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Stream the new album from The Knife -
yea! you can also dowload the thing. i’m listening now, and it seems made for today in berlin.
(via wolfsham)
“When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky (via crashinglybeautiful) (via joethelion)
So one of the things James is interested in is certainly what an American abroad can do for herself. It is most often “she” who can do things for herself abroad: James’s men fare much less well. But he is also interested in what she does to others than herself, often with her beauty and her ignorance, with her exclusion from the world that she finds herself in. She can do things with that exclusion, like being folded in otherwise, in ways that change the ways the social fabric falls.
Whatever she will be able to do, it depends on the conditions for conversation. Perhaps particularly in the late novels, we are treated to extravagant descriptions of these conditions and the difficulty of negotiating their terms. Often, his characters are well up to these difficulties.
Here, for example, is a long, amazing description of the way Kate Croy and Milly Theale relate to one another during their sejourn surrounded by admirers and interlopers in Venice:
These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatique on Milly’s side whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of relief. It was when they called each other’s attention to the ceasing to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in the air. There was a difference no doubt, and mainly to Kate’s advantage: Milly didn’t quite see what her friend could keep back, was possessed of, in fine, that would be subject to retention; whereas it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, abject affection—concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase of such states; it was rather a principle of pride relatively bold and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was the truth about the girl’s own conception of her validity; thus was a wondering, pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk, of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful: that of the angular, pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black robed, hung about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and that of the upright, restless, slow-circling lady of her court, who exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick, dark braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train, makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense. This is beacuase, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider, they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled to a care of what they said.
“To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves — that’s the way! And to consciously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.” —
The Book of Disquiet (entry 149), Fernando Pessoa (via unlitstairs) (via crashinglybeautiful) (via notational) (via thisworldwemustleave) (via montycantsin)
Fernando Pessoa is one of the best things that happened in the 20th century.
(via embody)
(via joethelion)
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Hamburger Bahnhof, like, the greatest museum for contemporary art in the world. Here in Berlin, tonight, at around 6 pm.
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