Come, said my Soul Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) That should I after death invisibly return, Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) Ever with pleas’d smiles I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses owning — as, first, I here and now, Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name, Walt Whitman
You were asleep. I wake you. The vast morning brings the illusion of a beginning. You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters. I bring you many things— the four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air; a single name of a woman; the friendship of the moon; the bright colors of the atlas; forgetting, which purifies; memory, which chooses and rediscovers; the habits which help us feel we are immortal; the sphere and the hands that measure elusive time; the fragrance of sandalwood; the doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics; the curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates; the taste of grapes and of honey
Open air highways planning for the future, the deeply paved path with real sidewalks maintain the illusion. Immovable guardians of order, last ramparts, legends and false memories relieve a little of the past. Search for a breach disappeared from the cameras, lost in specialized areas. Slipping through an impenetrable forest.
“As someone said to me–I can’t remember now who it was–it is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore, as that man truly said, it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why, he said, the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.”
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. ” Paul Bowles,
« Rome est ici, maintenant. L’Américain moyen n’y voit que du feu, mais elle est la réalité sous-jacente au monde où il vit. L’Empire n’a jamais pris fin. Il s’est seulement dérobé aux yeux de ses sujets. Comme on projette un film sur le mur d’une prison, il a ourdi pour eux cet univers de fantaisie, cette fiction éhontée que la plupart des spectateurs prennent pour un scrupuleux documentaire : dix-neuf siècles d’histoire et le monde qui en résulte. Mais pendant la projection la guerre continue. Ceux qui refusent de regarder le film et de le croire réel sont pourchassés impitoyablement : on ne les laisse pas sortir de la salle, on les massacre dans les toilettes. Certains, par prudence, donnent le change : ils restent assis face à l’écran, les yeux clos et l’esprit éveillé. Ils suivent leur propre voix, ils servent un autre roi » (Emmanuel Carrère, Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts, Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, Biographie, p. 262, Ed. du Seuil)
“Rome is here now. The average American does not see it, but it is the underlying reality of the world in which he lives. The Empire never ended. He only slipped away from the eyes of his subjects. As one projects a film on the wall of a prison, it has hatched for them this world of fantasy, this shameless fiction that most spectators take for a scrupulous documentary: nineteen centuries of history and the world that results from it. . But during the projection the war continues. Those who refuse to watch the film and believe it to be real are ruthlessly hunted down: we do not let them out of the theater, they are massacred in the toilet. Some, out of prudence, give up the change: they remain seated facing the screen, their eyes closed and their minds awake. They follow their own voice, they serve another king ”
(Emmanuel Carrère, I am alive and you are dead, Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, Biography, p. 262, Ed. Du Seuil)
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