will you walk out of the air?

Each of us alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

Salvatore Quasimodo, And suddenly it’s evening

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus
aduenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, aue atque uale.

Having come through many countries, over many seas,
I am here at last for these sad rites, my brother,
So that I may give you the gifts of death
and uselessly address your silent ashes:
Since fortune has carried you off
Alas, my brother, wrongfully taken from me,
Now take these offerings which, by ancestral custom,
Are given as a sad gift to the shades:
They are wet with your brother’s tears:
And then forever, brother, hail and farewell.

Catullus 101, trans. Sisson

I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze
Into one volume bound by love, the same
That the universe holds scattered through its maze.
Substance and accidents, and their modes, became
As if together fused, all in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple flame.
Verily I think I saw with mine own eyes
The form that knits the whole world…

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso 33:85-92

In that book which is
My memory…

On the first page

That is the chapter when
I first met you

Appear the words…

Here begins a new life

Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova

Aimer, ce n’est pas se regarder l’un l’autre, c’est regarder ensemble dans la même direction.

To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars)

This is one moment,
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Of Merlin wise I learned a song,—
Sing it low or sing it loud,
It is mightier than the strong,
And punishes the proud.
I sing it to the surging crowd,—
Good men it will calm and cheer,
Bad men it will chain and cage.
In the heart of the music peals a strain
Which only angels hear;
Whether it waken joy or rage,
Hushed myriads hark in vain,
Yet they who hear it shed their age,
And take their youth again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Merlin’s Song

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I LIved for