Marcel Proust: “Those Profound Slumbers”

Photographer Unknown, (Those Profound Slumbers)

“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have not time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say ‘we’), we emerge prostrate without a thought, a ‘we’ that is void of content.”

–Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

The Center is at the Center of the Totality

“The Cental Point About Which the World Spins”

“This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Reblogged with many thanks to http://puppybra.tumblr.com

In the Midst of Darkness

Photographer Unknown, (In the Midst of Darkness)

“Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it’s the curve of a wrist or what’s left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it’s even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light.

Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they’re born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves