Once and no more.  And we too,
once.  And never again.  But this
once to have been, if only this once:
to have been of the earth seems beyond reckoning.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies

Avoid contact with all people in whom there is no possible resonance with what touches you most deeply and toward whom you have obligations of “kindness,” of politeness. Since these obligations engage me strongly as soon as I find myself in the presence of such people and engage me through an ill-fated habit of patience and good-will, which in fact becomes will for humiliation (sometimes abject). Imagine a musician in an orchestra playing off-key because his neighbor is doing so, to be nice.

[…]

Keep silent as before. It’s better.

—Colette “Laure” Peignot, Fragments of a Notebook, 1937

Thus a love life started between the girl and myself, and it was so intimate and so driven that we could hardly let a week go by without meeting.  And yet we virtually never talked about it.  I realized that her feelings at seeing me were the same as mine at seeing her, but I found it difficult to have things out.  I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed, we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl.  Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels.  For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse.  The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.  Simone was tall and lovely.  She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice.  But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.  I first saw her mute and absolute spasm (which I shared) the day she sat down in the saucer of milk.  True, we only exchanged fixed stares at analogous moments.  But we never calmed down or played except in the brief relaxed minutes after an orgasm.

—Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

Ligeti: Piano Etudes, Book 1 - vi. Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw)

Jeremy Denk, piano

(Source: youtube.com)

When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end.

—O. V. de L. Milosz, L’amoureuse Initiation