Pessoa

marcel proust (1871-1922): We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved person, we can no longer, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, strip off that good character, that nature of a woman who loves us, from the person who bestows that glance, bares that shoulder, than we can when she has grown old eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood....

Nature, is parts without a whole. When I read this line, it is like a lightning strike. For each of us, there are some universial patterns of our experiece in this world. However, it is each of us that makes the whole, loosely connected and remotely located. Yes, there is no such a whole. No one could experience everything in this universe. 2023-04-20 Another line from Marilyn Monroe’s poem runs in the same vein....

The book of disquiet is a great book, unique in its own way. To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself....