bent: towards the sun / vermisse die sonne

muısic for this post: Max Bruch – Kol Nidrei

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
Albert Camus

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible."
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

just to rival that one:

"...my heart was irrevocably gone."

Jane Austen (Love and Friendship)

"Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

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ICH VERMISSE DIE SONNE

a moment in a novel / saluting a lucky encounter

once more, i salute a favorite moment in a novel; with respect to a lucky encounter with a contemporary Marco Polo -from Vienna- who introduced me today to some new books & places.

"Do you believe in a future everlasting life?

No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Demons)

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both Franziska and this amazingly allegorical person reminded me of this book. i had no clue when i heard the name "demons." and now i make the connection, finally. it was the "the posessed" by dostoyevski after all. a trick of memory.

(the mind has weird ways of remembering: the association with the "The Dispossessed" by ursula K.L. Guin made it easier to remember D's book as "the possesed" instead of "demons"... or was the mind reluctant to pursue the word "demons")

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loving with one's stomach / dostoyevsky

"The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"I go on living in spite of logic"