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Yesterday, while looking for
the owl, I met a gelding. The
horse was so still that it must
have been time. I almost
missed it because I didn’t

know I could see time. Time
is the only thing that doesn’t
move when it moves. I stood
at the fence, half hoping the
horse would come over, half

hoping I was the horse. I made
noises with my feet. The horse
turned its head to me. What are
days for for? / Days are where we
live. / … They are to be happy

in: / Where can we live but
days? wrote Larkin. My day
was this horse. This horse is all
my days, with its brusies, tears,
thin overworked body. I pay

all my debts to this horse.
This horse is also all the hours
of my life that are unlived.
It is all human suffering at
once. The horse knows this

and doesn’t move, doesn’t
come near me because
suffering cannot be touched.
At the courthouse, a woman
saw me looking up at a tree.

No owls today, she said. Two
live up there. This whole time I
had only been looking for one.
One is my life and the other is
what it could have been.

Victoria Chang, “Marfa, Texas”, in The Trees Witness Everything

The distinction between these two types of character, one archaic and one modern, touches on the distinction between characters portrayed entirely through their outward lives and characters who have their own inner livse. These differences are essential, and mysterious, and can really only mean two things: Either people in earlier eras were radically different from modern people, in other words they did not actually have an inner life in our understanding of the term, an autonomous self reflecting on itself. Or else only the depictions are different, and thus the conceptions of what is essential and inessential to a person. The question is whether these two possibilities aren’t, in the final analysis, the same.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Fate”, in The Land of the Cyclops, translated by Martin Aitken

[T]here are certain people, not many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means—the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.

Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern”

An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

What do we call this desire
to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow
to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani

at a sundress, a thigh,
a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail
glass. An olive in brine. Name it beauty

and chase will become
our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel.
Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?”

follows, rapturous, like a sparrow
pecking the ground. Instead of wisdom, why not
wish for the owl’s heart

at night, seeing in the dark
more than a meal, but a place to sing. Don’t imagine
a dirge for the eaten. Conjure

an exhale instead:
the hoot of being alive. Name it
                                                        whatever you like.

Steven Leyva, “Limerence”

I think of opacity as, not necessarily armour, but as an assurance of a fuller self—that you can traverse the world without having to constantly pick up your entrails.

Firelei Báez, note on Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing, Vancouver Art Gallery

A formal proof of this theorem is given in Table III. Like all formal proofs, it is excessively tedious, and it would be fairly easy to introduce notational conventions which would significantly shorten it. An even more powerful method of reducing the tedium of formal proofs is to derive general rules for proof construction out of the simple rules accepted as postulates. These general rules would be shown to be valid by demonstrating how every theorem proved with their assistance could equally well (if more tediously) have been proven without. Once a powerful set of supplementary rules has been developed, a “formal proof” reduces to little more than an informal indication of how a formal proof could be constructed.

C. A. R. Hoare, “An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming”