Could’ve chosen nearly any chapter, chose

71: MORELLIANA

Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an eden, another world? everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia.  An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam, le bon savage (and so it goes), Paradise Lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness…And so much for islands (cf. Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for hte Paris-Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing that this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalist is assigned to give us a precis of the quanta, Planck and Heisenberg, knocks himself out in thre columns explaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us with all our feet sticking up in the air.  An uncouth way of expressing one’s self, really.

The coffee cup is white, the noble savage is brown, Planck was a formidable german.  Behind all that (its alwasy behind, convicne yourself this is the key idea of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which weekping darkly seeks the land of Hurqualya.  In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground.  And not just for Eden, not so much for Eden as such, but just to leave jet planes behind, Kikita’s face or Dwight’s or Charles’s or Fancisco’s, the waking up to bells, the adjustment to thermometer and weather vane, the retirement from kicks in the ass (forty years of rubbing one’s behind so that it won’t hurt so much, but it hurts just the same, the tip of the shoe digs a little deeper every time just the same, and [I got bored of that passage]…

7o: a quote from MEISTER ECKARDT’s sermon:

“When I was in my first cause, I did not have God…I wanted myself and I did not want anything else; I was what I wanted, and I wanted what I was, and I was free of God and of everything…That is why we beseech God to free us from God, and to let us conceive the truth and to let us enjoy it eternally, there where the supreme angels, the fly, and the soul are all alike, there where I was and where I wanted that which I was and it was that which I wanted…”

[but I want to add this practical advice for writers, and none of us are writers]…115:

“The novel that interests us is not one that places characters in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters.  By means of this latter cecase to be characters and become people.  There is a kind of extrapolation through which they jump out at us, or we at them.  Kafka’s K. has the same name as his reader, or vise versa.”