you can sleep. sleep in my arms. like a baby bird. a song sung by a forest....within a forest...a thousand years ago....

from the unbearable lightness of being written by milan kundera directed by philip kaufman, 1988. daniel day-lewis & juliette binoche were never more beautiful. i still remember the first time i read this book, i have since read it more than 20, 30, 40 times. more than anyone i would like to meet milan kundera. more than anyone i would not like to meet milan kundera. he had such an impact on my life that i would not know what to say.

i am still hoping for one day to have these words said to me:

you can sleep. sleep in my arms. like a baby bird. like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. like a tiny parrot. like a whistle. like a little song. a song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.

the story-tellers, part 2

milan kundera

anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. what is vertigo? fear of falling? then why do we feel it when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? no, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. it is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

dylan thomas

wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

do not go gentle into that good night.

james joyce

vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. a dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. old now. it bore the oldest, the first race. the oldest people. wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. it lay there now. now it could bear no more. dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

t.s. eliot

april is the cruellest month, breeding

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

dull roots with spring rain

albert camus

when you have seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

laughter & forgetting

so today, after trying to retrieve my information off my computer's hard drive for the past 2 weeks, i came to the realization that it was all lost. all my contacts & addresses, all my emails, all my calendars. files full of quotes, recipes and the diligent notation of the dates of where & with whom i had dinner with, what jobs i worked on, what boyfriends i was with....all gone with the wind. it made me think of memory and how we hold it and shape it. did it really happen if i can't look back and see those words written somewhere? i finally let it go (or so i keep telling myself). i've lost so many things along the way and this too shall pass.

Please email me at sthenry7@earthlink.net so that i can start to rebuild...

i am reminded of two quotes from my absolute favorite authors:

"For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed."

-Milan Kundera

and....

"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, the thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?"

-Jeanette Winterson