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So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses–
if anything fits,
it's accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.

-- Wislawa Szymborska, lines from Dreams
Tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

-- W.B. Yeats, from "Adam's Curse"

3302

... writing is, among other things, an activity which discovers its object; which surprises itself with the meanings it runs into, and passes sometimes with apologies, or recognizes with a start like an old friend encountered in a strange place.

-- William H. Gass, from the Introduction to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (Tr. Stephen Mitchell)

2791