Seasons, senses & self: Day 19
“… that the endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home” – oh, how I love that quotation. It’s from an essay about Kafka – Franz Kafka, who wrote in his journal: “The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly”… No, he doesn’t end the sentence there, but how I love fragments! ✁ ✁ Fragments, collage, patchwork… letting random thoughts, overheard snippets, half-remembered quotations fall on the page, arranging themselves as they will… today’s theme, Dear Reader, is discontinuity, breaking off, finding something beautiful in failure… … … I’m posting this past the deadline –
Seasons, Senses & Self: a daily series
Image source: Picryl
The quote at the beginning of today’s piece is from a short essay on Kafka by David Foster Wallace. The title is a quote from Tom Eliot’s long poem, The Waste Land. (I misremembered both of them, but have corrected them now). The Waste Land weaves into itself a lot of fragments from other authors (rather as hip-hop music uses sampling). It’s a puzzling collage of elements – it’s hard to grasp the complete picture, and there have been many different interpretations of it in the century since it was published. But it’s got lots of good lines, like ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’. All writers unconsciously use phrases, ideas, plot elements etc. from what they have read, but some do this deliberately.