...of Time

'Looking at the stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions of activity, all the traditions, the complex organisations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

[The Time Machine, Wells, H. G.]

...of agitation

Stilk moved across to a smaller side table, glancing sideways at his audience with a mocking lift of the brow. A barely suppressed voila!, and he removed a dust-cover from the object on the table. It was a bottle.
'And here we are, gentlemen,' he said. 'Your bottle as redesigned by what this agency is pleased to call its think-tank. And adjusted a teeny-weeny bit more by yours truly.'
The businessmen did not know whether they were supposed to be amused or impressed, and one of them compromised by scraping his chair on the polished, wood-block floor. It made a suitably ambivalent sound.
'There is as yet no label, since there is as yet no name,' Stilk said, placing the bottle very precisely off-centre on the mirrored table-top. Tall and tapering, except for a slight bulge near the middle, the bottle was filled with an amber liquid. There was a glitter of small, shining octagonals around the neck, and these set up a series of endless reflections with the mirror below. 'And the name, as you well know, is almost as important as what is being named.'
Stilk brushed the bottle with the tips of his fingers. His own modest proposal, he said was Lagoon or, possibly, Laguna. This seemed to merit applause, and he waited for it.
'This bottle will, after all, hold your product, gentlemen,' he said, when none came. 'I think it would positively glow for a few distinct murmurs of approbation.'
The businessmen continued to stare, in awkward silence, at the bottle, which was gleaming in the puddle of its own reflection. They were troubled by Stilk: his language, his manner, his guessed-at sexual predilections. Somewhere near, the men knew, beautiful young women were changing into bikinis and high-heeled shoes, ready to perform. Why all this talk?

[Blackeyes, Potter, D.]

...of read books

The southern beaches of Uruguay did not give me the impression of a dirty windscreen on a rainy day. Perhaps it was the immensity of the sky, the wilderness of sand and wind, added to Carlos Brauer's story, which in my mind linked the coast of Rocha with windscreens and the panic I feel whenever someone praises all the books I possess. Every year I give away at least fifty of them to my students, yet I still cannot avoid putting in another double row of shelves; the books are advancing silently, innocently through my house. There is no way I can stop them.
I have often asked myself why I keep books that could only ever be of any use in a distant future, titles remote  from my usual concerns, those I have read once and will not open again for many years, if ever! But how could I throw away The Call of the Wild, for example, without destroying one of the building bricks of my childhood, or Zorba the Greek, which brought my adolescence to a tear-stained end, The Twenty-Fifth Hour and all those other volumes consigned to the topmost shelves, where they lie untouched and silent in that sacred trust of which we are so proud.

[The Paper House, Dominguez, C. M.]

...of an entrance

One of the men, who is not managing to get rid of his mask, too well pasted onto his real face, hurrying to finish, for the moral's squad looking for under-age homosexuals is always a danger in these neighbourhoods, loses patience, strips off at random the various lumps or protrusions on which he can get a grip, and begins tearing at his ears, his throat, his temples, his eyelids, without even realising that he is actually lacerating in his haste big sections of his own flesh. And in a little while, when he appears in "Old Joe's" to report to Frank on his mission and to recoup his strength with a double shot of bourbon, the band will suddenly stop playing, the trumpet-player suddenly mute, without thinking in his astonishment of putting down his meaningless instrument, will merely take it away from his mouth, holding it motionless in the air about three inches from his lips which still keep the tense position of a soloist in the middle of a fortissimo, while all the heads in the room turn with a single movement toward the street door, in order to see in their turn what the musicians have seen first from the bandstand: the bloody face which has just appeared in the rectangular frame by the open door against the black background of the night.

[Project for a Revolution in New York, Robbe-Grillet, A.]

...of dreams

To realise a dream it is necessary to forget it, to distract one's attention from it. That's why to realise something is not to realise it. Life is full of paradoxes as roses are of thorns.
   What I would like to create is the apotheosis of a new incoherence that could become the negative constitution of the new anarchy of souls. I have always thought it would be useful to humanity for me to compile a digest of my dreams. That's why I have constantly striven to do so. However, the idea that something I did could prove useful hurt me, silenced me.
   I own country estates on the outskirts of life. I spend my absences from the city of my Actions amongst the trees and flowers of my daydreams. Not even the faintest echo of the life led by my gestures reaches my green and pleasant retreats. I sleep my memory as if it were an endless procession marching past. From the chalices of my meditation I drink only the […] of the palest wine; I drink it with my eyes only, then close them, and life passes me by like a distant candle.
   To me sunny days savour of all I do not have. The blue sky and the white clouds, the trees, the flute that does not play there - eclogues interrupted by the trembling of branches… All this and the silent harp whose strings I lightly brush.

[The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa, F.]

...of Nature

Ah, tall twilight mountains, narrow moonlit streets, if only I enjoyed your lack of awareness of the […] your spiritual vision of the material world, free of preoccupations, devoid of sensibility, with no room for feelings or thoughts or disquiet! Trees, never anything more than trees, with your green leaves so pleasant to the eyes, you are so indifferent to my cares and griefs, so consoling to my anguish because you lack eyes to see it and a soul to look through those eyes to understand and mock! Stones on the road, broken tree stumps, the mere anonymous soil of the earth, your insensitivity to my soul is like a sisterly caress, a balm to me… […] beneath the sun or beneath the moon of the Earth, my mother, so much more tenderly maternal than my own human mother, because you cannot criticise me, because you do not have a soul with which unwittingly to analyse me, nor can you throw me rapid glances that provoke thoughts about me you would not confess to yourself. Vast sea, my clamourous childhood companion, you bring me peace and cradle me because you have no human voice and will not one day whisper into other human ears of my weaknesses and imperfections. Great sky, blue sky, so close to the mystery of the angels […] you do not look at me with envious eyes, and when you pin the sun on your breast you do not do so to attract me nor […] nor don a mask of stars in order to make fun of me… Immense peace of nature, so maternal in your utter ignorance of me; distant quiet […] so fraternal in your utter inability ever to know me… I would like to pray to your oneness and your calm, as an expression of the joy that comes with being able to love without suspicion or doubt; I would like to give ears to your not-hearing, eyes to your sublime […] and to be seen and heard by you through those imagined eyes and ears, glad to be present at your Nothingness, attentive to what is distant, as if to a definitive death, clinging to no hopes of any other life beyond a God, beyond the possibility of growing voluptuously old and beyond the spiritual nature of all matter.

[The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa, F.]

...of spectres

An accident... So The Bug rests alongside Tosh in the bleak cemetery in the shadow of the Witch's Hand.
An accident... drivers walking about with sullen eyes, and whisperings that are not pleasant listening... and I, in the hours after the midnight convoy, sitting thinking things that are best not thought... my fingers tight against Commandant's thick, red throat, gloating in the ebbing strength of that squat, healthy body until I am sick and faint with murderous longing.
The impulse has gone... but in its place has come something worse. I am haunted now as The Bug was haunted. Whenever I close my aching red eyes a procession of men passes before me: maimed men; men with neither arms nor legs; gassed men, coughing, coughing, coughing; men with dreadful burning eyes; men with heads and faces half shot away; raw, bleeding men with the skin burned from their upturned faces; tortured, all watching me as I lie in my flea-bag trying to sleep... an endless procession of horror that will not let me rest. I am afraid. I am afraid of madness. Are there others in this convoy fear-obsessed as I am, as The Bug was... others who will not admit it, as I will not, as The Bug did not... others who exist in a daily hell of fear? For I fear these maimed men of my imaginings as I never fear the maimed men I drive from the hospital trains to the camps. The men in the ambulances scream, but this ghostly procession is ghostly quiet. I fear them, these silent men, for I am afraid they will stay with me all my life, shutting out beauty till the day I die. And not only do I fear them, I hate them. I hate these maimed men who will not let me sleep.

[Not So Quiet..., Smith, H. Z.]