barthelme-angry-meaning

·

The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear — that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age gracefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under ‘Lost and Found,’ might culminate in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.

Thought:

“Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones – marble and granite and porphyry – she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night. Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees.”

Anne Carson | “Short Talk on Sleep Stones”

Christian Molenaar