If you can see it, it can see you. That’s true of just about anything. —Margaret Atwood

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All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Narcissus and Goldmund

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According to whether we are in the same place or separated one from the other, I know you twice. There are two of you. When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me.

This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons.

I live in you then like living in a country.

You are everywhere.


—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?


—John Berger

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Shapechangers in Winter

   

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This is the Solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future,
the place of caught breath


—Margaret Atwood 
Eating Fire

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In the depth of winter, 
I finally learned 
that within me there lay 
an invincible summer.

―Albert Camus

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owner(ship

 

  

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The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room, 
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.


—Margaret Atwood
the moment

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