House of Leaves (81 page)

Authors: Mark Z. Danielewski

BOOK: House of Leaves

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Marguerite Duras

Practicalities
again

The only wife for me now is the damp earth… Heho-ho!… The grave that is!… Here my son’s dead and I am alive… It’s a strange thing, death has come in at the wrong door.

Anton Chekhov again

“Misery”

lam cinis, adhuc tamen rarus. Respicio: densa coiigo tergis imminebat, quae nos torrentis modo infusa terive sequebarur. “Dejiectamus” inquam “than videmus, ne in via strati comitantium turba in tenebris obteramur.” Vix consideramus, et nox non qualis inlunis aut nublia, sed qualis in locis clausis lumine exstincto.
[446— “Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. ‘Let us leave the road while we can still see,’ I said, ‘or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.’ We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkne
fell, not
the dark
of a moonleas or oloudy night, but aa if the
lamp
had been put out
in a closed room.” As
translated by Betty Radice,
Pliny: Letters
and
Panegyricus.
Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), p.
445.—Ed.]

Young Pliny again

He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.

“There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. .

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Mother of the Muses, we are taught,

Is Memory: she has left me.

Walter Savage Landor

“Memory”

Far off from these a slow and silent stream,

Lethe
the River of Oblivion rolls

Her wat’ry Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,

Forthwith his former state and being forgets,

Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

Paradise Lost
again

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off —

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Sylvia Plath

“The Night Dances”

Gilgamesh listened and his tears flowed. He opened his mouth and spoke to Enkidu: “Who is there in strong-walled Uruk who has wisdom like this? Strange things have been spoken, why does your heart speak strangely? The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror; for the dream has shown that misery comes at last to the healthy man, the end of life is sorrow…”

Again
The Epic of Gilgamesh

I am missing innumerable shades—they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words.

Joseph Teodor Korzeniowski

Lord Jim

Hige sceal Je heardra, heorte e cënre, mod sceal J>e mare, Jë Ure mzgen ltla
[447—By
as much as our might may diminish, we will harden our minds, fill our hearts, and
Increase our courage.”
—
Ed.]

The Battle of Maldon

I wished to show that space-time is not necessarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of physical reality. Physical objects are not
in space,
but these objects are
spatially extended.
In this way the concept of “empty space” loses its meaning.

Albert Einstein

“Note to the Fifteenth Edition”

Relativity: The Special and General Theory

Let us space.

Jacques Demda

Glas

L ‘odeur du silence ext si vieille.
[448— “The odor of silence Is so old.” — Ed.]

O. W. De L. Milosz

For all the voice in answer he could wake

Was but the mocking echo of his own

From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach

He would cry out on life, that what it wants

Is not its own love back in copy speech,

But counter-love, original response.

And then in the far-distant water splashed,

But after a time allowed for it to swim,

Instead of proving human when it neared

And someone else additional to him,

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead…

Robert Frost

“The Most of It”

All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mind send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman’s reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have checked

That whereby a house lay wrecked?

William Butler Yeats

“Man and the Echo”

Have not we too?—yes, we have

Answers, and we know not whence;

Echoes from beyond the grave,

Recognised intelligence!

Such rebounds our inward ear

Catches sometimes from afar —

Listen, ponder, hold them dear;

For of God,—of God they are.

William Wordsworth

“Yes, It Was the Mountain Echo”

“Love should be put into action!”

screamed the old hermit.

Across the pond an echo

tried and tried to confirm it.

Elizabeth Bishop

“Chemin de Fer”

When I came back from death

it was morning

the back door was open

and one of the buttons of my shirt had

disappeared.

Derick Thomson

Return from Death

Thou Echo, thou art mortal, all men know.

Echo. No.

Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?

Echo. Leaves.

And are there any leaves, that still abide?

Echo. Bide.

What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.

Echo. Holy.

Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?

Echo. Yes.

Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?

Echo.
Light.

George Herbert

“Heaven”

L ‘amour n ‘est pas consolation, ii est lumière.”
[
449— “Love is not consolation, it Is light.” — Ed.]

Simone Weil

Cahier VI (K6)

Of what is this house composed if not of the sun.

Wallace Stevens

“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

The story as it should be, —

As if the story of a house

Were told, or ever could be.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

“Eros Turannos”

Should not every apartment
in
which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Werjetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
[
450— “Whoever has no house now, will never have one.” —
Ed.]

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Autumn Day”

I have brought the great bail of crystal;

who can lift it?

Can you enter the great acorn of light?

But the beauty is not the madness

Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod,

I cannot make it cohere.