"Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem. No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving. Like the enigmatic Chinaman one is rapt by the everchanging spectacle of passing phenomena. This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, he who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity. Such clear icy sanity that it seems like madness. By the force and power of the artist’s vision the static, synthetic whole which is called the world is destroyed. The artist gives back to us a vital, singing universe, alive in all is parts."

Henry Miller | “Creative Death” | The Wisdom of the Heart

"Today I imagine what shadows whisper in the half-summer light only ignite the distance between us. Do we watch in silence or listen in pause? Perhaps we are to pulse in the absence of each and settle here, you and I."

A. Sinclair | excerpt from “III: The Half-Summer Holy-Light” 

"I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound."

John Wieners, from “A Poem for Record Players” (via proustitute)

Norman Maclean | Young Men and Fire

Ah, we count the years and introduce divisions here and there and stop and begin anew and waver between these options. But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web influences and forces where the stars feel secure.

- Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Ulrich Baer; emphasis added)