Small Rain

Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence.

…what gives value to time, the knowledge of its scarcity or the illusion of everlastingness, what takes value away.

Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.

I had been in a cage, I thought, an animal in a cage; there was joy in movement, in being out of doors, detached from machines. Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace. Remember this, I said to myself. Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn't the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this.

I was full of squeamishness, which whatever else it is is a way of clinging to life, I could still care about unessential things.

.I thought of the old idea--is it in Milton or Dante, maybe both--that the pleasure of heaven is God's gaze upon us, the bliss of being seen by him. Maybe we got that idea from how dogs respond to us, the way they lift their ears and shiver with excitement, how you can work them up with the sound of your voice; it's intoxicating to be the object of such devotion, of course we love dogs.

The whole metaphysical edifice, love and artmaking and thought, poetry and painting, the possibility of God, all of it rested on brute mechanism, on the body taking things in and processing them and voiding what it couldn't use.

....now there was a great gulf and I was on one side of it alone. If I died, what would I be for him but a story, not even my own story but a segment of his, larger or smaller, I would be something he lived past, something he got over, an elegy's inspiration, maybe.