fastidiosité

Quand vous me montrez l’hirondelle
Qui part jusqu’au prochain avril,
Pourquoi mon âme se meurt-elle ?
Quand vous me montrez l’hirondelle,
C’est que je pense à mon exil.

Overwhelmingly

They talked always of pothouses, of feeding-time – by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, 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.

quête de sens

Régis Jauffret et Amandine Pudlovska : "N’attendez pas que Régis Jauffret soit mort pour le lire." from La Quinzaine littéraire on Vimeo.

New Travels

As it turned out, he never did settle down, exactly. Instead, he spent his last years planning on “speaking from the grave”—his phrase for the memoir that has now appeared upon the centenary of his death. With the excusable vanity of genius, he had high expectations for its reception. It will “live a couple of thousand years without any effort,” he told Howells, and will “then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.” In one way or another, he worked at it for much of his life. “The truth is,” he told a friend, “my books are simply autobiographies” in the sense that they are stocked with fictional versions of people he had known, including himself. But starting around age forty, he made some tentative attempts at a memoir of a more conventional kind.

Stadium

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying over head --

There were no birds to fly.

nóduri

Nichita Stănescu

Plutea o floare de tei
în lăuntrul unei gândiri abstracte
deşertul se umpluse cu lei
şi de plante.
Un tânăr metal transparent
subţire ca lama tăioasă
tăia orizonturi curbate şi lent
despărţea privirea de ochi
cuvântul, de idee,
raza, de stea
pe când plutea o floare de tei
în launtrul unei gândiri abstracte.