DEDICATION

"This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars."
--Walt Whitman

"To take pity on people in distress is a human quality which every man and woman should possess, but it is especially requisite in those who have once needed comfort, and found it in others."
--Giovanni Boccaccio

"The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box and glared into his pale face. 'The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,' he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for all the insolence in the world, he said, 'There's a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive,' and he released him with a laugh."
--Flannery O'Connor

"To choose was to choose youth, to choose the defeated and those who had nothing left. And that is what Cervantes does, he chooses youth. And even in this melancholy weakness, in this crack in his soul, Cervantes is the most lucid, for he knows that writers don’t need anyone to praise their occupation. We praise it ourselves. Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a general rule we tend to clap and dance when we’re alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we don’t need for anyone to tell us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations."
--Roberto Bolano

"And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life."
--Donald Barthelme













IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.