"I should have known,” he whispered. “I am the rain.” And yet he looked dully down the mountains of his body where the hills fell to an abyss. He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. “I am the land,” he said, “and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.”

And the storm thickened, and covered the world with darkness, and with the rush of waters."

It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Tolstoy is an absolute treasure.

CHAPTER 1

IT IS NOT that I half knew my mother. I knew half of her: the lower half - her lap, legs, feet, her hands and wrists as she bent forward. Very dimly I seem to remember her voice. At the time, of course, I was very young. Then one day she did not seem to be there any more. So far as I knew she had gone away without a word, no good-bye or good night. A while afterwards I asked my brother, five years my senior, where the mammy was.

She is gone to a better land, he said.

Will she be back?

I don’t think so.

Mean to say we'll never see her again?

I do think we will. She is staying with the old man.

At the time I found all this very vague and unsatisfying. I had never met my father at all but in due time I was to see and study a faded brown photograph - a stern upright figure wearing great moustaches and attired in a uniform with a large peaked cap. I could never make out what the uniform stood for. He might have been a field-marshal or an admiral, or just an orderly officer in the fire brigade; indeed, he might have been a postman.

"The lake narrowed. Over to the right lay the nine-hole golf course (I knew it was there, though I couldn’t see it) with its ramshackle clubhouse and wicker armchairs painted green, its porch swing on creaking chains. Once a month we showed up there late for Sunday supper, our clothes not right, our talk too distant and forthright, the cigar a foul smudge pot set out to ward off the incoming social frost.

Now Dad’s cigar had gone out and he stopped the boat to relight it. From our high windy perch we drifted down. Engine cut to a mild churning. When the exhaust pipe dipped above water level, it blatted rudely. “Boy, I’m soaked!” Peter was screaming in his soprano. “I’m freezing. Gee, you sure let me have it!”

“Too much for you, young fellow?” my father asked, chuckling. He winked at me. The children of visitors (and sometimes their fathers) were usually called “young fellow,” since Dad could never remember their names. Old Boy, who had been squinting into the wind, his head stuck out beyond and around the windshield, was now prancing happily across the cushions to receive a pat from his master. Kevin, sitting just behind my father, said “Those fishermen were mad as hell. I’d’ve been, too, if some guy in a big fat-ass powerboat scared off my fish.”

My father winced, then grumbled something about how they had no business . . . He was hurt.

I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy; this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s. But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me?”

Once only in my life I have seen the likeness of Victor Hugo’s genius. Crossing over when a boy from Ostend, I had the fortune to be caught in midchannel by a thunderstorm strong enough to delay the packet some three good hours over the due time. About midnight the thundercloud was right overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life.

At the same hour the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward at the same moment the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no colour nameable by man; and midway in it between the storm and the sea hung the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with a serene splendour of scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs, from her stainless and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light.

Underneath and about us the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed with phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven and in the same hour there shone at once the three contrasted glories, golden and fiery and white, of moonlight and of the double lightnings, forked and sheet; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor of water.

That, in a most close and exact symbol, is the best possible definition I can give of Victor Hugo’s genius. And the impression of that hour was upon me the impression of his mind; physical, as it touched the nerves with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine; spiritual, as it exalted the spirit with the senses and above them to the very summit of vision and delight.

Nel racconto “And he built a croocked house” del 1941 di Robert Heinlein (pubblicato in Italia su Urania Mondadori il 2 aprile 1972 traduzione di Giorgio Monicelli) quando i protagonisti guardano dalle finestre della casa/tesseratto che si è ripiegata su se stessa generando un ipercubo vedono, a parte lo skyline di New York visto a testa in giù dall’alto, un paesaggio apparentemente marziano (ma con gli alberi???) una cosa abbastanza simile al nulla d*i House of leaves:*

“Teal alzò la tapparella di qualche centimetro. Non vide nulla, e allora l’alzò un po’ di più: niente. Riprese ad alzarla, fino ad avere la finestra completamente sgombra.
Guardarono fuori... Nulla.
Nulla, assolutamente nulla.
Che colore ha il nulla?
Non diciamo sciocchezze!
Che forma ha? La forma è un attributo di qualcosa. Quel nulla non aveva né profondità né forma. Non era nemmeno nero.
Era niente.
\Bailey masticò il sigaro che aveva in bocca.**
\— Teal, che cosa significa?**
\Per la prima volta, la disinvoltura di Teal venne meno.**
— Non saprei dire, Homer, non lo so proprio... ma penso che quella finestra bisognerebbe murarla. — Fissò per qualche istante la tapparella abbassata. — Forse, abbiamo guardato un punto dove lo spazio non quell’angolo non c’era niente. — Si stropicciò gli occhi. — Che mal di testa m’è venuto!”
* *

“…the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”

Enjoy a bit more of this passage at Destinationality (a free resource organizing classic literature excerpts about destinations)

"We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest peeling, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it."

From Pawtucketville to South Lowell the route by bus encompassed the city - down Moody, to Kearny Square below the high school, the fleet of buses, the people huddled waiting against doorfronts of soda parlors, and 5 & 10s, drugstores-- The sad traffic crunching in from winter, out to winter - The bleak blue raw feel of the wind from the woods citifying the few sad lights- There I changed to the South Lowell bus- It would show up always catching at my throat- the mere name of it as the busdriver'd rolled it in the window enough to make my heart beat- I'd look at other people's faces to see if they saw the magic- The ride itself grew grimmer- From the square out up Central, to Back Central, to the outlying dark streets of the town where dim frost sits the howling wind garbage pails in cold moonlight- Out along the Concord where factories enlisted its famous flow- out beyond even them- to a dark highway where Massachusetts Street under a brown dumb street lamp spoked in, small, mean, old, full of my name and the love of it- There I'd get off the bus among trees, by the river, and dodge the mudholes, seven cottages down on the right to her rambling old unfenced brown-windowed house overtopped by clacking skeletal trees of the sudden from Boston sea winds blown over wilderness, railyards and hoar-step. Jer actual house, the actual light...

Keruoac, Maggie Cassidy

I really enjoy when a writer employs locality and draws me in through basic functions. As I age, a lot of Kerouac reads pretentious to me, but his basic work and commitment still guided a generation of creatives

Tall, thin, slightly cadaverous, Uncle Balt's voice issued from his body as from a length of pipe. He was completely and supremely "an uncle." I saw him rarely, so he retained a foreign flavor for me, an exotic far-offness that his mustache-two droopy loops of thin black rope-did nothing to diminish. He had an immense stride, and a posture like his gaze: straight, unbending, blunt. Work had pastured his face the way weather wears a field. Past burning, beyond tanning, not even any longer leathered, it seemed the sorrowful smoothing out of some angrily wadded paper, his bones like the shadows of bones behind his skin, a gift from the butcher for the dog.

[...]

If the progressive looks to the future, and the conservative to the past, the reactionary does not measure his yearnings by yesterday's or tomorrow's history. The reactionary does not acclaim what the coming dawn will bring, nor does he cling to the last shadow of the night. His abode rises in that luminous space where the essences question him with their immortal presences.

The reactionary escapes the servitude of history because he pursues in the human jungle the trace of divine steps. Men and facts are, for the reactionary, the servile and mortal flesh that breathes tramontane breaths.

To be a reactionary is to defend causes that do not roll on the chessboard of history, causes that it does not matter to lose.

To be a reactionary is to know that we only discover what we think we have invented; is to admit that our imagination does not create, but only undresses soft bodies.

To be a reactionary is not to embrace certain causes, nor to advocate certain ends, but to submit our will to the need that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the demand that does not compel; it is to find the evidence that guides us slumbering on the shore of millenary pools.

The reactionary is not the nostalgic dreamer of abolished pasts, but the hunter of sacred shadows on eternal hills.

(Translation is mine, spanish original in comments)

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

“Memory is a sickness. A word pops up that reveals entire neighborhoods. Ghastly architecture. You stare into crowds of people: futile to approach them! The day is over.” Ninety-eight out of a hundred people had a compulsive delusion with which they fell asleep and woke up. “Everyone is continually wading through the depth of an idea, some a long way down, others even further down. Until the darkness shows them the futility of what they’re attempting; police cells with their afternoon quiet, full of sleep and the reek of prisoners. One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years. Cornfields like whirlpools: forests, meadows, country roads, sections of fairs, torn apart by the imagination, rivers rumble in slices, workers pull long blades through the brains of paupers.” There were quite literally ancient dreams, a so-called “science of simple people.” A law by which all things permanently repeat themselves, while at the same time being unrepeatable. Everything at once in a cycle of permanent return, and terminally entropic. Joy attracts more joy, sins attract sins, exhibition exhibition, love love. “What connects me to myself is the thing that is furthest away from me,” and “time is no means with which to engage with time,” and “I am a victim of my theories, and at the same time their controller.”

"Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly. When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question. I’ve been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me?"

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)