literary jukebox

Mad Girl’s Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar

Song: “Blue Moon” by Snowblink

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I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence’.

Susan Sontag in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Song: “All You Ever Wanted” by The Black Keys

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If you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

[…]

If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

John Steinbeck in a letter of advice to his teenage son, from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

Song: “Patient Love” by passEnger

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I think it’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.

[…]

Darwin was the kind of romantic who could stand in the middle of a meadow like a statue for eight hours on end and let the bees buzz in and out of his ear. A fantastic statue standing there in the middle of nature, and all the foxes wandering by and wondering what the hell he was doing there, and they sort of looked at each other and examined the wisdom in each other’s eyes. But this is a romantic man — when you think of any scientist in history, he was a romancer of reality.

Ray Bradbury in Mars and the Mind of Man

Song: “Science vs. Romance” by Rilo Kiley

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Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

Rainer Maria Rilke to his lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

Song: “Past In Present” by Feist

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What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.

Lorrie Moore in Birds of America: Stories

Song: “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles Symphony Orchestra

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There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

Søren Kierkegaard in The Soul of Kierkegaard: Selections from His Journals

Song: “Shortcuts” by Trolle//Siebenhaar

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How is it possible to live when … the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist?

Rilke in a letter to Lotte Hepner, found in Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman and quoted in Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Song: “Living This Life (Makes It Hard)” by The Dutchess & The Duke

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It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises

Song: “So Tonight That I Might See” by Mazzy Star

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The flower of the Alps told the seashell: “You’re shining”

The seashell told the sea: “You echo”

The sea told the boat: “You’re shuddering”

The boat told the fire: “You’re glowing brightly”

The fire told me: “I glow less brightly than her eyes”

The boat told me: “I shudder less than your heart does when she appears”

The sea told me: “I echo less than her name does in your love-making”

The seashell told me: “I shine less brightly than the phosphorus of desire in your hollow dream”

The flower of the Alps told me: “She’s beautiful”

I said: “She’s beautiful, so beautiful, she moves me.”

“Sky Song” by Robert Desnos, found in The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos

Song: “Do I Move You” by Nina Simone

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That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Henry Miller in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

Song: “Got to Let Go (feat. Charlie Fink of Noah & the Whale)” by Charlotte Gainsbourg

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Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.

John O’Donohue in Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Song: “Tunnels” (Arcade Fire cover) by Meklit Hadero & Quinn DeVeaux

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Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

Lemony Snicket in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

Song: “If You Don’t Want To Be Alone” by Firehorse

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If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one … he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

Honoré de Balzac in Cousin Betty

Song: “Creation” by El Michels Affair

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Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original….it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.

Rosalind D. Cartwright in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives.

Song: “You Only Live Twice” by The Postmarks

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The old puzzle: I ‘see’ someone. But then how can that person ‘see’ me?

Susan Sontag in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980.

Song: “I See You, You See Me” by The Magic Numbers

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The aspiration to distill and transmit the secrets of the heart can attain a moment of matchless lucidity within a novel, a play, a short story, a poem. Through a symmetry as compact and surprising as the equivalence between matter and energy, love’s poetry and its science share an unexpected identity. Each avenue uses the tools of the intellect to reach beyond; each seeks to lay hold of the ineffable and render it known, with the warm shock of recognition that truth so often carries. Now that science has traveled into the realm of the poetic, the efforts of one endeavor can inform those of its twin.

[…]

The poetic and the veridical, the proven and the unprovable, the heart and the brain – like charged particles of opposing polarity – exert their pulls in different directions. Where they are brought together the result is incandescence.

Within that place of radiant intersection, love begins to reveal.

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon in A General Theory of Love

Song: “Falling in Love With Love” by Keith Jarrett

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Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

Song: “Truth” by Alexander

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And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

[…]

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

[…]

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

[…]

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” from Selected Poems

Song: “Wandering Secret” by Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi

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If I expect as little as possible, I won’t be hurt.

Susan Sontag in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980.

Song: “Eyeoneye” by Andrew Bird

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