Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the transformative power of art amidst personal grief or sadness.
In this quote by Anne Carson, the act of putting on sadness like a garment illustrates how the writer embraces and incorporates their emotions into their work. It suggests that creation can often be borne out of personal experiences of sorrow, and art serves as both a refuge and a means of expression, allowing the writer to navigate their feelings while engaging in the creative process.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might share this quote to emphasize the emotional weight that artists often carry.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.
In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.
I'm having so much fun, because you know what? They cast a Star Wars fan in a Star Wars movie. Biiiiiig mistake!
I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and it’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.
Sometimes female characters start out as the wife or girlfriend, but then I realize, 'No, she's the book,' and she becomes a main character. I surrender the book to her.
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