Excerpt from "Flaubert's Parrot," Julian Barnes.

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes; there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

Excerpt from the Zohar.

"Woe unto the man," says Simeon ben Yohai, "who asserts that this Torah intends to relate only commonplace things and secular narratives; for if this were so, then in the present times likewise a Torah might be written with more attractive narratives. In truth, however, the matter is thus: The upper world and the lower are established upon one and the same principle; in the lower world is Israel, in the upper world are the angels. When the angels wish to descend to the lower world, they have to don earthly garments. If this be true of the angels, how much more so of the Torah, for whose sake, indeed, the world and the angels were alike created and exist. The world could simply not have endured to look upon it. Now the narratives of the Torah are its garments. He who thinks that these garments are the Torah itself deserves to perish and have no share in the world to come. Woe unto the fools who look no further when they see an elegant robe! More valuable than the garment is the body which carries it, and more valuable even than that is the soul which animates the body. Fools see only the garment of the Torah, the more intelligent see the body, the wise see the soul, its proper being; and in the Messianic time the 'upper soul' of the Torah will stand revealed."

Two poems by D. Nurske.

A Night in Martirios

Sometimes when the story is wildly implausible
the author will have one character say
I have a hard time believing this
and the other explains:
it’s the axle working loose,
the fog in the orchards,
controlled fires in the canebrake.

Now we are resting at twilight
on a frayed floral quilt
and the dimity curtains open
in the wind from Orizaba.

Now the author has the characters undress
and sleep together, they are naked
as the space between words,
the lamp is unlit, the bed unmade,
the silence is absolute,
occasionally a faint hiss of rain
or the scritch as the author
erases his own name.


Evora

Maybe we may talk our way out of death
given that the I disappears so disingenuously
whenever you look for it, so does the poem,
leaving only the track of a snail
in the stucco alcove where we catnapped
in Evora, in late summer, scrunched
in the osier bed, before you knew me,
before I didn’t know you, when the future ended,
cracked sun in the mirror, when the finches
instructed us in thin scattered voices
to stand our ground against delight.

Excerpt from "A Fragment of Fourier’s On Trade," Engels.

It is true that Fourier did not start out from the Hegelian theory and for this reason unfortunately could not attain knowledge of absolute truth, not even of absolute socialism. It is true that owing to this shortcoming Fourier unfortunately allowed himself to be led astray and to substitute the method of series for the absolute method and thereby arrived at such speculative constructions as the conversion of the sea into lemonade, the couronnes boréale and australe, the anti-lion, and the conjunction of the planets. But, if it has to be, I shall prefer to believe with the cheerful Fourier in all these stories rather than in the realm of the absolute spirit, where there is no lemonade at all, in the identity of Being and Nothing and the conjunction of the eternal categories. French nonsense is at least cheerful, whereas German nonsense is gloomy and profound.

Judges 12:5-6, as translated by John Manson.

And the men o Gilead
tuik the mountain-passes o Jordan
bifore the men o Ephraim:
and this wis the wey o’t,
that whan the men o Ephraim
wha haed wun free
frae the men o Gilead
said, Lat me gang throu;
the men o Gilead telt him,
Ir ye a man o Ephraim?
Gin he said, Na;

Than they telt him,
Juist say Shibboleth:
and he said Sibboleth: 
fur he c’uldna mak his mouth say it richt
Than he tuik him,
an killt him at the mountain passes o Jordan:
and at thon time
forty-twa thousand men o Ephraim wir killt.

Atatürk's tribute to the ANZACs, 1934.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives: You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours: you, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

"Beheading Bacchus," Chad Davidson.

The shoulders, lowered in fields, glisten rouge.
Around his head the halo of vines, a fistful
of leaves translucent as skin, a sword curled

with arabesques of the same young flora. Study
the facial muscles. They suggest more than three
hundred heavens, one for every minute

the sun lords over a rain-stained morning.
You've never held the weight of the harvest
knife, strangely heavy, its handle worn,

or felt the deft twist unhinging fruit as a few
seeds hurry to swell the land you walk.
No matter how you try, the painting will not

depart, even after wisps of Giacometti
and an anchor thrown in the courtyard café
where grapes held sculptured poses,

ice clinked in highballs. Later you returned
to Bacchus, grape-stained and cumbersome
in his tableau of tunicked lutists.

Still, he lowers his shoulders, caught in the glare
of a jewel of juice. If he could speak, who's to say
he wouldn't beg? Overripe, he descends to the tendrils

of your engraving. The sun gleams off the blade
you raise. It is late autumn, the three-hundredth heaven.
A breath of wind, buttery and difficult, stirs his curls.

Excerpt from "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaire.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas.

Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life... any man who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude is a blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!

Excerpt from "The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements," John Dee, 1570.

And for these, and such like marueilous Actes and Feates, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically, wrought and contriued: ought any honest Student, and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a Coniurer? Shall the folly of Idiotes, and the Mallice of the Scornfull, so much preuaile, that He, who seeketh no worldly gaine or glory at their handes: But onely, of God, the threasor of heauenly wisedome, & knowledge of pure veritie: Shall he (I say) in the meane space, be robbed and spoiled of his honest name and fame? He that seketh (by S. Paules aduertisement) in the Creatures Properties, and wonderfull vertues, to finde iuste cause, to glorifie the Æternall, and Almightie Creator by: Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion of the Helhoundes, and a Caller, and Coniurer of wicked and damned Spirites?

Borellus, as cited in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," H. P. Lovecraft.

The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.