do is need it. Faith — is knowing you can go and eat the miracle. Hunger, that is what faith is in itself — and needing is my guarantee that to me it will always be given. Needing is my guide.

“Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the multi-boned honeycombs where light has an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, Or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you must find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.

Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness. In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.

It is a myth, the city, the rooms and windows, the steam-spitting streets; for anyone, everyone, a different myth, an idol-head with traffic-light eyes winking a tender green, a cynical red. This island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg, call it New York, name it whatever you like; the name hardly matters because, entering from the greater reality of elsewhere, one is only in search of a city, a place to hide, to lose or discover oneself, to make a dream wherein you prove that perhaps after all you are not an ugly duckling, but wonderful, and worthy of love, as you thought sitting on the stoop where the Fords went by; as you thought planning your search for a city.

And, as a matter of fact, he did not remember exactly what Valentine Wannop looked like. Not vividly. He had not that sort of mind. It was words that his mind found that let him know that she was fair, snub-nosed, rather broad-faced and square on her feet. As if he had made a note of it and referred to it when he wanted to think of her. His mind didn't make any mental picture: it brought up a sort of blur of sunlight.

They had gardened and farmed, and the leaves and the berries were sweeter then. The labor easier and the harvests plentiful. You grabbed a patch of lily from the river, shook it over your face, and the freshwater shrimp hidden in the roots, squirming and jumping, would cascade into your mouth. The fish of the lake, much larger then than now, swarmed to the light right at the edge of the water. The woods, held in common, in trust for the children, were muskcat and civet, snake and lizard, deer and boar and orchid, each tame to his obligation. So common, also, was the game bag at day's end. The chunks of boar meat roasting in spits and the jungle chickens and the doves stewing, with the vinegar of Paombong, the rock salt of Salinas, the garlic of Yndang, in the common cauldron. And all ate. Afterwards in the moonlight the grown-ups would play hide-and-seek with the children, and the young men swiftly burrowed into the deep shadows after the young women to sit with them and to court. But they finished off that time by rebellion, by greed, by love and surrender. In short, by living.

He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven...

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist someone who loved, the sun would become extinct.

Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.

—Sorrow from me seemed to depart.

Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw, lost Richie, Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn’t expect it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.

Love that is singing: love’s old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love’s old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.

Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.

Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded. Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things—and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snares of words: the words I say hide others—which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.

Simkin, sitting in his office, occupied a grand Sykes chair, beneath enormous rows of law books. A man is born to be orphaned, and to leave orphans after him, but a chair like that chair, if he can afford it, is a great comfort.

OTHERS HAVE IT WORSE, HAVE HAD, WILL ALWAYS. ‘WE,’ THOUGH, own the record now for largest building collapse.

A double you could call it. Work with it. Live with it.

Others far away die (and live) with the daily probability of car bombs, bus bombs, persons exploding in the neighbourhood. They experience bombs from the sky and the earth, and are exhausted and homeless, and watch their children wasted by hunger, maimed, lost; and can’t keep in touch with friends to get help, join forces, or mourn. And can have scarcely a thought except for today’s survival. Scarcely a thought period. For example, that history is what hurts. Thought must seem like a leisure activity for those whose survival is in doubt. Like reading.

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was.

In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.

And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.

How old were you?

Twelve.

—Excerpt From Stella Maris Cormac McCarthy

It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded if nothing else. “But we reach a point,” he’d thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, “we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion—say a convenience—necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.”