Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

The last day on earth 

will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed.

— Rewa Zeinati / “The last day on earth”

Language as medicine? Literature
as ceasefire? Maybe when/if it’s over,
fire from the sky snuffed out, some of the rubble
lifted, and a survivor emerges.

— Marilyn Hacker / “The Returnee”

‘I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.’

— John Wyndham / The Midwich Cuckoos

somewhere in the shallowest lake
the earth’s change in fate is accumulating
or growing heavier
and withdrawing

— Anna Glazova / “* [1. / it’d be nice to have some recognition by now]”

Small rivulets of MDMA
in the heartland. Beaked men beneath
your window, the lunacy of stars.
I gather it all in my cloak and set off
towards a future we would have wanted
had we known it could be known to us.
Pilgrims strung from the jiggly boughs
of maples, the hounds’ corrupting song.

— Michael Martin Shea / “[Not that it was as it was said to be]”

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

What I’m Listening To:

The grass is growing
All over town
From the cracks in the sidewalk
Where all the shops shut down
One tiny flower I’m jumping over
One tiny flower I’m jumping over

— Jeff Tweedy / “One Tiny Flower”