I felt myself vanishing into blue

 

       "In water, like in books—you can leave your life."                   

       -Lidia Yuknavitch

Title: Steven Millhauser

Image: Paul Klee, Hilterfingen, 1895

To cross the border beyond

Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet

-Mary Ruefle, from "White Buttons" as found in Trances of the Blast
Title: Octavio Paz, The Double Flame
Image: Trinity Site explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945

In what distant deeps

    I wanted to live among books.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Image: Kerry Mansfield
Title: William Blake, from “The Tyger”

Both eager and afraid to fall in

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, L’Agneau Mystique (The Ghent Altarpiece), 1432
Title: Rainer Maria Rilke, from Early Journals

They would rather be trees

There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries.

-Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Image: Érik Desmazières for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, 2000
Title: Margaret Atwood, Men With the Heads of Eagles

This forest of letters

   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.

-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

In the vast world or in the immense past

… the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

— R. S. Thomas, excerpt from “The Untamed” 

Images: Found; Edward Curtis
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

There is no Frigate like a Book

“You live several lives while reading.” 
 

-William Styron


Image: Thomas Dibdin, Bibliomania, or, Book-madness : a bibliographical romance, 1842
Title: Em Dickinson

Trying to Find the Door

    A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page… And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about.

-Gerald Murnane, Inland

Image: Chad Wys, from the series The Critique of Gesture
Title: Nod to Adam Fuss

Today I feel the whole world is a door

What is art? Trying to find the door.

-Adam Fuss

Image: Hannah Höch, Portait of Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919
Title: Nod to Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theatre”

The Purpose of Poetry

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

-Czesław Miłosz

Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin

"And though recently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time."

-Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Image: Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, history from 4000 BC - 1813 AD

The Poet & Nonrecognition

-Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Calvino on Classics

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

Image: Alejandra Laviada, Before the Fall

Something Quite Surreal

When a local Maine library was destroyed in a fire, artist Elizabeth Awalt drove over and saw something quite surreal: Hundreds of scorched pages flying around. Only the edges were burned resembling pieces of toast or even tombstones but the center of the pages were intact. She started picking up the pages, from Jean de Brunoff’s Babar, Edward Gorey, and more. She was deeply moved by these pages and remarked on how much a part of her own life these books had been. Elizabeth thought she might paint on some of them or give some to other Maine artists to paint. These pages turned into a benefit auction of works from the pages she’d recovered that day.