1. ‘Caco: to go to the stoole.’

—Thomas Thomas
Dictionarium, 1587.

2. ‘Words for excretion are very similar in Latin and in English.
Caco (to shit) was the standard obscene term for defecation…’

—Melissa Mohr
Holy Sh*t; A Brief History of Swearing

3. Neap: adj. (also neap tide) A tide just after the 1st or 3rd quarter
of the moon when there is least difference between high and low water. (cf. flood tide.)

4. “The Sound of Silence”

—Simon and Garfunkle

5. ‘inklingness’; inky + inkling: a dark or murky idea.

1. ‘…from the waste that splutters most when the bath is nearly empty.’

He (Samuel Beckett) is discussing his irrational heart in its physical and metaphorical manifestations, and with skepticism.

On Beckett’s response to Thomas à Kempis’ ‘Imitation of Christ’
Grove Companion to Beckett

2. Ablution n. (formal or humorous) An act of washing oneself.
[-s: British slang: a building or room containing wash facilities
and toilets]

1.  “But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end to shine it on the empty shadows.”

—Samuel Beckett
Molloy

2. “but this can wait”
cf. “But this by the bye.”

—Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy

3. “…light only becomes visible through the bodies which reflect
it, and without them loses itself in darkness without producing
any effect.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer
World as Will and Idea

4. “Death, from street to alley, from door to window,
Cries out his news,–of unplumbed worlds approaching.”

—Conrad Aiken
“Coffins: Interlude” The House of Dust

5. “Dragging cold cannon through a mud
Of rain and blood;
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!”

—Walter De LaMare
The Fool Rings His Bells

6. When error’s waves are past
How sweet to reach thy tranquil port at last
And gently rocked in undulation doubt,
Smile at the sturdy winds which was without.

—Thomas Moore
Hail, Skeptic Ease

7. Frottage n. 1. the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art. 2. the practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another. [for sexual gratification]

1. “All my life I have been metaphysically frivolous and playfully earnest. I never did anything seriously, however much I may have wanted to.”

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

2. On Nihilism: “All is laughter, and all is dust, and all is nothing; for out of unreason is all that is.”

—Glycon
Select epigrams from the Greek; Anthology

1. Wherefore: adv. For what reason.

2. Flags: v. become tired or less enthusiastic or dynamic.

3. Micturate: v. (formal) urinate.

1. “…intending to have kissed him and fell in drops like tears because they missed him.”

—Christopher Marlowe
Hero & Leander

2. “The voice of the arithmomaniac was heard: ‘The arc,’ he said, stooping to all the great plainess of his words, ‘is longer than its chord.'”

—Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to Middling Women

1. “Man needs the fiction of punishment for a crime uncommitted in order that he bear up under the burden of an emptiness and isolation which are unbearable but must be borne.”

—Samuel Beckett
On Francis Doherty

2. But if at church they would give us some ale,
and a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
we’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day,
nor ever once wish from the church to stray.

—William Blake
The Little Vagabond

3. “Thus everyone at some time dreams of being the commander of the army from whose rearguard they fled.”

—Fernano Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

1. Heb 11:38 (and entire chapter)

2. the paradox of the Will: that of not being free yet existing as a mote in the dark of absolute freedom.

“On Schopenhauer”
Grove Guide to Beckett

3. like a clever dog we are free simply because the chain is long.

“On Mauthner”
Grove Guide to Beckett

4. “…the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
No worst, there is none…”

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

5. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

—Seamus Heaney
Personal Helicon

1. Does anybody want any flotsam?
I’ve gotsam.
Does anybody want any jetsam?
I can getsam.

—Ogden Nash
No Drs Today, Thank You

2. My quiet Niagara/ of unnameable things/
over again I go/ in my barrel of prayer

—Christian Wiman

1. There was an old man in a trunk
Who inquired of his wife, “Am I drunk?”
She replied with regret,
“I’m afraid so my pet,”
And he answered, “It’s just as i thunk.”

—Ogden Nash
Carlotta

2. In sink of sadness almost sunk,
To quit all strife he strove–
And after he a think had thunk,
A happier life he love.

—George B. Moregood
“A Victim of Irregularity,” Puck October 1912

1. If we should weep when clowns/Put on their show/If we should stumble when/ Musicians play/Time will say nothing but/I told you so.

—W. H. Auden
But I Can’t

1. ‘The knot untangled in the noose’
Denoument: Drap then a dram upon this final plot whereby
the idiot’s tale is at last unlamented done.

—david summer

2. Doors are about to open, cords to snap, blows to fall, pulsations to repeat themselves. Doubts about self-consciousness

—George Santayana
from Scepticism and Animal Faith

1. hollow eye cf ‘the black bottomless eye’

—Samuel Beckett
All Strange Away

2. “…an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten.”

—Samuel Beckett
Watt

3. “The mind blanks at the glare.”

—Philip Larkin
Aubade

1. “Crepuscule”

—e.e. cummings

2. Beckett’s characters slip or are pushed into a world of no thing, an immaterial world where even language, one’s narrative voice or its physical manifestation in writing, are beyond possession.

from Introduction to Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett

3. “…before i can be let loose, in the unthinkable unspeakable…It will perhaps be less restful than i appear to think, alone there at last, and never importuned.

—Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable

4. “Let others hail the rising sun: I bow to that whose race is run.”

—David Garrick (1716-79)

5. Having seen with what lucidity and logical coherence certain madmen (with method in their madness) justify their crazed ideas to themselves and others, I have lost for ever any real confidence in the lucidity of my own lucidity.

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

1. “A Chorus Girl”

—e. e. cummings

2. ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ L.:
where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing.

—Arnold Geulincx (1624-69)
Ethica

1. Dictum; dicked’em, fucked’em, (joke: Rectum? Damn near killed him.) def: n. A formal announcement from an authoritave source. (spec usage); a short statement that expresses a general truth or principle, eg: “might makes right”. (law); short for obiter dictum.

1. Beckett: (“Ding-Dong”).

1. Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist
And calm of mind all passion spent.

—John Milton
Samson Agonistes

2. God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal
How slight the gift was hung in my hair.

—John Milton
Samson Agonistes

3. You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things.

—Shakespeare
Macbeth

4. His austerity, like an irresistible sledge-hammer, drove them lower and lower: They dwindled while he soared.

—Maxwell Bodenheim
The Old Jew

5. Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort,
Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist– slack these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry
I can no more. I can;
Can something hope, wish day come,
not choose not to be.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Carrion Comfort

1. Someone who has sailed every sea has merely sailed
through the monotony of himself.

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

2. The square root of I is I.

—Vladimir Nabakov
Bend Sinister

3. …man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland.

—Jack London
John Barleycorn

1. Fey: adj. 1. giving the impression of vague unworldliness or mystery. 2. having supernatural power of clairvoyance. 3. (arch, Scottish) fated to die or at the point of death.

2. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind.
At certain hours it haunts the house.

—Jean Cocteau

3. Then I looked up over the top of the open book because it sounded like someone was coming up the stairs. Someone was. It was you…
“I’m late,” you said.
“You’re–” I said…
“I’m later than– I’m later than. Than–“

—Ali Smith
Artful

4. A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
Black Cat

5. Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing uncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond him

—Heidegger

1. I get mad. Drinks get spilled.
At 5 past 2 I dont feel sad.
But then I see you… And I see Red.

—X
I See Red

1. But if your pow’r to mend it you denied, swearing that twice
and thrice in vain you tried; “Then blot it out! (he cried)
it must be terse: Back to the anvil with your ill-turned verse

—Horace

2. This old anvil laughs at many broke hammers.

—Carl Sandburg
The People, Yes

3. And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tell us his misery’s birth and growth and signs…

—Matthew Arnold
The Scholar-Gipsy

4. That rusty nail over our front door
is where I hung our tears in the rain
I threw that horseshoe into the weeds
to see what luck can bring

—X
Burning House of Love

Petty Mort
Let him have it. Flay him alive. And don’t draw back when
you’re drawing blood. Test all of your whips against his
manhood. Cut deep. No mercy. Make him squeal. Leave him
in strips from head to heal.

—Brian Merriman (c 1780)
The Midnight Court as read in Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry

Fraimed
That I regain my freedom with a sigh,
And, as true suffering captives ever do,
Carry of my sore chains the greater part…

—Petrarch
Sonnet LVI

Whatever
on whence no sense but on to whence no sense.

—Samuel Beckett
Worstward Ho

Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same
as ever. I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
I have only to go on, as if there were something to be done,
something begun, somewhere to go.

—Samuel Beckett
The Unnammable

Pointless Petition
I shall not see the morning sky;
I shall not hear the night-wind sigh;
I shall be mute, as all men must
In after days.

—H. A. Dobson
In After Days

1. For what, alas! could the unpractised ear
Of rustics, revelling o’er country cheer,
A motley groupe! high, low; and froth and scum;
Distinguish but shrill squeak, and dronish hum?

—Horace
An Epistle to the Pisos

2. I look at all this like a yokel who has never seen a blotter before, like someone staring at the latest novelty, with my whole brain inert except for the areas to do with seeing.

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

3. … and my being esteem’d a pretty good riggite, that is, a jocular verbal satirist, supported my consequence in the society.

—Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

1. Strange task, which consists in speaking of oneself– the obligation to express.

—Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable

2. …generations of scribes keeping the record.

—Samuel Beckett
How It Is

3. …there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

—Samuel Beckett
Three Dialogues; Disjecta

4. If a man thinks at all, he cannot well be a stranger to the true state of this account;– he must be privy to his own thoughts and desires;–he must remember his past pursuits, and know certainly the true springs and motives, which, in general have governed the actions of his life.

—Laurence Sterne
“Ch 17. The Sermon” Tristram Shandy

5. Yet I make no mistakes, I write and add up and so the keeping of the accounts by clerk of this establishment continues uninterrupted.

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

6. But all dreamers, even if they don’t do their dreaming…in front of a balance sheet…has an account book open before them…

—Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

1. I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
and Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

—Emily Dickinson
#280

2. At last when prayers for the dead
and rites were all accomplished,
they weeping, spread a lawny loom,
and closed her up as in a tomb.

—Robert Herrick
The Funeral Rites of the Rose

1. Eccl. 10:8

1. I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod.

—Seamus Heaney
Follower

1. Yes, I’ve wrestled with an angel: there’s no other kind.
I wrestled with an angel: that wrestling’s the only kind.
Any easier wrestling finally sends you blind.

—Les Murray
Low Down Sandcastle Blues

1. What but an imperfect sense of humor could have made such a mess of chaos. In the beginning was the pun.

—Samuel Beckett
Murphy

2. Fartinando Puff-indorst on Farting ????
A nitro-aerial vapour, exhaled from an adjacent pond of stagnant
water of saline nature, and sublim’d into the nose of microcosmical
alembic, by the gentle heat of a stercorarius balneum, with a strong
empyreuma and forced through the posteriors by the compressive power of the expulsive faculty.

—(likely) Jonathan Swift
The Benefits of Farting

3. Escatology; n. (neologism) the study of nether times.

4. Afflatus; n. (formal) a divine creative impulse of inspiration.
—from Latin; to blow. [afflatulence; see 3.]

5. Fart; v. (around) waste time on silly or trivial things. also a boring or contemptible person.

6. …for
where but in the very asshole of comedown is
redemption: as where but brought low, where
but in grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around.

—A. R. Ammons
Garbage

1. Indolence watches the tooth of time with careless eye and nerveless hand.

—John Ruskin
The Poetry of Architecture

1. ‘Paraphrase’

—Hart Crane

2. …lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory
and all its clear relations…

—T. S. Eliot
Rhapsody on a Windy Night

3. Then must he not regard the wailful ghosts
Who all will flit, like eddying leaves, around.

—Matthew Arnold
Balder Dead

4. I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really there.

—Philip Larkin
Aubade

1. Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?

—Hart Crane
My Grandmother’s Love Letters

2. I believe in the flesh and the appetites, seeing, hearing, feeling
are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

3. That weren’t no D. J. That was hazy cosmic jive.

—David Bowie
Starman

4. …know sound
is gilt-edged & saturnalian like lightning,

meant to enter but never land, cotton-slide
your closed eyes all the way back to Watusi land;

caterwaul & amplify,

—Nikky Finney
I Feel Good

1. Jakes: A toilet, esp. an outdoor one. Shakespeare: “I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the walls of a jakes with him” Kent in King Lear II.2.

2. I will daub you with dung if you open your mouth.
(sausage seller to Cleon)

—Aristophanes
The Knights

2. And that’s the of jakes in which I sometimes dreamt I dwelt, and even let down my trousers.

—Samuel Beckett
The Unnammable

3. I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar,
and daub the wall of a jakes with him.

—William Shakespeare
King Lear II:2

1. MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

cf. Daniel 5:25 (KJV)

2. “Nor look…”: bathroom graffiti. ‘dont look up here, the joke’s in your hand.’

3. Yes, the partys over/ but I’ve landed on my feet/
I’ll be standing on this corner/ where there used to be a street.

—L.Cohen
Last Call

4. But what can one clock do to stop the game
When others go on striking just the same?
Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,
Time may be silenced but will not be stilled.

—Adrienne Rich
A Clock in the Square

1. After each thrust of my crutches i stopped, to devour a narcotic and measure the distance gone, the distance yet to go.

—Samuel Beckett
The Unnammable

2. …for each loss, hard fought won…
cf “fail again, fail better.”

—Samuel Beckett
Worstward Ho

1. What I can’t bear is the blindness– meaninglessness–the numb blow fallen in the stumbling night.

—Archibald Macleish
J.B.

2. A little onward lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps, a little further on…

—Milton
Samson Agonistes

3. Thou art become…the dungeon of thyself;
thy soul…imprisoned now indeed,
In real darkness of the body dwells,
Shut up from outward light
To incorporate with gloomy night;
For inward light , alas!
Puts forth no visual beam.

—Milton
Samson Agonistes

4. …like those of us hobbled by sight…

—David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

5. For he, Alas! is blind.
O’er rough and smooth with even step he pass’d
and knows not whether he be first or last

—Coleridge
Time, Real and Imaginary

1. The Man, unapt for sport of fields and plains,
From implements of exercize abstains;
For ball, or quoit, or hoop, without the skill,
Dreading the crowds derision, he sits still:
In Poetry he boasts as little art,
And yet in Poetry he dares take part.

—Horace
On Poetry

2. The man is a great jester, and not a great humorist. He…paints his face, puts on ruff and motley clothes, and lays down his carpet and tumbles on it.

—Thackeray, on Sterne
English Humorists of the 18th Century

3. coarse
jocosity
catches the crowd
shakespeare
and i
are often
low browed

—Don Marquis
“Archy Confesses,” Archy and Mehitabel

1. Ol’ Neb

cf. Daniel 4:31-33 (KJV)

2. untombed respite:
wasting in the marble maw of the sepulchre…

—George Macdonald
On Hamlet, A Dish of Orts

3. burnt to butt:
He dares not come there for the candle:
for, you see, it is already in snuff.

—Shakespeare
Midsummer Night’s Dream IV:1

4. Thus to myself a prey, from hill to hill,Pensive by day I roam, and weep at night,
No one state mine, but changeful as the moon.

—Petrarch
Sestina VII

5. i am as sad /says the majestic mackeral /i am as sad /as the song /of a soudanese jackal /who is wailing for the blood red /moon he cannot reach and rip

—Don Marquis
“archy interviews a pharoah” Archy and Mehitabel

6. Out went the taper as she hurried in;
The little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died.

—Keats
Eve of St. Agnes

1. …the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole–
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

—Poe
quoted in At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft

2. I’m gonna let it go
Let it flow like Pompeii or Herculaneum
Let it sizzle, let it rise
Don’t let your love flow turn to stone
Keep it burnin’/ Keep it burning here at home

—B52’s
Lava

1. After Baudelaire

2. cf “Of Nicolette”

—e.e.cummings

3. What of soul was left, I wonder, when
the kissing had to stop
‘Dust and ashes!’ So you creak it, and I
want the heart to scold.

—Robert Browning
A Toccata of Galuppi’s

4. …After he knew not what– if it was aught
Or but a nameless something that was wrought
By him out of himself…

—George Macdonald
Lillith

5. The seemingly inscrutable in her I would fain penetrate: to understand something of her mode of being would be to look into marvels such as imagination could never have suggested.

—George Macdonald
Lillith

6. And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm

—Dylan Thomas
The Force That Through My Green Fuse Drives

7. It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?

—Jack London
The Sea Wolf

8. The other thing I like to do is go to the graveyard…
and reread your epitaph. And it says,
“Don’t you laugh as you walk by,
for as you are so once was I.
And as I am, so you shall be…Alone.

—Chrissie Hynde
Alone

9. Laugh when I laugh, I seek no other fame,
The cry is up, and scribblers are my game.

—Lord Byron
English Bards

10. jagged rocks:
From the bedpost and the rocks
death’s enticing echo mocks.

—W.H. Auden
Poem 32

1. After Goethe: Erotica Romana XXIV.

1. The cattle rising from the grass
His thought must follow where they pass
The penitent with anguish bow’d
His thought must follow through the crowd

—Matthew Arnold
To Lessing’s Laocoon

2. These are but cows that see no other thing
Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
Though they should thin and die in last year’s stubble.

—Hart Crane
Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge

3. For cows were chewing in enormous fields, lying and standing, in evening silence…they chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful…but perhaps I’m remembering things.

—Samuel Beckett
Molloy

4. For it’s rush hour now on the the wheel and on the plow
and the sun is going down on the sacred cow.

—Bob Dylan
Ring Them Bells

5. My milch kine have come home.
O dear! That the herdsman would come!
The fairy-woman counts her cows coming home

—J. Gregorson
Superstitions of Highlands and Isles of Scotland

6. What is this life if, full of care
we have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
and stare as long as sheeps and cows.

—W. Henry Davies
Leisure

1. The heavens, he said to himself, are darkened, absolutely, beyond any possibility of error.

—Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to Middling Women

1. Why not? Why not? Why not not, then if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

—David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

1. Motley’s the only wear.

—Shakespeare
As You Like It II:7

1. …Rip down all hate, I screamed. Lies that life was
black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed…
…Fearing not that I’d become my enemy in the instant
that I preached.

Ah, but I was so much older then.
I’m younger than that now.

—Bob Dylan
My Back Pages

1. …I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death’s pardon now. And mourn the dead.

—Richard Wilbur
The Pardon

1. The cheese stands alone.

The Farmer In The Dell

2. An aged ploughman came alone
and drove his share through flesh and bone,
and turned them under to mold and stone;
all night long he ploughed.

—Conrad Aiken
The Vampire

1. I ran like a deer and hid among the rocks,
or I crawled under a bush my heart in thorns…
I swore on the day the good shepherd catches hold,
trying to wrestle me to the ground and bind my feet
I will buck like a ram and bite like a wolf,
although I taste the famous blood
I will break loose! I will race under the gates of heaven,
back to the mortal fields, my flock, my stubbled, grass and mud.

—Stanley Moss
The Good Shepherd [Luke 15:3-7]

1. Latin:

Podex; anus (ass)

Insipiens; unwise, foolish

2. [subtitle: Why, the Gall!]

1. Afflatus n. a divine creative impulse of inspiration.
fr L. fr v. afflare: ad- to + flare; to blow.
cf flatulence. see In The Beginning.

2. …what is breath of balm for one may very well be halitosis for another.

—Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to Middling Women

3. When the prophet speaks, well, no one listens.

—Van Morrison

1. …he seemed to hear the single profound suspuration of the parched earth’s agony rising toward the imponderable and aloof stars.

—William Faulkner
Absalom, Absolom

1. ‘Here’s how,’ said Marcus, half emptying his glass. ‘Ah-h!’ he added, with a long breath, ‘That’s good; it is for a fact.’

—Frank Morris
McTeague

2. He: Here’s how!

She: I know how. I wanna know when?

1. Seize: v. intrans. (of a machine with moving parts, etc.) Become stuck or jammed. Joke: what’s the difference between jam and jelly.

2. Dinner for One, Please, James

—written by M.Carr, recorded by Nat King Cole
on the album Nature Boy, 1947

3. I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and I shall answer when I am reproved.

Habakkuk 2:1 (KJV)

4. And here are echoing stairs to lead you downward
To long sonorous halls.

—Conrad Aiken
“vi. portrait of one dead” The House of Dust

5. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished:’ and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

John 19:30 (KJV)

6. When he dressed up & up, his costumes varied
with the southeast wind, but he remained aware.
Awareness was most of what he had.
The terrible chagrin to which he was married—
derelict Henry’s siege mentality—
stability, I will stay
in my monastary until my death
& the fate my actions have so hardly earned.

—John Berryman
Dream Song 370

7. None of these things is of any importance. Like all ordinary things in life, they are a dream of mysteries and castle battlements from which I look out upon the plain of my meditations like a herald newly arrived.

—Federico Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

8. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth.
None them along the line know what it is worth.

—Bob Dylan
Watchtower

1. Suddenly like all that was not then is I go not…

—Samuel Beckett
How It Is

2. Iambic Monometer

—Robert Herrick
Upon His Departure Hence

1. Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.

—William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet II:3

2. A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

—Robert Herrick
Delight In Disorder

1. Five Poems: V

—e.e.cummings

2. Leave me! There’s something come into my thought,
That must and shall be sung high and aloof,
Safe from the wolf’s black jaw and the dun ass’s hoof.

—Ben Johnson
The Poetaster

1. I am not resigned to the shutting away of
loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has
been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lillies and with laurel they go,
but i am not resigned.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dirge Without Music

2. To be is to be confronted with a void, a blankness,
a blackness that both appeals and appals.

—Christian Wiman
The Parable of Perfect Silence

1. He that will have a cake of of wheat must needs tarry the grinding.

—William Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida I:1

1. I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a
a spear of summer grass.

—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

2. There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a ‘creative reality,’ as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity,’ of ‘choiceless awareness.’ This…awareness– in every moment and in all circumstances of life is the only effective meditation.

—Aldous Huxley
Introduction to The First and Final Freedom by Krishnamurti

3. How it would be clearer
Just to loaf, imagining little
…
And so on to median depth.

—John Ashberry
Absolute Clearance

1. …All he wants to do is lie lapped in a beatitude of indolence in a limbo purged of desire.

—Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to Middling Women [Belacqua]

1. A man must learn that he is nothing but a fool.

—Montaigne
Essays; Of Experience

2. A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated,
has not the art of getting drunk.

—Samuel Johnson

3. From jigging veins of rhyming
mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage
keeps in pay.

—Christopher Marlowe
Prologue to Tamburlaine

4. ‘…as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed.’

—David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

1. Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

—Leonard Cohen
Bird on the Wire

2. ‘The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music’ is Nietzsche’s fine formula. Martha Graham seems to lead us back to that musical beginning, a realm of Jungian archetypes, Goethian mothers, feelings purged of trivial and accidental contacts.

—Eric Bentley
“Personality” The Dramatic Event

3. And it was to him lying thus that there came, with great distinctness, from afar, from without, yes, really it seemed from without, the voices, indifferent in quality, of a mixed choir.

—Samuel Beckett
Watt

1. ‘You rang?’

—Maynard G. Krebs
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis