everythingliterature - Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

M. C. Escher - A Man's Intuition

everythingliterature - truth in beauty

0 REMAIN, DEAR ONE...


"O remain, dear one, I love you,

Stay with me in my fair land,

For your dreamings and longings

Only I can understand.



You, who like a prince reclining

O'er the pool with heaven starred;

You who gaze up from the water

With such earnest deep regard.



Stay, for where the lapping wavelets

Shake the tall and tasseled grass,

I will make you hear in secret

How the furtive chamois pass.



Oh, I see you wrapped in magic,

Hear your murmur low and sweet,

As you break the shallow water

With your slender naked feet;



See you thus amidst the ripples

Which the moon's pale beams engage,

And your years seem but an instant,

And each instant seems an age."



Thus spake the woods in soft entreaty;

Arching boughs above me bent,

But I whistled high, and laughing

Out into the open went.



Now though e'en I roamed that country

How could I its charm recall...

Where has boyhood gone, I wonder,

With its pool and woods and all?


Poem by Mihai Eminescu - Version by Corneliu M. Popescu

Transcribed by Gabriela Brancovici