Another Country

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who se his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

At the same time, it occurred to him that the question was not really what he was going to "get" but how he was to discover his possibilities and become reconciled to them.


James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness.

James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Middlemarch

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not wrought itself on the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Songs of Experience

Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself to have any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.

Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another to its delight
Joys in another's loss of ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despite.


William Blake, Songs of Experience
1794

Middlemarch

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Leaves of Grass

There is that in me....I do not know what it is....but I know it is in me.
[...]I do not know it....it is without name....it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary or utterance or symbol.
[...]Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death....it is form and union and plan....it is eternal life....it is happiness.


Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
1855

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.
Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it--logical form.
In order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to station ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world.
Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language...
What can be shown, cannot be said.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1961

Eisenheim the Illusionist

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams.

“Eisenheim the Illusionist,” The Barnum Museum
Steven Millhauser, 1990

The Barnum Museum

It has been said, by those who don’t understand us well, that our museum is a form of escape. In a superficial sense, this is certainly true. When we enter the Barnum Museum we are physically free of all that binds us to the outer world, to the realm of sunlight and death; and sometimes we seek relief from suffering and sorrow in the halls of the Barnum Museum. But it is a mistake to imagine that we flee into our museum in order to forget the hardships of life outside. After all, we are not children, we carry our burdens with us wherever we go. But quite apart from the impossibility of such forgetfulness, we do not enter the museum only when we are unhappy or discontent, but far more often in a spirit of peacefulness or inner exuberance. In the branching halls of the Barnum Museum we are never forgetful of the ordinary world, for it is precisely our awareness of that world which permits us to enjoy the wonders of the halls. Indeed I would argue that we are most sharply aware of our town when we leave it to enter the Barnum Museum; without our museum, we would pass through life as in a daze or dream.


"The Barnum Museum," The Barnum Museum
Steven Millhauser, 1990