Democracy

It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:

mercurial French adolescent

Rimbaud: ‘En effet ils furent rois toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l’après-midi, où ils s’avancèrent du côté des jardins de palmes.’

Ashbery: ‘In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.’

Wittgenstein’s Handles

...'This utility of handles had also caught the attention of the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, but he thought utility was only half the story. In his brilliant 1911 essay “The Handle,” Simmel argued that the handle of a vase bridges two worlds, the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian. A vessel, according to Simmel, “unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of practical life.” 

Thus the vessel stands in two worlds at one and the same time: whereas reality is completely irrelevant to the “pure” work of art and, as it were, is consumed in it, reality does make claims upon the vase as an object that is handled, filled and emptied, proffered, and set down here and there. This dual nature of the vase is most decisively expressed in its handle.'

boundary

 Slate tiles gleaming with water,
Nests of sparrows rotting and trailing in the wind,
Night falling, and the winds turning
Umbrellas inside out…the rain wetting
The faces of the ladies returning

“Cultismo”

Never out of obstinacy take the wrong side, because your opponent has got before you and taken the right one.
Do not, in trying to escape from the trite, become paradoxical.
Do not get into a contest with one who has nothing to lose.
Reticence is the seal of capacity. 
Know how to transplant yourself.  
They are all fools who seem to be so, and half of those who do not.
Understand how not to take things against the grain, however they come.

...  three hundred maxims by Balthasar Gracian, translated by Schopenhauer himself from the Spanish...

jam to-day

'Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order. `Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the pins. `But really you should have a lady's maid!'

`I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!' the Queen said. `Twopence a week, and jam every other day.'

Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, `I don't want you to hire me -- and I don't care for jam.'

`It's very good jam,' said the Queen.

`Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate.'

`You couldn't have it if you did want it,' the Queen said. `The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam to-day.'

`It must come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.'

quite forgetfully

'...they talked of mostthings, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt, their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet inattackable; for they didn’t count their talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, to reappraise.'