By Awe: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." — Thoreau "Cornell speaks of being 'plunged in world of happiness in which every triviality is imbued with significance'." — Charles Simic, We Comprehend by Awe, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992)

Life is like setting forth on a boat that is already sinking. Shunryu Suzuki

Without knowing: "I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me … What am I to do, what shall I do? How proceed? By aporia? … I say aporia without knowing what it means.” — Samuel Beckett, Unnamable

RIP Dale Pendell (1947-2018). Like Jenny Diski and Oliver Sacks, he wrote about his dying. He called his notes on dying Pharmako/Thanatos, where Pharmako is the gift and the poison, and Thanatos is our end. xitter.cf/faustroll/status/94358…

Good teachers are like artists who are capable of using other people as their ‘medium’. — Anton Ehrenzweig, 1965

"[Madness was once thought] a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent." — Machado de Assis, The Alienist (1882)

"Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul." — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1838)

Sense the provocation: "I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. We both recognize the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us." — A.E. Housman

“How many of us are still longing for the father’s recognition or the mother’s appreciation that still somehow drives what we do and what we hope to make of ourselves?” — Max van Manen, Pedagogical Tact: What to Do When You Don't Know

Solo recuerdo la emoción de las cosas, y se me olvida todo lo demás. Muchas son las lagunas de mi memoria. — Antonio Machado [I remember only the emotion of things and I forget all the rest. There are many gaps in my memory.] - Epigraph to Speziale-Bagliacca, Guilt, Chapter 10

Art of drowning: Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre que no sirven en la mar: ancla, gobernalle y remos, y miedo de naufragar. — Antonio Machado Four things a man may have that do not serve on the sea anchor, rudder and oars, and a fear of going under. — Machado

"[T]rauma, loss of our central importance, and eventual death is our fate. We cannot bear to think about these aspects of the human condition; yet we must be sufficiently aware of them in order to survive." — Shengold, The Promise

"All contradictions are to be found in me in some shape or manner....[W]hoever studies himself very attentively finds in himself, even in his judgment, a mutability and discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply or solidly." — Montaigne, Inconsistency (1588)

Mom: "Dickens’s mother was neglectful; Kipling’s allowed him to be sent away; Swinburne’s was overindulgent and unempathic; Butler’s cruel and uncaring. Jules Renard’s mother [..]a pathetic but monstrous psychotic sadist...E. M. Forster’s resisted his having a separate identity."

"It should not be a surprise that it is very difficult to be a human being." — Leonard Shengold

I fought the ghost and the ghost won: "So he fought out his day of life with the father ghost." — Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé on the suicide of Victor Tausk.