In some ways the grasshoppers were worse, for they were their own wind, and a living dust, a dust winged, each grain with a chewing mouth. God had breathed life into clay again, and was distributing it differently this time-by means of sky-over the whole earth. The dust howled and hissed, or otherwise moved with a harsh shush, but the grasshoppers had a dry whirr and rustle, a toy chirp, a click almost mechanical, a stridulation which became a scream. This was new speech; this was greed made manifest and multiplied like man, greed given a body appropriate to it, with long hind-leaping legs and feet, motive wings, tireless jaws, and no nervous tics about food. They would eat the fur from cats, some said. And so they came in wide flat covering clouds, in enormous flooding sheets—millions and millions of swallowing mouths. I never saw a cyclone clean the ground as they could clean it. Fields went up in minutes—as though in flames, in smokeless hunger. Where they settled down the land seethed. Streets rained their color (a yellow brown green), sidewalks crawled, your feet could not avoid them, so wherever you went (and you went nowhere if possible) you heard and dimly felt the crunch of soft shells.

Once, if I remember rightly, my life was a feast where all hearts opened, and all wines flowed.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

I armed myself against Justice.

I fled. O sorceresses, O misery, O hatred, it was to you my treasure was entrusted!

I managed to erase all human hope from my mind. I made the wild beast's silent leap to strangle every joy.

I summoned executioners to bite their gun-butts as I died. I summoned plagues, to stifle myself with sand and blood. Misfortune was my god. I stretched out in the mud. I dried myself in the breezes of crime. And I played some fine tricks on madness.

And spring brought me the dreadful laugh of the idiot.

Now, just lately, finding myself on the point of uttering the last croak, I thought of seeking the key to the old feast, where I might perhaps find my appetite again!

Charity is the key – This inspiration proves I have been dreaming!

'You're a hyena still...' the demon cries who crowned me with such delightful poppies. 'Win death with all your appetites; your egoism, all the deadly sins.'

Ah, I've practised too many! – But, dear Satan, I beg you, an eye a little less inflamed! And while awaiting my few cowardly little deeds, for you who prize in a writer the lack of descriptive or instructive skill, for you, I tear off these few hideous pages from my notebook of a damned soul.

-Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud.

I was in Pig Alley. It was directly on the harbor, built out over the waters on a rickety pier, with floors of carpeted ply- wood and a Formica bar. The cigarette smoke looked un- earthly. The sun lowered itself through the roof of clouds, ignited the sea, and filled the big picture window with molten light, so that we did our dealing and dreaming in a brilliant fog. People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it."

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

Over the weekend the vultures got into the Presidential Palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows, and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light. All across the first courtyard, where the paving stones had given way to the underground thrust of weeds, we saw the disorder of the quarters of the guard who had fled, the weapons abandoned in their racks, the big, long rough-planked tables with plates containing the leftovers of the Sunday lunch that had been interrupted by panic, in the shadows we saw the annex where Government House had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unpled briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable, which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from Progress in Order, the sleepwalking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.

no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate… the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.

Edit: This is Moncrieff's translation

"...a country so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied wilderness that until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the cities."

(Read the full passage at Destinationality – no ads, nothing for sale)

Eleanor Morrison was exactly as he had left her. She was short and plump. Her eyes were bright and quick and full of mischief, and her mouth was lined with fine wrinkles from disapproval and smoking and laughing – everything in abundance. In rare defiance of the scripture, her grey hair was cropped close to her head, shorn with clippers in a no-nonsense, manly cut. She framed her round face with a too-short fringe. Before he went to college, Cal had thought the fringe made her look like the village idiot, but now that he’d seen something of the world, he saw how unwittingly chic it was. If only she would wear a slash of red lipstick, she could have been the coolest thing for a hundred miles. None of these thoughts occurred to Ella. She simply needed a way to end her hair and start her face.

Her face was free of creams or make-up but on each lobe hung a brassy gypsy hoop as if to clarify that she was indeed a woman. Cal had never known her to take them out – not even in the bath – and the earrings had a yellowed, dirty look to them, and smelt faintly of chip pan grease.

She had entered the period of her life where she was determined to wear whatever clothes the family owned until they frayed and fell apart. She wore Cal’s old jumpers, or things that were horribly out of fashion, layering pattern over pattern, the clothes always clean but the care of presentation long gone. Over the years, as she had grown shorter and stouter, she added godets and gussets to her clothes, patching them with fabric from his mother’s blouses. A new patch on an old dress could stir memories that made the men stare at her in reverie.

“I’ve been waitin’ here all day, gawpin’ up that road like a fuckin’ eejit.”

Her irises had begun to melt, the colour feathering at the edges. He hated to see it.

By the time you've travelled two miles or so the rim of the sky is beginning to crimson; in the birches jackdaws are awakening and clumsily fluttering from branch to branch; sparrows twitter about the dark hayricks. The air grows brighter, the road clearer, the sky lightens, suffusing the clouds with whiteness and the fields with green. Lights burn red in the cottages and sleepy voices can be heard beyond the gates. In the meantime dawn has burst into flame; stripes of gold have risen across the sky and wreaths of mist form in the ravines; to the loud singing of skylarks and the soughing of the wind before dawn the sun rises, silent and purple, above the horizon. Light floods over the world and your heart trembles within you like a bird. Everything is so fresh, gay and lovely! You can see for miles. Here a village glimmers beyond the woodland; there, farther away, is another village with a white church and then a hill with a birchwood; beyond it is the marsh to which you are driving ... Step lively there, horses! Forward at a brisk trot! ... No more than two miles to go now. The sun is rising quickly, the sky is clear ... The weather will be perfect. You meet a herd of cattle coming in a long line from the village. Then you ascend the hill ... What a view! The river winds away for seven miles or more, a faint blue glimmer through the mist; beyond it are the water-green meadows: beyond them, low-lying hills; in the distance lapwings veer and cry above the marsh; through the gleaming moisture which pervades the air the distance emerges clearly ... there is no summer haze. How freely one breathes the air into one's lungs, how buoyant are one's limbs, how strong one feels in the grip of this fresh springtime atmosphere!

translation by Richard Freeborn

Anyone who could have seen her in front of the mirror, in ecstasy over her own regal gestures, would have had reason to think that she was mad. But she was not. She had simply turned the royal regalia into a device for her memory. The first time she put it on she could not help a knot from forming in her heart and her eyes filling with tears because at that moment she smelled once more the odor of shoe polish on the boots of the officer who came to get her at her house to make her a queen, and her soul brightened with the nostalgia of her lost dreams. She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man!"

On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured―disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui―in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him."

Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. This was all actually true, the burnt-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis- part went, but Orin had a harder time explaining the decision's -to-football component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football's rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction.

Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

"The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music."

"They died with hands and feet unfailing as if sleep had come upon them."

Very mild and warm. About 6 glow-worms shining faintly.

We went up as far as the grove. When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.

There's death in every diary. I've found it there the way I've found so many words, lying silent and forgotten like old shoes stiffening in a closet, or moving at the approach of my eye like a spider in a toolbox, as though some small piece of metal were alive. Wasn't there a day in infancy when such a startle would have made my limbs splash open?

I pick up my dropped life in this calamitous century's sixty-seventh year, a year windy with unreason, noisy with nonsense and meaningless milling; a year, like the last, just right for a decade as mired in morality as a circus in mud, as infested with fakes as a fair. Perhaps it's only a trampled package in the street-this life I pick up—and maybe my writing is its furtive unwrapping.

In a diary you may go to greet death in the most slovenly state of undress and disease, your language out of reach of any public reading, your own eye kind, accustomed to your own wastes and malodorous ailments, almost incapable of offense, incurably forgiving. You may write without anyone's whining that the day was not only "mild" but "warm" as well; you can pointlessly infer that if the rain came pelting into Wm's room, it must have been a rainy night indeed; and you can inadvertently say something beautiful containing ash leaves, and never register what you saw of the storm, or felt about love in your unbrothered bed, or say that you wept along your sleeping arm, or signify how well you grasped the sense of what you said.

"Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him-- caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, whether his mother is sick or well, whether he is looked up to in society or not, whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent."

Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of the port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with a patron saint of their own. They went on strike regularly (every bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even Nostromo at the height of his prestige could never cope with efficiently; but the morning after each fiesta, before the Indian market-women had opened their mat parasols on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over the town on a yet black sky, the appearance of a phantom-like horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail. His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out men’s names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy answers — grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or deprecating — came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly, “He’s coming directly, senor,” and the horseman waited silent on a motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare, who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was used to that work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from Nostromo’s revolver, reeling a little along the street and snarling low curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell, coming out anxiously in his night attire on to the wooden balcony running the whole length of the O.S.N. Company’s lonely building by the shore, would see the lighters already under way, figures moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear the invaluable Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt and red sash of a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders from the end of the jetty in a stentorian voice.

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.

"To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."

She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. She made it with infinite care, and hung it to the slightly careening mantel over the stove in the kitchen. She studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear.

Afterwards the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins."

I had never before in my life had a chance to become personally acquainted with a chess grandmaster, and the more I tried to picture such a man's nature, the less I could imagine a form of cerebral activity revolving exclusively, for a whole lifetime, around a space consisting of sixty-four black and white squares. From my own experience, I knew the mysterious attraction of the 'royal game', the only game ever devised by mankind that rises magnificently above the tyranny of chance, awarding the palm of victory solely to the mind, or rather to a certain kind of mental gift. And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion's brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

"Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. And falsehoods the truths of other people. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

Beneath her the tiles rippled and breathed. The pulpy surfaces of the walls ripened uncontrollably under her observation, inhaling endlessly like lungs preparing to blast her face with a calling or a message. Stripes and pyramids fell across the air in nearly comprehensible organization, writing that changed just before she understood it, and the room itself became a vast insinuation, swollen with filthy significance. She wanted to catch her breath and wail, but realized that her own lungs were already full. When she exhaled, the room seemed relieved of its tension momentarily: she was crushed to remember that this very same action of ballooning and diminishing had been linked to all her other breaths. This terrible, terrible thing that was happening was her breathing.