it's a year to the day since i posted anything on this blog. so much has come full circle and as 'they' say "the more things change, the more they stay the same," so i am just about certain i write this for myself alone, and perhaps for the internet vagabond who makes a stop here while traveling a google search.
funny thing (but perhaps not so surprising), i find myself reading a henry miller book at the moment. a book about books, "the books in my life," and already have more than a handful of quotes to deposit here. however, i will save them for some other day, or some other year, or some other place, like the bookshelf where i can readily retrieve them without the help of a url.
instead i'll share this, from the author who lent me the title for this blog:
"The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched; "to succeed" or "to fail" have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn't keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my discourse occur to me like so many dice casts). Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.
(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)
-Roland Barthes
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
