House Of Leaves
House Of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
Introduction
Page: 19 (2.57%) @ 26 Feb 2025 12:51:45 AM
As I discovered, there were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I'd come across later- on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what-sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating-find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell what?
Page: 22 (2.97%) @ 28 Feb 2025 10:35:31 PM
Zampanò, I've come to recognize now, was a very funny man. But his humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help's not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they've done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all. Carrion dawn for vultures
Page: 22 (2.97%) @ 28 Feb 2025 10:37:03 PM
"Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary."
Page: 23 (3.11%) @ 28 Feb 2025 10:38:16 PM
Zampanò writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and what in turn we can't see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering Zampanò's piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.
Page: 23 (3.11%) @ 02 Mar 2025 06:28:20 PM
Well that, of course, was Zampanò's greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken-hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn't seen a thing since the mid-fifties.
Page: 24 (3.24%) @ 02 Mar 2025 06:43:17 PM
With a little luck, you'll dismiss this labor, react as Zampanò had hoped, call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix-your word, ridiculously conceived, and you'll believe all you've said, and then you'll put it aside though even here, just that one word, "aside", makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside? -and you'll carry on, eat, drink, be merry and most of all you'll sleep well. Then again there's a good chance you won't. This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For Some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were
I felt this way after reading the Book of Disquiet.
Normally it means a piece of work that is unapologetically personal.
Page: 25 (3.38%) @ 02 Mar 2025 06:47:27 PM
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye Will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for ho for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
1004
Page: 32 (4.32%) @ 02 Mar 2025 07:12:01 PM
Even today many people still feel The Navidson Record, in spite of all its existential refinements and contemporary allusions, continues to reflect those exact sentiments. In fact, a few eager intellectuals have already begun to treat the film as a warning in and of itself, perfectly suited for hanging whole above the gates of such schools as Architectonics, Popomo, Consequentialism, Neo-Plasticism, Phenomenology, Information Theory, Marxism, Biosemiotics, to say nothing of psychology, medicine, New Age spirituality, art and even Neo-Minimalism.
1012
Page: 40 (5.41%) @ 02 Mar 2025 07:38:14 PM
In that peculiar contradiction that serves as connective tissue in so many relationships, it is possible to see that she loves Navidson almost as much as she has no room for him.
1021
Page: 49 (6.62%) @ 02 Mar 2025 08:41:30 PM
What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.
1030
Page: 58 (7.84%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:35:07 AM
Karen refuses the knowledge. A reluctant Eve who prefers tangerines to apples.
1031
Page: 59 (7.97%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:42:37 AM
Zampanò himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.
1032
Page: 60 (8.11%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:45:03 AM
At first glance, it seems hard to believe these two men are even related let alone brothers. Tom is content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it. Navidson works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism, and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography. Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom's wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson's eyes share the same water.
Page: 60 (8.11%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:46:27 AM
As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: "God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe adds up.
1033
Page: 61 (8.24%) @ 03 Mar 2025 01:04:46 AM
It is beneficial to consider the origins of "riddle." The Old English rēdelse means "opinion, conjure" which is related to the Old English radon "to interpret" in turn belonging to the same etymological history of "read." "Riddling" is an offshoot of "reading" calling to mind the participatory nature of that act-to interpret-which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.
1035
Page: 63 (8.51%) @ 03 Mar 2025 01:28:45 AM
imperceivable and alone, though not I think so lonely
1039
Page: 67 (9.05%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:16:13 PM
When confronting the spatial disparity in the house, Karen set her mind on familiar things while Navidson went in search of a solution. The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths. But children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies.
1041
Page: 69 (9.32%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:22:50 PM
To illustrate the multiple resonances found in an echo, the Greeks conjured up the story of a beautiful mountain nymph. Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser-known version of this myth is Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mele, In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo's body and the near negation of her voice,
1044
Page: 72 (9.73%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:31:56 PM
On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher's Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (Nördlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange "clamore" for four echoes: "amore,""more" ore," and finally " re."
"O outcry" returns as "love," "delays," "hours" and "king".
1045
Page: 73 (9.86%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:43:20 PM
In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose dramatically revised this reading. In a series of lectures delivered at Chapel Hill, Rose referred to "God's Grand Utterance" as "The Biggest Bang Of Them All" After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek logos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John, chapter 1, Verse 1–"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: "Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god's echoes and god is Narcissus,"
Page: 73 (9.86%) @ 03 Mar 2025 12:44:44 PM
Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, "Be not like me. I am alone." And it might be heard.
1050
Page: 78 (10.54%) @ 03 Mar 2025 01:05:24 PM
Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.
1053
Page: 81 (10.95%) @ 03 Mar 2025 01:14:33 PM
Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into. Quick second note: if that last paragraph didn't apply to you, you may skip it and proceed to this next part.
I laughed so hard reading this that my wife came to check on me.
1087
Page: 115 (15.54%) @ 05 Mar 2025 12:50:32 AM
Even after seeing Navidson's accomplished shots, it is hard to disagree with Holloway. The darkness recreated in a lab or television set does not begin to tell the true story. Whether chemical clots determining black or video grey approximating absence, the images still remain two-dimensional. In order to have a third dimension, depčh cues are required, which in the case of the stairway means more light. The flares, however, barely illuminate the size of that bore. In fact, they are easily extinguished by the very thing they are supposed to expose. Only knowledge illuminates that bottomless place, disclosing the deep ultimately absent in all the tapes and stills -those strange cartes de visites. It is unfortunate that Holloway's images cannot even be counted as approximations of that vast abrupt, where as Rilke wrote, "aber da, an diesem schwarzen Fellel wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelöst"
1112
Page: 140 (18.92%) @ 08 Mar 2025 02:27:35 AM
This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.
1123
Page: 151 (20.41%) @ 08 Mar 2025 03:14:03 AM
"Goethe once remarked in a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann [March 23, 1829]: 'I call architecture frozen music.'
1326
Page: 354 (47.84%) @ 13 Mar 2025 03:20:13 PM
I wash the sweat off my face, do my best to suppress a shiver, can't, return to the body, spread out across the table like papers-and let me tell you there's more than just The Navidson Record lying there-bloodless and still but not at all dead, calling me to it, needing me now like a child, depending on me despite its age. After all, I'm its source, the one who feeds it, nurses it back. to health not life, I fear-bones of bond paper, trans fusions of ink, genetic encryption in xerox; monstrous, maybe inaccurate correlates, but nonetheless there. And necessary to animate it all? For is that not an ultimate, the ultimate goal? Not some heaven-sent blast of electricity but me, and not me unto me, but me unto it, if those two things are really at all different, which is still to say state the obvious-without me it would perish.
1366
Page: 394 (53.24%) @ 17 Mar 2025 05:45:14 PM
I don't think I'm alone in feeling the immutable sadness contained in these fragments. Perhaps that is the price of remembering, the price of perceiving accurately. At least with such sorrow must come knowledge.
1368
Page: 396 (53.51%) @ 17 Mar 2025 05:52:34 PM
There are only 8,160 frames in Karen's film and yet they serve as the perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs. The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love, and colour.
1497
Page: 525 (70.95%) @ 23 Mar 2025 01:50:49 PM
Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold. I will become, I have become, a creature unstirred by history, no longer moved by the present, just hungry, blind and at long last full of mindless Wrath.
1502
Page: 530 (71.62%) @ 23 Mar 2025 02:12:00 PM
A quick re-read of all this and I begin to see I'm tracing the wrong history. Virginia may have meant a great deal to Zampanò's imagination. doesn't to mine. I'm following something else. Maybe parallel. Possibly harmonic. Certainly personal. A vein of it inhabiting every place I've visited so far, whether in Texsus, I finally went New Orleans, Asheville, North Carolina or any other twist of road or broken town I happened to cross on my way east. I cannot tell you why I didn't see her until now. And it wasn't a scent that brought her back either or the wistful edges of some found object or any other on-the-road revelation. It was my own hand that did this. Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse, between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings? My mother is right before me now, right before you. There as the docent, as the interpreter, maybe even as this strange and tangled countryside. Her shallow face, the dark lyric in her eyes and of course her words, in those far-reaching letters she used to send me when I was young, secretly alluding to how she could sit and watch the night seal the đusk, year after year, waiting it out like a cat. Or observe how WOrds themselves can also Write. Or even, in her own beautiful, and yes horrifying way, instruct me on how to murder. One day even demonstrate it. She is here now. She has always been here.
1509
Page: 537 (72.57%) @ 25 Mar 2025 01:19:17 AM
I went outside. Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought I saw the billion eyes of a billion cats blinking out, in the math of the líving, the sum of the universe, the stories of history, a life older than anyone could have ever imagined. And even after they were gone-fading away together, as if they really were one-something still lingered in those sweet folds of black pine, sitting quietly, almost as if it too were waiting for something to wake.
1518
Page: 546 (73.78%) @ 25 Mar 2025 01:42:03 AM
The book is burning. At last. A strange light scans each page, memorizing all of it even as each character twists into ash. At least the fire is warm, warming my hands, warming my face, parting the darkest waters of the deepest eye, even if at the same time it casts long shadows on the world, the cost of any pyre, finally heated beyond recovery, shattered into specters of đust, stolen by the sky, flung to sea and sand.
1545
Page: 573 (77.43%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:10:17 AM
Stars to live by. Stars to steer by. Stars to die by.
1546
Page: 574 (77.57%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:11:43 AM
Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.
1563
Page: 591 (79.86%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:17:02 AM
Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.
1587
Page: 615 (83.11%) @ 04 Mar 2025 12:51:14 AM
Remember your mother loves you, despite her crumbling biology. Also remember, love inhabits more than just the heart and mind. If need be it can take shelter in a big toe.
1595
Page: 623 (84.19%) @ 04 Mar 2025 01:01:08 AM
Well if you must strike then I certainly won't stand in your way. Just remember words can exceed the might of all blows. In some cases, they can be fatal For the rare few, even immortal. Try them out now and then on your foes
1646
Page: 674 (91.08%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:21:25 AM
Le coeur a ses raisons, gue la raison ne connair point
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. " - Blaise Pascal (Pensées)
Page: 674 (91.08%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:28:29 AM
Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenêtres
"Through all windows, I see only Infinity." - Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal)
Page: 674 (91.08%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:30:55 AM
Un livre est un grand cimetière où sur la plupart des tombes on ne peut plus lire les noms effacés
"A book is a vast cemetery where for the most part one can no longer read the faded names on the tombstones" - Marcel Proust
1650
Page: 678 (91.62%) @ 25 Mar 2025 02:32:58 AM
As I dig for wild orchids
in the autumn fields,
it is the deeply-bedded root
that I desire,
not the flower.