Plus my only natural talent's wasted

[sovay]

I sat down to write up this weekend and the bits and pieces of news that I've been reminding myself to report since last Thursday, but my brain has gone to slurry.* Consequently, I am forced to fall back on other people's brains for my entertainment. Don't let me down here.

So. I saw this done once with icons. If you want to comment on this post, you must do so in quotation. If you want to respond to a comment, you must do so in quotation. Prose, poetry, film, television, song lyrics, academic criticism, all are fair game; the language is likewise left to your discretion, although I cannot promise that you won't be asked to provide translations. Neither will I stipulate that you must be able to identify the quotation to which you are responding, although more power to you if you can. Quote characters who are already speaking in quotation, if you feel like it.** Now watch a total radio silence fall.

"Is anybody there?" said the Traveler . . .

*I blame this partly on the fact that I'm reading what must be the perkiest whaler's journal ever. A sample entry: December 10. Saturday. Set in, bright & beautiful! 9 AM raised "Right Whales!!!!!" Lowered! The Larboard Boat went on & struck a fine one! He tried hard to get away but the lance "hurt his feelings" and in consequence, he was a dead whale at 22 AM!! 3 PM Cut in. 7 PM Boiling! You think I'm making those exclamation points up.

**And if you are Pamela Dean, you should properly be started with a handicap . . .

Comments

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?
Air upon air, and man, where was he?
Time upon time, and man, where was he?
Were you too then the broken bit
of half-spent humankind, an empty eagle, that
through the streets today, through footsteps,
through the dead autumn's leaves,
keeps crushing its soul until the grave?
The meager hand, the foot, the meager life...
Did the days of unraveled light
in you, like rain
on pennants at a festival,
give off their dark food petal by petal
into your empty mouth?
Hunger, coral of humankind,
hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutter,
hunger, did your reef-edge climb
to these high and ruinous towers?

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

(and, okay, these little quotes are turning into passages--see what sovay opened up?)

[larryhammer]

Time shall not lose our passages.

---L.

completing the passage

[larryhammer]

                                              ... the spring,
How fresh our love was in the beginning;
The summer, how it ripen'd in the year;
And autumn, what our golden harvests were;
The winter I'll not think on to spite thee,
But count it a lost season; so shall she.

[sovay]

There is nothing in the world that we can count on
Even that we will wake up is an assumption
But I know for a fact that I loved someone
And for about a year we lived in Boston

Re: completing the passage

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

[sovay]

There's always a siren singing you to shipwreck

[larryhammer]

Not faint Canaries, but ambrosial,
Her swelling lips, to which when we are come,
We anchor there, and think ourselves at home,
For they seem all; there Sirens' songs and there
Wise Delphic oracles do fill the ear.

[sovay]

I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan; I will kiss thy mouth.

Re: completing the passage

[zdenka]

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
and burned the topless towers of Ilium?

[sovay]

Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

[zdenka]

Dimly I could descry
the stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes,
waiting to see me die.
The high masts flicker'd as they lay afloat;
the crowds, the temples, waver'd, and the shore;
the bright death quivered at the victim's throat--
touch'd-- and I knew no more.

[sovay]

The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monuments mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

[scanner-darkly.livejournal.com]

To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

[larryhammer]

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

[sovay]

When you understand that—then any time at all will be the right time for you.

[larryhammer]

I understand, and grow, and see
The rafters of my body, bone

[sovay]

But time is not mine to control . . . only to tease a little.

[scanner-darkly.livejournal.com]

this is the place where time reverses
dead men talk to all the pretty nurses
instruments shine on a silver tray
don't let me get carried away

[sovay]

What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them

[sovay]

I have the fervor of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

[zdenka]

And I know there is truth in this,
for I know what it is to stand
before the very gates of Dis,
and Dis was stretching out his hand --

[sovay]

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.

[zdenka]

In this happy little community, Death, when he comes, doth so in punctual and business-like fashion; and, like a courtly gentleman, giveth due notice of his advent, that one may not be taken unawares.