“When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net via @nonsuchbook.bsky.social
"Midway the Stable Place
Below the southern, seaward ledges, where,
Such is the heavy weathering away,
No flower grows, no silence hearts the air,
Each rock gives slowly from its utmost bay.
There comes the day's calthumpian, all afleer,
In his midwaste quotidian King Lear.
His great moonface rumridden and windshot,
His voice the cleaving of the wind to sea,
He drives full speed head on and sets his pots
In his own image and without a lee,
Safe in the backwash of the ledge at bay,
An act of God who does not die this day.
It is midwaste of breaking and the foam,
Midblack the upward curve, the flecking lace,
There always order gives disorder room,
There always midlight is the stable place.
There in the blossoming of waywardness,
O stalwart Lear, you eddy and confess."
—R P Blackmur
Industrial Sector before Dawn, 1942.
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