Franz Kafka’s Diaries, 1 July 1914
ID: 1 July. Too tired.
whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
sunrise - louise glück
from a poem traveled down my arm- alice walker
[image description: black text on a white background that reads in the following format.
“I will
go
on
believing
that
love
is
the future
that
I deserve”
/end description]
Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (b. 14 June 1811)
your hands within my hands are deeds;
my tongue upon your throat—singing
arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful
dark
drink the dawn—
a forest shudders in your hair!
Hart Crane · “The Harbor Dawn.” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2001)
;_(1900)_(14748891504).jpg)
June page taken from
‘Through the Year with Birds and Poets.’
Poetry compilation by Sarah Williams.
Published 1900 by
Boston, Lee and Shepard.
The Library of Congress
Wikimedia.
Astrological diagram inside book cover, 1801
Coloured diagram pasted inside the cover entitled, ‘Talismans and magical images made from the twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon, etc. etc.’
#Occult #Talismans #FrancisBarrett #Magic #Astrology
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
I made a little text game if anybody wants to check it out!
https://abookish.itch.io/all-we-know
it’s small but I’m pretty proud of it
Sometime near five, I had just stepped from the living room as my sister came out of her room in the back, when the lock on the hall door between us ratcheted. The door swung in. Then my mother and aunts erupted through, all at once:
"It's all over! It's all over!—the poor boy—he's gone! Oh, the poor boy!"
(That was one of my father's older sisters, Bessie. As the announcement broke through the women's sobs, why, I wondered, feeling distant, do we turn in stress to such banalities?)
"No more suffering! It's all over!" My Aunt Virginia's voice might have been that of a traffic policeman clearing the road, as she led in my mother, an arm around her shoulders. "He's out of his pain."
The four of my father's sisters, Bessie, Sadie, Laura, and Julia, as well as my mother, were in tears. (Only Virginia, my mother's sister, was not crying.) All six women—I realized—already wore black.
That evening, over Mom's protests, I went talking by Riverside Park. Dead leaves mortared the pavement around Grant's Tomb. For some reason, sitting on one of the benches beside the public mausoleum, I took my shoes and socks off to amble barefoot on the chill concrete, beneath the mercury vapor lights, notebook under my arm. I'd been trying to write an elegy. It began, "They told me you were not in any pain ..." because, for some reason, that's what people had been saying to me about him a week now, even though every movement had made him gasp, grunt, or grate his teeth.
Days later, in suit and tie, I sat beside my mother in the front row of folding chairs in the funeral chapel, watching Brother (the same cousin who had driven us to the hospital, and who had been running my father's funeral business a year now, since Dad had been too ill to work) go up at the end of the service to the basket banked left and right by flowers, take the corpse's hand in his, and, with a sharp tug, remove my father's ring. Then he reached up to lower dark, gleaming wood. Moments afterward, outside the funeral home on Seventh Avenue among milling relatives and friends, he handed the ring to me and I slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, before I got into the gray, nestlike sofness of the funeral car for the ride to the cemetery.
from The Motion of Light in Water, Samuel R. Delany