From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):
from The Ninth Duino Elegy
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])
…and:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”
(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Chance went inside and turned on the TV. The set created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all plants downward. Everything on TV was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed out: night and day, big and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot and cold, far and near. In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man.
By changing the channel he could change himself. He could go through phases, as garden plants went through phases, but he could change as rapidly as he wished by twisting the dial backward and forward. In some cases he could spread out into the screen without stopping, just as on TV people spread out into the screen. By turning the dial, Chance could bring others inside his eyelids. Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself be.
The figure on the TV screen looked like his own reflection in a mirror. Though Chance could not read or right, he resembled the man on TV more than he differed from him. For example, their voices were alike.
He sank into the screen. Like sunlight and fresh air and mild rain, the world from outside the garden entered Chance, and Chance, like a TV image, floated into the world, buoyed up by a force he did not see and could not name.
(Jerzy Kozinski, from Being There (reprinted 1999) [source])
Finally, since Kozinski did after all raise the subject… Ellen DeGeneres — as usual — really does seem to resemble us more than she differs from us (from her 2003 “Here and Now” HBO special):
Ellen DeG (per yesterday’s show) is now on Twitter. So she can be THERE, with YOU. NOW, even.
kelly says
Are you kidding me? Rilke! Rilke! Oh, yes you are radical. You are way radical.
My favorite Rilke comes from Letters to A Young Poet. I love the idea of living your way into the questions. I try to live this way. I try. But, I’m usually to busy kicking down doors, totally impatient, the answers run from me and I chase frantically after with frizzy hair.
John says
kelly: Wow. I haven’t felt radical since I called Richard Nixon “Rosemary’s Baby”! (Of course, I was young and impetuous then. But still.)
Rilke’s letters you mention are a favorite of mine, too. (For anyone reading this who might not know them, they’re here among — no doubt — other places around the Web.)
You need to think of those elusive answers like the old hippie advice about love: if you’ve gotta chase them, maybe they’re not answers after all. Looking at them this way may also help keep your hair under control.
froog says
What was that song – “A man chases a girl, until she catches him”?
Same with “the answers”, I feel.
froog says
Perhaps not quite on point, but this is one of my favourite passages from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.
John says
froog: A superb passage from The Third Policeman. (Which I have yet to read. I’ve read a collection of his — The Best of Myles — and At Swim-Two-Birds. Time to expand the old horizon yet again, hmm? (Thanks for giving me yet another reason!))
marta says
What the hell is water reminds me a bit of teaching the 20 yr olds.
John says
marta: Ha! (That analogy is even better for anyone who knows you teach ESL. :)
froog says
I like the fish in water joke.
It reminds me of a favourite cartoon I saw in my childhood.
Two caterpillars are watching a butterfly fly past. One says to the other, “I don’t care what you say. You’ll never get me up in one of those.”
froog says
John, did you happen to see my post on two ‘lost’ poems yesterday?
I was hoping that you might be able to help me track them down.
John says
froog: On the lost poems, the Muir one took quite a while to find — it was “Suburban Dream” (which I pasted into my comment). Graham Hough’s “Andromeda” is in this PDF, on page 20.
I like the way you remember cartoon captions from years/decades ago; I’d thought I was the only one who did that. (Not counting the heavily anthologized classics, like Thurber’s “All right, have it your way: you heard a seal bark.”) The earthbound caterpillar is a gem!
Jules says
Beautiful. I love Rilke. The Wallace excerpt made me laugh outloud. He’s on my to-be-read pile, too. Any recommendations?
froog says
OK, this is serious indebtedness. I have to kill someone for you now. Or save someone’s life. Or something really extravagant…..
Thank you, thank you, JES.
And I’m sorry I’m too dumb to search that well…
John says
Jules: It’s almost impossible to read Rilke and NOT come away with something memorable, isn’t it?
On Wallace, I’ve got to plead ignorance. I think I have one book by him, The Broom of the System, which I got years ago. (His first book, maybe?) It seems every time I start to read it, I get majorly sidetracked. So I’ve read the first few pages (say) a dozen times; the next few pages (say) 11 times, and so on. I actually like what I’ve read but he seems to demand a commitment. (If that makes sense.) If/When you tackle him please let me know what you think.
froog: I doubt it’s a matter of dumbness. (I assumed it had something to do with your being behind the Internet curtain over there.) And I’m somewhat obsessive if it appears I can’t find something. (It helped that I stayed home from work today, heh.)
The Muir one was genuinely tough; I must’ve spent, well, a good while anyhow on that one.
You know anything about Wales? I’ve got this striking wallpaper on my computer here and at work; all I know of it — or can seem to find out about it — is that it’s a photo of “restaurated” monuments, about 2 meters tall, in the Vale of Glamorgan.
Not critical to know more, really, as I simply like the photo. But my imagined “need” to know rises artificially in proportion to the unlikelihood of knowing. If that makes sense.
froog says
I grew up quite near there, in a small town on the border called Monmouth. I’m afraid I don’t recognise the sword sculptures or their location, though. I suspect they’re quite recent.
I tried Googling around for a while, but with no luck.
Have you tried GoogleEarth?
John says
froog: Google Earth, excellent suggestion.
Knowing more about those swords isn’t really critical; they’ve more to do with my Wales jones (er, no pun intended) than anything else. I’ve half-convinced myself the whole thing is just a Photoshop-driven sham.
But…
…but…
……You grew up in Monmouth? Did I miss this on a bio at your site or something? [runs off to check] Right, so I didn’t really miss anything official. Numerous mentions of Monmouth in blog posts, though, and a visitor to Froogville could get an excellent feel for what your site (and your writing) is like just by doing the same search I just did, and reading the posts.
(The American Werewolf/Jenny Agutter thing renewed my faith in your cinematic taste, by the way. Not that it needed renewing.)
As for why the Monmouth connection should have so unhinged me: I don’t want or need to know anything about your real name; just reassure me that you’re not a seven- to eight-hundred-year-old man named Geoffrey.
I must go off and ponder the strange currents of the world these days… More later, after I’ve gathered my wits.
froog says
No, indeed, I am not Geoffrey, although I have read him (taking the Medieval Latin option in my last year was the most fun I had in my Oxford studies). And I think he’d be at least 900 years old if he were still among us now.
I had forgotten that I had ever mentioned Monmouth on the blog. I don’t reminisce about my childhood very much. However, I did mention over on The Book Book a while ago that David Mitchell’s fictionalized account of his childhood in the Malverns in Black Swan Green is uncomfortably familiar to me.
If you are on the lookout for potentially disturbing coincidences, I’ve had the Wikipedia page on Wales open in my browser all this past week. (The reason being that I was jousting with an angry Chinese commenter on another blog about the continuity – or otherwise – of the history of China as a single political entity, and I thought I’d better remind myself of the key stages in the unification of the UK.)