If I Presume To Understand Negative Capability, Am I Then Incapable Of It, Since It Is The Capability
if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.
Mary Ruefle, On Fear
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For, when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides.
- John Dewey, Art as Experience
To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.
Anaïs Nin, Henry and June
Sometimes, there seems to be a halfway point between where you've been and everywhere else, and we were there.
Ada Limón, Oh Please, Let It Be Lightning
We teeter / on the brink of time, you and I, he, she, / all of us, all so worthy of pity.
Maria Bigoszewska, tr. Regina Grol
the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.
Mary Ruefle, On Fear
What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?
Anne Carson, Kinds of Water
and in a windowless attic some of me is in the smoke rising from the chimney
Anna Frajlich, Here I Am tr. Regina Grol
How imagining death can make it easier
to live and I agree and say, It’s called die
before you die.
- Ada Limón, The Long Ride
“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”
— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
I always want to see you laughing. It belongs to you.
Anaïs Nin, Henry and June
