Charles Simic, "The Life of Images" 에서

Charles Simic, "The Life of Images: Selected prose" (2015).

 

 

 

[아래는 이 책에 실린 여러 에세이들에서 인용한 거다. 그 에세이들의

제목을 밝힌다는 게 그만 잊었다. 책은 벌써 도서관에 반납했다. ] 

 

The pleasures of philosophy are the pleasures of reduction --

the epiphanies of hinting in a few words at complex matters.

Both poetry and philosophy, for instance, are concerned with

Being. What is a lyric poem, one might say, but the recreation

of the experience of Being. (p 12)

 

To be conscious is already to be divided, to be multiple. There

are so many me's within me. The whole world comes into our

inner room. ... "How strange it all is," Dickinson must have told

herself. (p 15)

 

It's like saying, "I wanted to go to church, but the poem took

me to the dog races." When it first happened I was horrified.

It took me years to admit that the poem is smarter than I am.

Now I go where it wants to go. (p 20)

 

The labor of poetry is finding ways through language to point

to what cannot be put into words. (p 20)

 

I like a poem that understates, that leaves out, breaks off,

remains open-ended. A poem as a piece of the unutterable

whole. ... Emily Dikinson's poems do that for me. Her

ambiguities are philosophical. She lives with uncertainties,

even delights in them. To the great questions she remains

"unshielded," as Heidegger would say. (p 25)

 

Neither is poetry merely a recreation of experience, "It was and

it was not," is how the old storytellers used to begin their tales.

It lies to tell the truth. (p 26)

 

The task of poetry, perhaps, is to salvage a trace of the

authentic from the wreckage of religious, philosophical, and

political systems. (p 31)

 

Heaven is a pot of chilli simmering on the stove. ... Honestly,

what would you rather have, the description of a first kiss or

stuffed cabbage done to perfection? ... I have to admit, I

remember better what I've eaten than what I've thought. (p 35)

 

There has never been a poet who didn't believe in a stroke of

luck. What is an occasional poem but a quick convergence of

unforeseen bits of language? ... Only literary critics do not

know that poems mostly write themselves. (p 47)

 

The poem is perfectly understandable after one reading, and

yet one immediately wants to reread it again. Poetry is about

repetition that never gets monotonous. (p 100)

 

A thief once broke into Tsvetaeva's flat and was horror-struck

by the poverty he found. ... When he got up to leave he

offered her money. Nevertheless, in her diary after one such

dark moment, she makes a surprising remark:

 

    I didn't write down the most important thing: the gaiety,

    the keeness of thought, the burst of joy at the slightest

    success, and the passionate directness of my entire being.

 

(p217)

 

She[Simic's mother] listened to Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and

other lunatics on the radio. ... What upset har even more than

their vile words was their cheering followers. (p 245)

 

Of course, I was naive. I didn't realize the immense prestige

that inhumanity and brutality have among nationalists. I also

didn't grasp to what degree they are impervious to reason. ...

The infuriating aspect of every nationalism is that it doesn't

understand that it is a mirror image of some other

nationalism. (p 251)