Fiction: the exact status of angels

There had been a grave debate in the servants' hall about the exact status of angels. Even Mr. Blenkinsop, the butler, had been uncertain. "Angels are certainly not guests," he had said, "and I don't think they are deputations. Nor they ain't governesses either, nor clergy not strictly speaking; they're not entertainers, because entertainers dine nowadays, the more's the pity."
"I believe they're decorators," said Mrs. Blouse, "Or else charitable workers."
"Charitable workers are governesses, Mrs. Blouse. There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely. Decorators are either guests or workmen."
After further discussion the conclusion was reached that angels were nurses, and that became the official ruling of the household. But the second footman was of the opinion that they were just "young persons," pure and simple, "and very nice too," for nurses cannot, except in very rare cases, be winked at, and clearly angels could.
-- Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

Fiction: Another glass mountain

Somewhere in the vastness of the Reaper's Woods, which is said to reach to the very ends of the earth where the sun eats wayward children and the moon and stars hang in the trees like lamps, there is a glass mountain with sides so sheer and slippery none can climb it unassisted, that assistance when granted being either magical or a gift of nature, as in the case of virgin maidens who, according to legend, are able to slide up the mountain as easily as others slide down. Why would they want to do this? For some-- like Stepmother's fugitive daughter, for example, did she still qualify-- the mountain offers sanctuary, and not only from men and other earthly predators, but also from the disappointing impurity of the diurnal world, for the mountain in its lofty inaccessible beauty and crystalline transparency is the very emblem and embodiment of purity. As such it represents not merely escape but also transcendence, the desire for which is said to be the deepest of humankind's desires and the source of its strange magical systems.
Certainly it is a desire that often invades the hearts of those princes and ordinary mortals who aspire to surmount it. Their goal is ostensibly to rescue, or at least have a good time with, the beautiful maiden who, according to legend, resides all alone in the golden castle at the top, and for many, drawn by the seductive thrill of going where no man has gone before, the prospect of this conquest (some think of it as liberation) may be sufficient. But for those of a more soulful bent, there is also a need for illumination and self-understanding, which is to say, an understanding of the universe itself wherein for a short time one resides. Thus it is that the transcendent merges with the erotic and the manly in the heroic effort to pit one's strength and will against the mountain, to assail the unassailable. ...The quest, being impossible, draws wave after wave of brave seekers after love, honor, truth, and spiritual repose, thought to be attainable atop the glass mountain, where one is offered, so it is said, a contemplative view of the whole world and a life thereafter without cares, at least to the extent that bodies can be freed from cares.
Even at its base, visible or invisible, one experiences a great serenity, the mountain's untrammeled grandeur making the earth which bears it seem less an illusion, one's terrestrial passage less transient and insubstantial. Life's messy perplexities and sufferings (elsewhere, the story of the fugitive maiden and the royal princes-- as it must-- continues) fade away, as though absorbed into the pure luminous depths of the crystal mountain, wherein, like consciousness itself, all exists but as if it did not exist because one can see through it. And yet, for all that it attracts, it also, like all things pure, repels, for purity, unlike beauty, does not exist in the eye of the beholder but in the body of the beheld, quite apart from the awed self and all the dim ordinary things of the world, as if not a thing at all (this mountain, that maiden), but only its idea, something one can believe in, strive for, worship, but never know. Or love.
Although... it is transparent, the mountain ghostily reflects the striving climber in his perilous ascent, making him thus a witness to his own exertions. Which are strenuous. Even the gentler slopes near the base require great concentration, all one's strength, an indomitable will.... As the slope rises more sharply, however, even one's perspiring flesh turns against one, and what the climber sees in the mountain's dim reflection is a damp glittering brow and his own gathering despair. Yet most press on, gripping the mountain with their bodies, reaching for inch after inch, unwilling, like most mortals, to surrender to the inevitable. Which, being inevitable, arrives: the climber falls. Sometimes to his death, more often merely into humiliation, chagrin, lifelong desolation: to have glimpsed such grandeur and beauty but never to attain it.

- Coover, Robert. Stepmother. 45-48.

The Lure of Modernity

They consecrated the rest of their time to their waning dreams in the hills. … Sure, one survived, sure, one was free, but the aftertaste of misery was rising quickly. It was the bitterness of a land whose promises fly away. It was from the boredom with nature that did away with all patience before the least wish came true. … The hills had neither schools nor lights. You just found yourself with the sky over you like a lid, getting anxious, sometimes destitute, and always without perspective. The still hills did not care for any weakness. Thus, year after year, the maroon Trail began to go down to the Factory. There was opportunity there.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 139, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Christ Parallels

The drifter’s destiny is to carry us, all together, toward worlds buried in us. He assumed what we were looking for and allowed us to look for it, without our having to suffer. The drifter, he was our desire for freedom in the flesh, our way of living worlds in ourselves, our City maroon.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Making Myths

... legends are memories greater than memories.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 176, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

On the Ideal Life

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pg 87-88.

on knowing the limits of academic devotion

I am one person-- myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary; there is a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a knife.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pg. 87

on perspective and self-knowledge

With the return of self-consciousness, he knew that only violence could make him supple. It was Betty, however, that he criticized. Her world was not the world…. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her order was not.

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyheart, pg. 11.

on sensation and history

…An account of the tears? when you recall them they bring back perceptible touches, numb of all pain, but which you can feel and which one can examine from afar as if looking at so many trails taken by our flesh in the world, such wealth gushing out from torment….

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 310, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

beware of the city

And she asked, What is City, Ternome? He, full of secular learning, exaggerated: City’s a quake. A tremor. There all things are possible, and there all things are mean. City sweeps and carries you along, never lets go of you, get you mixed up in its old secrets. In the end you take them in without ever understanding them. You tell those just-off-the-hills that that’s how it is and they eat it up: but the City has just gulped you in without showing you the ropes. A City is the ages all gathered in one place, not just in the names, houses, statues, but in the not-visible. A City sips the joys, the pain, the thoughts, every feeling, it makes its dew out of them, which you see without being able to point to it.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 173, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the dangers of globalization

Often, thanks to a crew reduced by yellow fever, two-three would leave as sailors into the vertigo of the wide world, see other skies, breathe other winds. They came back disoriented with truths, more confused than washed-up zombies. Sons of the world but outside it all, half transparent, they floated about in town, stiff, hard, without a past.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 67, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on movers and shakers and community-makers

It was a kind of magical we. He loaded it with the meaning of one fate for many, invented the we that would prey on his mind in his last years.

- -Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 122, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on too-common turns of phrase

Her smile had opened naturally, not like an umbrella, and while he watched her laugh folded and became a smile again, a smile that was neither “wry,” “ironical” nor “mysterious.”

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, pg. 12.

on a flood of feeling, writing

I wrote. I wrote despair. Writing does well at the end of an edge of oneself. Ti-Cirique no longer had time to read my things. He was overwhelmed by my avalanche of words undoing the alphabet, by my sadness cut up by commas to teach silences; that despondency which inspired my words slamming into each other impaled on hyphens, or these word left unfinished that would open the pages to my Arcadius. I would let my tears dry to burden each i with a dot. I would string the beads of my shivers onto threads of ink and crush them waiting for them to bloom in my closed notebooks. I would tie together the memories… and I grated them together like manioc, making ink from the tears I cried. I wrote haikais colder than seventeen coffin nails, plowed lines bitter as toad gall. I wrote dictionary words which popped out of me like a deadman’s clots and left me more anemic than a cow hanging at a slaughterhouse. I wrote feelings which mingled verbs the way sleeper-women do. I wrote colors like Rimbaud having visions. I wrote melancholy which reinforced mine. I wrote blinking howls which made my ink run by. I wrote thinking involuntary, coming from God knows where like frightened she-dogs… writers are mad to live out such things in their heart; he would tell me that today’s writers don’t go through such things anymore: they’ve lost the primal drive of writing which comes out of you like necessity, which you wrestle (forever along), your life getting in a tangle with death, in the holy inexpressible. And out of that kind of drama, no one can make a profession.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

an addiction for writing

I then gained a taste for notebooks: you could yank out stained pages, the squares would discipline my hand; what’s more, it looked like a book to me; it was possible to read it again, leaf through it, smell it. A brand new notebook, woah! I got carried away, the beauty of the pages, the promise of blankness, its threat too, this fear when the first word is inscribed and calls for the rush of a world one is never sure to tame.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 321-322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on weariness

…he found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end. And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, pg 1.

elegy in the making

It’s around that time, you know, that I began to write, that is: to die a little.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on history (unlinkable)

Lives don’t make sense in reality, they come and go and often, like tsunamis, with the same crash, and they sweep away the dregs stagnating in your head like they were relics, which are treasures to you but don’t stand still. What a necropolis of sensations! … these heart throbs of which there’s nothing left… these smiles remembered by a simple wrinkle… what’s the use of all these people one meets and who go by and are no more? … and why forget those it would be pleasant not to forget, these beings with a heart in your image, and who go away from you… transient zombies, how to keep you inside?

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 310, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on withering away

... she was losing her footing. The light in her eyes wavered. She looked like the oil flame of a candle ring in the wind. She had found her cane bearings again, her mechanical movements to fend off their blades, her rags rolled up to the round of her shoulder, the old hat which pitilessly grated her temples under the heated sun. This badly watered life was hurling her every day down the bottom of the cliffs of her heart of hearts for good. My Esternome would make sure to be there when she came back home. She would come back like a withered flower. Month after month. Ninon was alighting from the world. She was beginning to look like ... her mother, no point in talking more about her. Soon she looked at what he brought her back (a glossy turtle shell, a small steel knife, some yellow scarves that she loved so much, a clear eau de cologne) with indifference. It made him so sick; he thought he could see her slow descent into an echoless depth.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 116, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on patience, stoicism, joy

But I never had these bad thoughts. With so many rags to launder in misery’s rivers, I’ve never had time for melancholy. What’s more, in the few moments life has left me, I learned to let my heart gallop on the saddle of intense feelings, to live life, as they say, to let her be. And note if you please that neither laughter nor smiles have ever tired the skin of my lips.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 33, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov