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Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
From The Niagara River © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves
Montaigne
You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss
the dead. The littlest
bit of absence excites
oceans. And of oceans
the less said the
better: the wet beyond
the land: we have a
Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country
There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net: