Cathay

The Twelve Images of Sorrow are: the autumn moon behind three black branches, a mirror when it does not reflect a face, a single whit plum-petal hanging from a bough, the eyes of a beautiful lady at dusk, a garden in summer rain, frosty breath on an autumn night, an old man gazing at a river, a faded fan, a dead sparrow in the snow, a lover leaving his mistress at dawn, an old abandoned hourglass, the black from of the wild duck against the red setting sun. These are the sorrows known to all men, but there is a sorrow that is known only in Cathay. Our sorrow is the sorrow hidden in the depths of the rich, deep-blue summer afternoons, the sorrow of sunshine on the blossoming plum tree, the sorrow that lies like a faint purple shadow in the iris of a beautiful, laughing girl.

"Cathay," In the Penny Arcade

Steven Millhauser, 1981

August Eschenburg

And so at the tender age of sixteen I learned an all-important secret: all words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

"August Eschenburg," In the Penny Arcade

Steven Millhauser, 1981

Cleaning Piece II

Make a numbered list of sadness in your life.
Pile up stones corresponding to those numbers.
Add a stone each time there is sadness.
Burn the list, and appreciate the mount of stones for its beauty.

Make a numbered list of happiness in your life.
Pile up stones corresponding to those numbers.
Add a stone, each time there is happiness.
Compare the mount of stones to the one of sadness.


"Cleaning Piece II," Yoko Ono
1996

Dancer

My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found they matched his age exactly.

We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.

Dancer, Colum McCann

2003

Dancer

Do not allow the critics to make you so good you cannot become any better. Correspondingly, do not allow them to rip the cartilage from your carcass.

Dancer, Colum McCann

2003

The Market of Symbolic Goods

No one has ever completely extracted all the implications of the fact that the writer, the artist, or even the scientist writes not only for a public, but for a public of equals who are also competitors.

"The Market of Symbolic Goods," Pierre Bourdieu

1983

Dancer

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.

Dancer, Colum McCann

2003

So Long, See You Tomorrow

What we, or any rate I, refer to confidently as a memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life to ever be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell

1980