The Lonely Poet, Khalil Gibran
I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile. I am alone, but in my aloneness I contemplate an unknown and enchanting country, and this meditation fills my dreams with the spectres of a great and distant land which my eyes have never seen.
I am a stranger among my people and I have no friends. When I see a person I say within myself, “Who is he, and in what manner do I know him, and why is he here; and what law has joined me with him?”
I am a stranger to myself, and when I hear my tongue speak, my ears wonder over my voice; I see my inner self smiling, crying, braving, and fearing; and my existence wanders over my substance while my soul interrogates my heart; but I remain unknown, engulfed by tremendous silence.
My thoughts are strangers to my body, and as I stand before the mirror, I see something in my face which my soul does not see, and I find in my eyes what my inner self does not find.
When I walk vacant-eyed through the streets of the clamorous city, the children follow me, shouting “Here is a blind man! Let us give him a walking cane to feel his way.” When I run from them, I meet with a group of maidens, and they grasp the edges of my garment, saying, “He is deaf like the rock; let us fill his ears with the music of love.” And when I flee from them, a throng of aged people point at me with trembling fingers and say, “He is a madman who lost his mind in the world of genii and ghouls.”
I am a stranger in this world; I roamed the Universe from end to end, but could not find a place to rest my head; nor did I know any human I confronted, neither an individual who would hearken to my mind.
When I open my sleepless eyes at dawn, I find myself imprisoned in a dark cave from whose ceiling hang the insects and upon whose floor crawl the vipers.
When I go out to meet the light, the shadow of the body follows me, but the shadow of my spirit precedes me and leads the way to an unknown place seeking things beyond my understanding; and grasping objects that are meaningless to me.
At eventide I return and lie upon my bed, made of soft feathers and lined with thorns, and I contemplate and feel the troublesome and happy desires, and sense the painful and joyous hopes.
At midnight the ghosts of the past ages and the spirits of the forgotten civilization enter through the crevices of the cave to visit me… I stare at them and they gaze upon me; I talk to them and they answer me smilingly. Then I endeavor to clutch them, but they sift through my fingers and vanish like the mist which sits on the lake.
I am a stranger in this world, and there is no one in the Universe who understands the language I speak. Patterns of bizarre remembrance form suddenly in my mind, and my eyes bring forth queer images and sad ghosts. I walk in the deserted prairies, watching the streamlets running fast, up and up from the depths of the valley to the top of the mountain; I watch the naked trees blooming and bearing fruit, and shedding their leaves in one instant, and then I see the branches fall and turn into speckled snakes. I see the birds hovering above, singing and wailing; then they stop and open their wings and turn into undraped maidens with long hair, looking at me from behind kohled and infatuated eyes, and smiling at me with full lips soaked with honey, stretching their scented hands towards me. Then they ascend and disappear from my sight like phantoms, leaving in the firmament the resounding echo of their taunts and mocking laughter.
I am a stranger in this world… I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.
For this reason I am a stranger, and I shall remain a stranger until the white and friendly wings of Death carry me home into my beautiful country. There, where light and peace and understanding abide, I will await the other strangers who will be rescued by the friendly trap of time from this narrow, dark world.
The commercials for Alf’s Boston debut in syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, so much like Garfield, so much like Bart) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV!” His pitch is an ironic permission slip to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of fetal position; a pose of passive reception to escape, comfort, reassurance. The cycle is self-nourishing.
- E Pluribus Unam, David Foster Wallace
Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests.
- E Unibus Pluram, David Foster Wallace
What explains the pointless of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It’s that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of “real life” made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will only look at your finger.
- E Unibus Pluram, David Foster Wallace
I would suggest that academics be established where young people will learn to get really high…high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark…high as the karate master is high when he smashes a brick with his fist…high…weightless…in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this rundown radioactive cop-rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body. Remember anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways. You don’t need drugs to get high but drugs do serve as a useful short cut at certain stages of the training. The students would receive a basic course of training in the non-chemical discipline of Yoga, karate, prolonged sense withdrawal, strobotropic lights, the constant use of tape recorders to break down verbal association lines. Techniques now being used for control of thought could be used instead for liberation. With computerized tape recorders and sensitive throat microphones we could attain insight into the nature of human speech and turn the word into a useful tool instead of an instrument of control in the hands of a misinformed and misinforming press.
- The Job, Interviews with William S. Burroughs
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
…precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered…
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Part of our difficulty today in accepting any connection[s] at all is that we tend to reduce [a] complicated matter to an apparently simple casual one, which in turn produces a rhetoric of blame and defensiveness.
- Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said