- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Ulysses
- Dostoevsky's The Dead
- The Idiot
- Hunger - Knut Hamsun
- The Unberable Lightness of Being
- War and Peace
- Thomas Bernhard
- Swedish poet and playwright, Stig Larsson
- Poems of Holderlin
- Faulkner
- Paul Celan
- Finnegans Wake
- Mallarme's poems
- Francis Ponge (prose poems)
- The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Marcel Proust
- Turgenev - Sketches from a Hunter's Album
And a few quotes about reading and writing:
It wasn’t until I discovered this, that the distance of form and language created a space into which I could pour my self, where I lost ownership and control over it and where what was me was transformed into “me,” that I became a writer. That wasn’t why I began writing, since for a long time I didn’t know this, yet I still wrote. But when I discovered it, it was already familiar to me: that’s what reading was like.
...
And this, an outside place where what is inside becomes visible, is still what literature is to me. Literature and art, along with religion, are the only places I know of that are capable of establishing such an outside.
...
I wanted to be there, in that state of utter absorption where everything else vanished and you were, in a sense, out of the world. To read is to be the citizen of another country, in a parallel realm which every book is a door to.
...
This is so because I have to hit upon it inadvertently, or it has to hit upon me. It is one thing to know something, another to write about it, and often knowing stands in the way of writing. Make it new, Ezra Pound said—and is there any other way to do that than to let everything we know about something fall away and regard it from a position of defenselessness and unknowing?
**
The contradiction between the illimitable that dwells within us and our simultaneous limitation and earthboundness is the driving force behind all literature and all art, or so I believe, but not only that; the longing to equalize the difference, suspend the contradiction and simply exist in the world, undifferentiated from it, is also an important part of all religious practice....He was on fire, driven by an intense will to communicate his inner world to the outer one, but the resistance was too great, the language he had access to was incapable of expressing it. But his will was as wild as it was blind, little by little the distance was whittled away until he produced his final paintings, painted only ten years after his first, and which are simple and rich and dizzyingly intense, full of an existential yearning which it is difficult to remain indifferent to. Van Gogh found a language, not for the illimitable within him, but for the longing of the illimitable to overcome the limitations of the external world and become one with it.
...Perhaps why one writes, to give a form to the formless within.
**
I am reading a few other writers who talk about writing and reading. I often end up reading about reading and writing. All writers eventually come to solitude, the meditative loss of self that happens when one reads and writes, playing with words, in a different space. Knausgaard says it is perhaps art and literature, and maybe religion. Is it really so? Or is it that these avenues get talked about, especially word-artists talking about the formless wishing for form. I would think the formless wishes to shape itself in form irrespective of the medium. Words provide a beautiful canvas, so does a palette. But it is there in any losing or subsuming of self, be it a person rapt listening to music, or a person rapt trying to get that crochet design sorted, or a person rapt trying to plane the wood, or a person rapt trying to make a working code, or a person rapt in something very humble, like sweeping off the autumn leaves from a a yard. Formless manifests itself when that boundary of self dissolves, in those momentary rapt attention when there is no I, no self, no ego. That writers talk about it is because they have that access and those words to talk about it. That their talk is from that place of loss of self. Everyone else is too rapt to put words to it. Only the writers and a few readers attempt those words. Hence; I think. What do you reckon?
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