yoonkim.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Freud in a letter to Binswanger (who had also suffered the loss of a child): “My daughter who died would have been thirty-six today. […] Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. [+]

submitted 1 hour ago • 1 comment

“TIBBON, JUDAH BEN (12th century): […] The translation was faithful when ben Tibbon was in love with his betrothed, good when he was angry, wordy if the winds blew, profound in winter, expository and paraphrased if it rained, and wrong if he was happy.” — Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

submitted 23 hours ago • 0 comments

Robert Musil, “On Stupidity”: “The higher pretentious form of stupidity … is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right. … This higher stupidity is the real disease of culture. [+]

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Robert Musil (in a 1937 lecture): “Each of us is, if not always, at least from time to time, stupid. So a distinction must also be made between failing and incapacity, between occasional, or functional, and permanent, or constitutional, stupidity, between error and unreason. [+]

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

“Delusion is a perfect state. … It is a deliberate construction conceived to deceive the very person who has constructed it. A pure state, maybe the purest of all the states that exist. Delusion, like a private novel, like a future autobiography.” — Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

“Vielleicht die reinste Genugtuung meines Lebens: Musils Geltung.” — Elias Canetti (Die Fliegenpein)

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Robert Musil: “That the moment of feeling can never be sustained, that emotions wilt more quickly than flowers, or transform themselves into paper flowers if one tries to preserve them, that happiness and will, art and conviction, pass away: all this depends on the specificity of the emotion, [+]

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

“The nonspecific emotion changes the world in the same way the sky changes its colors, without desire or self, and in this form objects and actions change like the clouds. The attitude of the nonspecific emotion to the world has in it something magical.” — Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

“For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. … Morality is imagination. … His second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.” — Musil, The Man without Qualities

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

from Musil’s The Man without Qualities: “You read a great deal, don’t you? … You leave out whatever doesn’t suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. [+]

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

“You are perhaps right in what you say about excessive reading killing the imagination, the individual element, the one thing, after all, that has some value.” — Flaubert to Louise Colet (1846)

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

“We lived a day-to-day life which, however tedious, was still endurable, held down to earth by the ballast of habit and by that certainty that the next day, even if it should prove painful, would contain the presence of the other.” — Proust, The Captive (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

“A life of afterwords begins. We never live long enough in our lives to know what today is like.” John Ashbery

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

“The abyss is vertigo of all rebirth.” — Edmond Jabès

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

“Listen, because I dived into the abyss I started to love the abyss of which I am made.” — Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

“Man is within man like the kernel in the fruit, or the grain of salt in the ocean. And yet, he is the fruit. And yet, he is the sea.” — Edmond Jabès (A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

“The thoughts of men are each a soul.” (Herman Melville, Mardi)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

“Dans mon inconscient ce sont les autres que j’entends…” (Antonin Artaud, Cahiers de Rodez)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Marcel Proust (Against Sainte-Beuve): “…that Method [of Sainte-Beuve] which consists of not separating the man from the work, of considering that it is not irrelevant if we are to judge the author of a book … to surround oneself with all the possible facts about a writer, [+]

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

“Every soul is a rhythmic knot.” (Mallarmé, La Musique et les lettres) “Death is a knot undone.” (Jabès, The Book of Questions)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

“But if I do not … out of the many men in me make one … then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.” (Virginia Woolf, The Waves) “Yes, what I’m writing you is nobody’s. And this nobody’s freedom is very dangerous. It is like the infinite that has the color of air.” (Clarice Lispector, Água Viva)

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.” (Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal)

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. […] The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself.” (Don DeLillo, Mao II)

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“The author of what I describe is not myself, it is the Other. First of all it is you, it is the woman, it is the queen, it is the Child, it is a person who is greater than I and who surpasses you as well, whom you do not know. I am your scribe.” (Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea)

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Roland Barthes: “There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the ‘dominant ideology’; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). [+]

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

“Only much later did I understand that being there is also giving.” — Clarice Lispector (from her story “A Sincere Friendship,” tr. Katrina Dodson)

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Vila-Matas on Robert Walser “Someone has compared Walser to a long-distance runner who is on the verge of reaching the longed-for finishing-line and stops in surprise, looks round at masters and fellow disciples, and abandons the race, that is to say [+]

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

“We are only what we do to others. We are the consequences of those actions. Perhaps the most important thing is not to triumph in life. Not to be fulfilled. Man must live by seeking fulfillment. Achieving fulfillment is like adding a full stop.” — Clarice Lispector (Nov. 1973)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

“. . . is it love to give one another one’s own solitude as a present? For it is the utmost thing we can give of ourselves.” (Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

“The orange is the nearest star.” (Hélène Cixous, To Live the Orange)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Rereading 🖤

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Hélène Cixous (in her first tribute to Lispector): “A woman’s voice came to me from far away, like a voice from a birth-town, it brought me insights that I once had, intimate insights, naïve and knowing, ancient and fresh like the yellow and violet color of freshias rediscovered…”

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Marcel Proust: “And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been—if the invention of language, the formation of words, [+]

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

“I have always hoped one day, as a sort of purification rite, to be able to write without my natural style. Style, even your own style, is an obstacle to be overcome. I didn’t want my way of saying things. I just wanted to say . . .” (Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

“But now, having removed the layer of words from things, now that he’d lost the language, he was finally standing in the calm profundity of the mystery.” (Lispector, The Apple in the Dark)

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

The epigraph to Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark:

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments