To accompany Coledridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner":

Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
near her hull,

a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
a sea-gull

of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
with wings spread--

curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
men long dead.

Marianne Moore, "A Talisman"

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[Alice] Walker described the 'essential' O'Connor as the portrayal of spiritual growth, or those moments when an individual comes face to face with her or his own limitations, and comprehends 'the true frontiers of her own inner country'. Or, in O'Connor's terms, to know what we are is above all to know what we lack, so that the first result of self-knowledge is humility. Walker explained that these moments of revelation tend to occur at times of extreme loss or crisis. Moreover, these revelations in O'Connor's stories show that, for her, art is not so much an idealistic view of what we ought to be as a revelation of what people actually are, in all their inner, hidden deformity and limitations. Hence, O'Connor wrote stories about characters, about people who are 'poor, afflicted in mind and body', and who have little (or at best a distorted) sense of spiritual purpose, since to her that is the norm.

Kathleen Wheeler, "A Critical Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists"

Commentary in progress.

Read More 0 comments | Posted by Katie

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say...

I wish to recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number.* This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books.

*22 letters, the space, the commas and the period.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, "Labyrinths"

Reading requires a huge leap of faith, but I suppose not one any bigger than is demanded by going to sleep each night.

The Pit of Babel

Es muß ein Fortschritt geschehen...
Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.

Some progress must be made...
We are digging the pit of Babel.
(Franz Kafka)

I am Katie Sharrow-Reabe and I am interested in structural and social architecture. Linguistic and cultural translation. Progress through retrospection. Subliminal and subterranean connections. And I would like you to help me put these fragments into a hole.

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