Conrad Aiken Quotes

It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

Cosmos mariner destination unknown

It is moonlight. Alone in the silence I ascend my stairs once more, While waves remote in pale blue starlight Crash on a white sand shore. It is moonlight. The garden is silent. I stand in my room alone. Across my wall, from the far-off moon, A rain of fire is thrown. There are houses hanging above the stars, And stars hung under the sea, And a wind from the long blue vault of time Waves my curtains for me. I wait in the dark once more, swung between space and space: Before the mirror I lift my hands And face my remembered face.

For brief as water falling will be death, and brief as flower falling, or leaf, brief as the taking, and the giving, breath; thus natural, thus brief, my love, is grief. —CONRAD AIKEN It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway. —PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Variations: II Green light, from the moon, Pours over the dark blue trees, Green light from the autumn moon Pours on the grass ... Green light falls on the goblin fountain Where hesitant lovers meet and pass. They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands, They move like leaves on the wind ... I remember an autumn night like this, And not so long ago, When other lovers were blown like leaves, Before the coming of snow.

MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again.

Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death... ("Mr. Arcularis")

Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man,and hold on to your umbrella! Have you got your garters on? Mind your hat! ("Mr. Arcularis")

. . . while daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill.

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers.

I am closest to Amy Lowell, in actuality, I think. I love the lyrics clarity and purity of Elinor Wylie, the whimsical, lyrical, typographically eccentric verse of e e cummings, and yearn towards T.S. Eliot, Archibald Macleish, Conrad Aiken...

Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion. ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")

And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying. ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")

It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure. ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")

Walt Whitman's proclamation that a leaf of grass was a miracle to confound all atheists did more justice to the findings of science than a positivism that stopped with the breaking down of the chemical reactions between sunlight and chlorophyll. This isolation of science from feeling, emotion, purpose, singular events, historic identity, endeared it to more limited minds. But it is not, perhaps, an accident that most of the great spirits in science, from Kepler and Newton to Faraday and Einstein, kept alive in their thought the presence of God-not as a mode of explaining events, but as a reminder of why they are ultimately as unexplainable today to an honest enquirer as they were to Job. (That thought has been admirably translated in Conrad Aiken's poetic dialogue with 'Thee.')

Everybody of course, was like this, - depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes – talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything – all things – yet said only one word: ‘I.’ A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining for ever unread and unheard.

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned.

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I!

...Her eyes, he says, are stars at dusk, Her mouth as sweet as red-rose-musk; And when she dances his young heart swells With flutes and viols and silver bells; His brain is dizzy, his senses swim, When she slants her ragtime eyes at him... Moonlight shadows, he bids her see, Move no more silently than she. It was this way, he says, she came, Into his cold heart, bearing flame. And now that his heart is all on fire Will she refuse his heart's desire?―...

The moon rose, and the moon set; And the stars rushed up and whirled and set; And again they swarmed, after a shaft of sunlight; And the dark blue dusk closed above him, like an ocean of regret.

Beyond the doctor’s shoulder was the fire, the fingers of flame making light prestidigitation against the sooty fireback, the soft sound of their random flutter the only sound.

Bread and Music Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver, And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, belovèd, And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them, And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; And in my heart they will remember always,— They knew you once, O beautiful and wise. D. H. Lawrence is better known today for his novels, which include the then-infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover, but he was one of the better early modernist poets

Silence thronged the room, and he was aware of the focused scrutiny of the three people who confronted him.

So Walter Arensberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, Eunice Tietjens, Clara Shanafelt, James Oppenheim, Maxwell Bodenheim, Richard Glaenzer, Scharmel Iris, Conrad Aiken, I place your names here So that you may live If only as names, Sinuous, mauve-colored names, In the Juvenalia Of my collected editions.

Bend as the bow bends, and let fly the shaft, the strong cord loose its words as light as flame; speak without cunning, love, as without craft, careless of answer, as of shame or blame: this to be known, that love is love, despite knowledge or ignorance, truth, untruth, despair; careless of all things, if that love be bright, careless of hate and fate, careless of care. Spring the word as it must, the leaf or flower broken or bruised, yet let it, broken, speak of time transcending this too transient hour, and space that finds the beating heart too weak: thus, and thus only, will our tempest come by continents of snow to find a home.

How is it that I am now so softly awakened, My leaves shaken down with music?― Darling, I love you. It is not your mouth, for I have known mouths before,― Though your mouth is more alive than roses, Roses singing softly To green leaves after rain. It is not your eyes, for I have dived often in eyes,― Though your eyes, even in the yellow glare of footlights, Are windows into eternal dusk. Nor is it the live white flashing of your feet, Nor your gay hands, catching at motes in the spotlight; Nor the abrupt thick music of your laughter, When, against the hideous backdrop, With all its crudities brilliantly lighted, Suddenly you catch sight of your alarming shadow, Whirling and contracting. How is it, then, that I am now so keenly aware, So sensitive to the surges of the wind, or the light, Heaving silently under blue seas of air?― Darling, I love you, I am immersed in you…

It's a psychological fantasy of the dream type, more like Kafka I suppose, or like 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' There is no fantasy premise: that is, a fantastic postulate from which things proceed logically; the beginning is natural, factual, normal, as in Hubbard's 'Fear;' the ordinary world, in fact. From there, the book 'degenerates into sheer fantasy,' as my agent puts it. It progresses, I would say, into greater and deeper levels of fantasy; a trip into the dream-regions of symbolism, the unconscious, etc. as one finds in 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the work ends with a final cataclysm of dream-fantasy. I'm saying all this because my point is this: I'm not sure a reader of fantasy would consider this a fantasy. He might consider this merely 'morbid neurotic psychological investigations for sick minds' as del Rey tends to put it. Actually, I think all human minds, sick or well, have regions of dream-symbolism; I see nothing morbid in these symbolistic worlds . . . they have their own logic and structure, their own typical relationships, as Lewis Carroll showed. Not a chaotic or formless world, at all . . . a world that fascinates me. But perhaps not of interest to fantasy readers. Yet, I don't know what else to call this. I call Kafka's work 'fantasies,' for want of a better name. Or Conrad Aiken's ' Silent Snow, Secret Snow.' Or even THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, and certainly Molnar's 'Liliom,' or the plays of the Capek brothers, or that ghastly Maeterlinck 'Bluebird' thing, and certainly Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt.' To me, the myth and the dream are related; I see myths as symbolistic proto-type experiences, archaic and timeless, occurring in the individual subconscious. The fairy tale, the myth, the dream, are all related. And I see nothing morbid in it . . . the button molder, in 'Peer Gynt' absolutely terrifies me. I sense meaning, there. I can't exactly define it rationally . . . perhaps that's why Ibsen chose to present it that way; perhaps these symbols can't be reduced to exact literal descriptions. Like poetic images, they can't be translated.

Once more we turn in pain, bewildered, Among our finite walls: The walls we built ourselves with patient hands; For the god who sealed a question in our flesh.

Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence, Where never summer was no shade of tree, Nor sound of water, nor sweet light of sun, But only nothing and the shore of nothing, Above, below, around, and in my heart

So, talking with my first wife, At the dark end of evening, when she leaned And smiled at me, with blue eyes weaving webs Of finest fire, revolving me in scarlet,-- Calling to mind remote and small successions Of countless other evenings ending so,-- I smiled, and met her kiss, and wished her dead

Know thyself! That was the best joke ever perpetrated. A steaming universe of germ-cells, a maelstrom of animal forces, of which he himself, his personality, was only the collective gleam.

It was perhaps the sound of Smith, giving himself a body in the darkness; or Faubion, coming up out of the unfathomable with a short sigh; or Silberstein, muttering as he clove the cobweb of oblivion in which he found himself enshrouded; or Cynthia, waking from granite into starlight. It was perhaps only the little sound of the atom falling in his mind, the atom falling like a star from one constellation to another, molecular disaster, infinitesimal tick, which, in its passage, created, illuminated and then destroyed this night, this ship, the corposants.

This is merely the announcement of that perfect communion of which I have often dreamed. They have lost their individualities, certainly—but was individuality necessary to them? Or is it possible that, having lost their personalities, they have lost that alone by which harmony or discord was perceptible? Or is it only that their individualities have been refined by self-awareness, so that the feelings no longer intrude, nor the passions tyrannize, bringing misery?…

Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect—physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches… Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles—why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!

If one could only establish a direct mode of communion with another being, instead of undergoing this pitiful struggle of conversation? Extraordinary, the way conversation, even the most intimate (not at present apropos) concealed or refracted the two personalities engaged. Impossible to present, all at once, in a phrase, a sentence, a careful paragraph—even in a book, copious and disheveled—all that one meant or all that one was. To speak is to simplify, to simplify is to change, to change is to falsify. And not only this—there were also the special demons who inhabit language; and again, the demons who make a perpetual comedy, or tragedy, of all human intercourse, the comedies and tragedies of the misunderstood. These were the same thing—or aspects of the same thing?

All is insanity… Who so among you that is without insanity, let him think the first think…

What is man that thou art mindful of him? Melancholy. Men, in a smoking room, recounting their conquests to one another. Was it, as always assumed, a mere boastfulness, a mere rooster crow from the dunghill? No… It was the passionate desire to recreate, to live over again those inestimable instants of life, so tragically few, so irrecoverably lost. ‘That reminds me of one time when I was staying——’ Yes, you can see the wretched man trying to summon them back, those few paltry episodes, and make of them, for his solace, a tiny immortal bouquet.

While the blue noon above us arches, And the poplar sheds disconsolate leaves, Tell me again why love bewitches, And what love gives. It is the trembling finger that traces The eyebrow’s curve, the curve of the cheek? The mouth that quivers, when the hand caresses, But cannot speak? No, not these, not in these is hidden The secret, more than in other things: Not only the touch of a hand can gladden Till the blood sings. It is the leaf that falls between us, The bells that murmur, the shadows that move, The autumnal sunlight that fades upon us: These things are love. It is the ‘No, let us sit here longer,’ The ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ the ‘Once I knew —’ These trifles, said as I touch your finger, And the clock strikes two. The world is intricate, and we are nothing. It is the complex world of grass, A twig on the path, a look of loathing, Feelings that pass — These are the secret! And I could hate you, When, as I lean for another kiss, I see in your eyes that I do not meet you, And that love is this. Rock meeting rock can know love better Than eyes that stare or lips that touch. All that we know in love is bitter, And it is not much.

Then I felt How tears ran down my face, tears without number; And knew that all my life henceforth was weeping, Weeping, thinking of human grief, and human Endeavour fruitless in a world of pain.