The Inner Valley

Your eyes are the homeland O f the tear and the lightning bolt, Silence that speaks, T empests without wind, S ea without waves, jailed birds, Somnolent golden beasts, I mpious topazes like Truth , Autumn in a forest glade W here light sings upon the shoulders O f a tree with leaves like birds . B each that the morning finds A s a constellation of eyes, B asket filled with fruits of fire, L ie that feeds, M irrors of this world, G ateways to the hereafter, Gentle pulse of the sea at noon, M oor, absolute  which blinks. ******* ✍  Octavio Paz ( Mexico City, 31 March 1914 ~ Mexico City, 19 April 1998).   *Translated by Horacio S.   ◙ Artwork: Moïse Kisling *******

"From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer." ******* ✍   Edvard Munch   (Ådalsbruk, Løten, Norway, 12 December 1863 ~ Oslo, Norway, 23 January 1944). ◙ Artwork: 'The Sun' (1912) by Edvard Munch.

Everyone is a world, peopled by blind beings in dark commotion against the self the king who rules them. In every soul thousands of souls are trapped, in every world thousands of worlds are hidden and these blind, these underworlds are real and living, though incomplete, as true as I am real. And we kings and princes of the thousand possibilities in us are ourselves servants, trapped in some greater creature, whose self and being we grasp as little as our own superior his superior. Our own feelings have taken the color of their love and death. As when a mighty steamship passes far out, under the horizon, lying in the evening glitter- - And we don’t know about it until the swell reaches us on the shore, first one, then another, and then many which strike and boom until everything has become as before. – Yet everything is different. So we shades are troubled by a strange unease When something tells us that others have gone ahead, That some of the possibilities have been released. ...

" It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” ✍ William Faulkner (New Albany, Mississippi, 25 September 1897 - Byhalia, Mississippi, 6 July 1962). ◙ Artwork: Pieter Claesz

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse - The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff tha...

Free man, you shall forever cherish the vast sea, The sea, that image where you contemplate your soul As everlastingly its mighty waves unroll. Your mind a yawning gulf seasoned as bitterly. You love to plunge into your image to the core, Embracing it with eyes and arms; your very heart Sometimes finds a distraction from its urgent smart In the wild sea's untamable and plaintive roar. Both of you live in darkness and in mystery: Man, who has ever plumbed the far depths of your being? O Sea, who knows your private hidden riches, seeing How strange the secrets you preserve so jealously? And yet for countless ages you have fought each other With hands unsparing and with unforbearing breath, Each an eternal foe to his relentless brother, So avid are you both of slaughter and of death. ******* ✍ Charles Baudelaire (Paris, France, 9 April 1821 ~ Paris, 31 August 1867).   ◙ Artwork: Winslow Homer

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two employees who play a silent game of chess in a southern caf é . The potter, premeditating a colour and shape. A typographer setting this page with care, albeit perhaps disliking it. A woman and a man reading out the final tercet of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies or seeks to justify the wrong done to him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, anonymously, are saving the world. *******   ✍  Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 24 August 1899 ~ Geneva, Switzerland , 14 June 1986).