Simic

Intense experience eludes language. Language is the Fall from the awe and consciousness of being.

What does it all mean, she wanted to know? What terrified her was the likelihood that it meant nothing.

My student Jeff McRae says, "Life at its best is a beautiful sadness."

Free will is an illusion. In conspiracy theory, the law of gravity is absolute. Planes cannot fly.

Suppose you don't believe in either Hobbes's notion that man is evil and society is good, or Rousseau's that man is good and society is evil. Suppose you believe in the hopeless and messy mixture of everything.

We call "street wise" someone who knows how to look, listen, and interpret the teeming life around him. To walk down a busy city block is a critical act. Literature, aesthetics, and psychology all come into play.

Eternity is the insomnia of Time.

Consciousness: this dying match that sees and knows the name of what is throws its brief light upon.

The closeness of two people listening together to music they both love. There's no more perfect union. I remember a summer evening, a good bottle of white wine, and Helen and I listening to Prez play "Blue Lester." We were so attentive, as only those who have heard a piece a hundred times can be, so this time it seemed the piece lasted forever.

Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him. Poe often dreamed he was a black pullet pecking in the graveyard on moonlit nights. Hawthorne kept a rusty nail in his shoe as a pet. Melville nursed his melancholy by eating fresh strawberries in cream on summer mornings. Come evenings, Emily Dickinson could see the shadow her brain cast on the bedroom wall. Whitman's beard once caught fire. The firemen came from as far as Louisiana to put it out. Emerson said, "The world is an immense picture book." "Everybody's using its pages to wipe his ass," wrote in response an unknown American genius in the margin of my library book.

"When the entire world was covered with ladybugs," she sighed, "and we made love on the ceiling."

Faulkner somewhere defines poetry as the whole history of the human heart on a head of a pin.

Cold, windy autumn night. A homeless woman on the corner talking to God, and he, as usual, having nothing to say.

He’d explain to me slowly, painstakingly, as if I were feeble-minded, that one should never worry about the future. “We’ll never be so young as we are tonight,” he’d say. “If we are smart, tomorrow we’ll figure out how to pay the rent.” In the end, who could say no?

The cards, the quick hands fluttered. It looked like a cock fight.

I remember my father saying, “Let’s have another bottle of wine so that when we rise from the table we can feel the earth turning under our feet.”

He prayed to God who couldn’t wait for him to die so he can roast him over a slow fire.

The sunset sits down to a feast over the rooftops as the homeless make their beds in the streets.

My old mother, exchanging whispers at dawn with a saint shot full of arrows.

The imagination has moments when it knows what the word “infinity” means.

The beauty of a fleeting moment is eternal.

Birds sing to remind us that we have a soul.

Awe (as in Dickinson) is the beginning of metaphysics. The awe at the multiplicity of things and awe at their suspected unity.

The old woman turning the crank had her eyes raised to heaven in a manner favored by saints who are being tempted by demons.

In the morning she gave me a long kiss in parting, which could have meant anything.