House of Leaves

Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

[O]

June 19, 1994

Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.

Do you believe in God? I don't think I ever asked you that one. Well I do now. But my God isn't your Catholic varietal or your Judaic or Mormon or Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist or whatever / whoever. No burning brush, no angels, no cross. God's a house. Which is not to say that our house is God's house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house is God.

Who has never gone for a walk through some unfamiliar park and felt that it was huge, only to return a second time to discover that the park is in fact much smaller than initially perceived?

"Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God’s echoes and God is Narcissus."56

Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.

I will become, have become, a creature unstirred by history, no longer moved by the present, just hungry, blind and at long last filled of mindless wrath.

Little solace comes

to those who grieve

when thoughts keep drifting

as walls keep shifting

and this great blue world of ours

seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.

[B]

March 14, 1969

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

The finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.

Why did God create a dual universe?

So he might say,

“Be not like me. I am alone.”

And it might be heard.

[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

[Original]

December 23, 1996

I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote something, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of sum’things has always been and always will be you.

I miss you.

"In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.[...]"