iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.” (opening line, Wittgenstein’s Mistress)

0448

“Whenever a few pages of Kant had tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard. … This book [Either/Or] confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited me more than any other book.” — Walter Benjamin (at 21, in a letter)

0463

…accordingly how thinking in its absoluteness follows upon a seeming reality.” (Penguin, 1996) In a later version, still Hannay: “…thus on how thinking in its absoluteness takes over from a seeming reality.” (Princeton, 2007)

0181

In Hannay’s translation: (September 4, 1837) “A remarkable transition occurs when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, because here for the first time one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it is thought, …

1192

“What an extraordinary change takes place … when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.” — Kierkegaard (an epigraph to *Wittgenstein’s Mistress*)

1353

“Hugely, spring exists again.” — John Ashbery, “Grand Galop”

0497

Walter Benjamin: “Just as Proust begins the story with an awakening, so must every presentation of history begin with awakening; in fact, it should treat of nothing else. This one [The Arcades Project], accordingly, deals with awakening from the nineteenth century.”

0324

“There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.” — Benjamin, The Arcades Project

0315

“Primal poetry, poetry that allows us a taste for our inner destiny, is an adherence to the invisible. […] True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.” — Bachelard, Water and Dreams (tr. Edith R. Farrell)

0243

another opening line came to mind: “The danger is in the neatness of identifications.” — the first line of Beckett’s first critical essay (“Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”)

0305

from *Essai sur la connaissance approchée* (1928; based on his 1927 thesis)

0101

Gaston Bachelard: “Connaître, c’est décrire pour retrouver.” [To know is to describe in order to retrieve.] — the opening line of the first chapter of his first book

1255

“As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul.” (Jabès, The Book of Questions)

0243

“Written words could tell him who he was. […] The only way to be in the world was to write himself there.” (Don DeLillo, Mao II)

0244

“Syntax is a faculty of the soul.” (Paul Valéry, Analects)

0305

And now that I am reading Proust, I was shocked to discover there the very same expression I had used in The Chandelier, in the same sense, with the same words. This expression is nothing much, but even in the ordinary it is impossible not to come upon others.” (trans. from French)

0150

trembling to the measured steps of frail and melancholy young girls. The devil has it that I always arrive last, so that I always find myself faced with what has already been done. I have often felt a certain discouragement because of this. […] (3/4)

1140

one of those little things to which he gives so much meaning without, however, granting them the slightest supernatural value. If I had been listening to Chopin, my chandelier would evoke that of a grand salon, with delicate and transparent pendants, (2/4)

1120

Daily Mayröcker @dailymayroecker.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Lispector on *The Chandelier* (letter, 1944): “Perhaps you find the title Mansfieldian because you know that I recently read Katherine’s letters. But I don’t think so. […] If I had been reading Proust at the time, it would have made one think of a Proustian chandelier, (1/4)

1150

Reposted by Yoon Kim

vielleicht lebe ich in einem Gäszchen. Von Sprache wunderbarer Sprache. (24.3.18 | da ich morgens ..., S. 70)

0165

“We are eternal travelers of ourselves, and the only landscape that exists is what we are. We possess nothing, because we do not even possess ourselves... The universe is not mine: it is me.” — Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

0629

“We are nothing; what we seek is everything.” (Friedrich Hölderlin)

0296

“Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles.” — Hölderlin, Fragment von Hyperion, 1793

0253

Yoon Kim @yoonkim.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

epigraphs to *An Absence of Sea*

0242

Happy Birthday, Anthony! 🥂💖

110

Reposted by Yoon Kim

Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Imagine this: The hand no longer finding itself in the dark. There would be no humanity if the body did not reflect itself, writes MMP. If the chiasmatic structure were to collapse—“It would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being.”

081

Yoon Kim @yoonkim.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

“neither bed nor body neither subject nor object neither time nor hands but something else… …not from anywhere I search to borrow words for this eternal letter but something trembling unnamed a grammar of flesh that cannot be conjugated only endured” 🖤 Christina Tudor-Sideri, An Absence of Sea

1365

“The memories which two people preserve of each other, even in love, are not the same. […] For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies.” (Proust, Time Regained)

04810

Richard Rorty: “Proust’s novel is a network of small, interanimating contingencies. […] Such contingencies make sense only in retrospect—and they make a different sense every time redescription occurs.” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)

0273

for the reason that it resided in my memory and my imagination.” (trans. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

0220

Proust, Time Regained: “No doubt life … prevented me from discovering their essence. For between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies… …even her personal charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished as soon as I was near her, [+]

1250

Charlotte Mandell @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

“Life is an April day, that both laughs and weeps in a breath.” — Babbalanja in Mardi (Vol. 2, Ch. 79) #MelvilleMonday 🐳

0335

Reposted by Yoon Kim

Mourning dove perched, then flying away 🪶

0112

“To me the really wonderful thing about these insects [moths] is the way they perish.” — W. G. Sebald (interview, 1998)

0353

“Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Correction)

0180

“Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur der Korrektur, so Roithamer.” (Bernhard, Korrektur)

0141

that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth, so Roithamer.” (trans. Sophie Wilkins)

0170

Thomas Bernhard, Correction: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, (1/2)

1220

“…weil wir in jedem Augenblick erkennen, daß wir alles falsch gemacht haben […] deshalb korrigieren wir diese Fälschung und die Korrektur dieser Fälschung korrigieren wir wieder und das Ergebnis dieser Korrektur der Korrektur korrigieren wir undsofort, so Roithamer.” — Bernhard, Korrektur

0133

“All poetry is the voice given to death. May our decay praise, celebrate. May our defeat shine, resound.” Jaccottet, for World Poetry Day 🌸

04310

“I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.” — Borges, “The Immortal” (tr. James E. Irby)

0468

“Don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. […] Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.” — Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

0313

— from a footnote: Irrgartengang: Nietzsche’s coinage, from Irrgang (‘mental aberration’) and Irrgarten (‘labyrinth’)

0161

Ancient philosophy is a strange *labyrinthian aberration* of reason. The proper note to strike is that of dreams and fairy tales.” (Philosophy and Truth, tr. Breazeale)

1242