'it refuses to go away, and it refuses to be located'

But love is too heavy a word for this light unity, the color and texture of honey, the sound of summer meadows in fresh winds.

Anne Truitt - Daybook

some days ago you realized what a fundamental discovery emily dickinson's writing is. then it was like looking into the sun for too long, you shied away from it again, couldn't read more than you already had, as if this is an intellectual intensity you only very slowly can get used to. and you wondered what it is about this type of experience a book, a thought, the world or other people expose you to. 
what does this mean to you: this experience, and you can't work it out. you know, it's important. but you cannot, at the moment, verbally reach it. and nietzsche comes back to you, the insight that 'the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon' (birth of tragedy) and yet...
the numerous attempts that have been made to come close to it, to somehow describe it. your understanding has slowed down significantly. you sit and contemplate everything quietly.

what you read at the moment, anne truitt and fanny howe, you want to explore more of edith stein as well, because of this:

It was through my window facing onto their house that the sun fell around the walls as a living presence that I called (secretly) God. Whether it was cold, yellow, white, warm, orange, or a spread of violet, that light was my surrounding other. I now suppose it was equivalent to the geistige that the philosopher Edith Stein describes as always being present to consciousness; it refuses to go away, and it refuses to be located.
Fanny Howe - The Winter Sun. Notes on a Vocation

Time is just reality slowed down, so it wouldn't all happen at once

Things that grow in the light don't last long as hidden things. p222

...she wore the look of one who wants to control the conditions of her own humiliation. p228

- Film is ultimately an exercise in disappointment, he was saying. The surface is bound to offer no clues to anything inside. Surface is only evidence of an intention which we can never know.
- That's really interesting, said Echo.
- I keep thinking the surface is going to tell me its secret but it never happens. p229

... a blank quality that alarmed me. The world had no sound. Or it didn't reach me. p258

...fundamentally unnoticed. p264

...covered her eyes with the palms of her hands and rubbed the darkness in. p271

This was the true way, letting him understand that all of his life began in suffering and happiness was only a temporary release from it and we all had things backward. This was how he read his story anyway and how he experienced his life. Interior pain and a consciousness of fragments, shapes, the bits and pieces of a once whole and palpable creation hurled into space... p274

... it's easier - for some people - to love alone. p282

Once I knew the shape, it was the law and I could live inside it. Before I was always looking for a hole, a view of sky. I knew that this exit was unavoidable anyway, seeing that the air was the biggest, and I fell on my feet in the dark, returning to the shadows for help. If the world maker wanted shadows, it then made substance; f it wanted those shadows to move all the time, it made the substance seem to move in relation to its own static darkness. p286

He had, he told me later, asked me as a joke, to make a bit of a fool of me, and was surprised when I knew something about literature and music. p292

I think I must have been compelled to lose everything then. I think I was engaged in some quest that meant that I had to suffer the uprootedness which then made me yearn for the safety I couldn't stand. Insane. p296

"Time is just reality slowed down, so it wouldn't all happen at once," said some writing on a wall. I believed that the importance of keeping a promise was simple: a mark of confidence in the laws of time. p304

It was the first time in my life I realized that a mistake could take you so far from home that you were, in a sense, permanently lost. Could your lost life be said, then, to be the end of, your original destiny? p310

I realized what I had been looking for. Not him, not the reassurance he gave me, but truth, or whatever you want to call it - that is, the meeting of two people who share one story and agree on it's meaning. That's what I had always been looking for. p311


Fanny Howe -- Famous Questions

axiology

At first it wasn't clear. No truth. No belongings. There was snow on the trees, rooftops, streets and that gray light you see in old movies set at the sea where ice floes break the boat apart. This to me is the image of the knowable. Ropes and stripes, black and white, and what you look at, looks back. If it's a dream, or if it's what is actually seen, then it comes to the same thing: broken language, foreign syntax, the incomprehensible nature of the world. Anyway I didn't even want an answer, that's a fact. All answers are hells. I just wanted to locate the process that underlay the surface image, to put my hand under the top without looking at what I let out. Whatever it was, it didn't belong to me. That is the nature of truth.
p129

(italics - p142)

I can't live without reality even when my head is aching. The lies I've been told to survive! Think: everyone was avoiding a direct statement. Do I get a break, a reward for this? When I meet the hypocrisy inculcated in me since childhood, it is discharged in action, a surprise to me. Everything living into the present has an effect on the future. Unnoticed horizons exist, I think.
p148

Each subject yearns for the safety of artifice.
p153

There are animated bodies other than my own, but I can't really know them without love.
This is the horror. All I guess is, by the time I've touched someone, we've both moved on, and loneliness puts us each into perpetual motion.
p163

Society demands expression from us, even in jail. Distinguishing facts from each other is meant to turn justice into meaning.
p167

Success is an attribute belonging to someone else, not to me. Often when I say something intelligent, a man will say No and then restate what I just said, in his own words! I hate this too.
p169

'The powerful only talk to the powerful,' Ron had said more than once. 'So we must only talk to the powerless.'
p171

Those who have suffered severe displacement and separation really have no need for more suffering. They have, instead, a fear of all new events and only crave an end to drama and change. For this they are called lazy and irrelevant.
Many people who are professional believe that in the end you have no standard of value available to you but theirs and since they have power you must do as they say. This process is called axiology.
p181

Nature's intention sometimes seems to be that all should be forgotten, that there should be no trace of a human event. Sometimes it seems that the pulse of all living creatures comes from a voluntary rebellion against that supreme intention, which longs for emptiness or only the rub of wind against wind. Sometimes all the varieties of wildflower, fern, pool and sea seem to spring from subversion, the genius of the spirit in disguise, as it struggles against that omnivore, nature herself. In this way the spirit becomes the enemy of nature, but fits itself to her forms, and hides there, inside her, holding her together.
p185

Complete objectivity, when applied to another person, is impossible. Empathy affects the information and the objectivity becomes a form of psychological torture, within minutes, hours.
p189

If I see through myself, what am I seeing through?
When my sight goes way out, I don't hate anything.
p195


Fanny Howe -- The Deep North

You have to make yourself believe.  Is this possible?  Can you turn “void” into “God” by switching the words over and over again?

Any act of self-salvation is a problem because of death which always has the last laugh, and if there has been a dramatic and continual despair hanging over childhood, then it may even be impossible.
After all, can you call “doubt” “bewilderment” and suddenly be relieved?

Not if your mind has been fatally poisoned. . . .
But even then, it seems the dream of having no doubt continues, finding its way into love and work where choices matter exactly as much as they don’t matter—at least when luck is working in your favor.

Fanny Howe -- Doubt

the right way was the hidden way

Like many, if not all people, Cloda began to defend her beliefs in her sleep. In her dreams her sense of error was so profound and luminous it suggested an equally - if not greater - way that was right. Yet the right way was the hidden way. And in her dreams she encountered instead the wrong door, the wrong street, the wrong direction, the wrong room. And these encounters horrified her, confused her, kept her lost. To be in error is to feel oneself to be far from the source of happiness. It is to be far from or late to... and distance and time become then one thing, in the dream a torment of misdirected moves and inefficient machinery. To be in error is not to be wrong so much as to be separate from the source of a peaceful conscience, and the windy gap is cold and deep, like a portion of sea that seems to run right through the earth and meet its opposite ocean. She couldn't go home because she didn't know where home was!

Hope became her home instead. (Unhoping hours are the same as refugees from a cruel government.)
p19


(One has to continually prove one's worth through work. Isn't that right, Doctor? After all by now everyone knows that the elect need worldly success in order to prove to everyone that they are, in fact, endowed with a special grace. Otherwise sacredness would seem to be equally distributed among all people.)
p84

Fanny Howe - NOD

the allegory of a maybe

She thinks that even then she guessed that people lived two lives.
One was physical, frantic, random or lost.
The other was airy, transparent, hopeful.
But she couldn't put the two together, not when she was young.
Now this is the task. To melt the edges between the two lives.
To return to that problem and turn it into a progress -- that is, the story of a story -- the not-quite, the almost, the allegory of a maybe, the too-late, don't know, the no-more.

Fanny Howe -- NOD

a hidden meaning that finally defines, rather than defies, them.

But all my main characters are failures in the social world who trail around after a hidden meaning that finally defines, rather than defies, them.  What they seek becomes them as integrated beings. This is a very Thomist vision of reality that is also found in philosophies of culture everywhere. But I really care about failed American women from the 20th century, the anonymous saints and geniuses who couldn’t make a living.  My pronouns shift because people are objects sometimes, subjects other times, and their minds can also leave their bodies and become joined with other minds that are out there with them. I feel there are actual spheres of consciousness, but I am also steeped in the 20th century’s tragic view of language as being a closed system.

Fanny Howe -- Interview