wwnorton:

1. Read more of the greats and the immortals: Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert!
2. No Gide! No Proust! Nor anything of the sort!
3. The Bible. Homer.
4. Don’t distrust the “reader” too much!
5. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism at heart.
6. No interest in day-to-day politics. They distort. They distort the human.
7. There’s really no need for you to write serials! F*#k them. All they’re good for is a hat for the wife and a dress for the girlfriend.

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters.

Slowly, shuffling, something trudges across the dust of a thousand sessions. It grows so weary of its trek to reach its final destination, but it is a trip of utmost importance - there are only days left. Its perception is hazy, vision; thumping. Its knees tremor slightly under strain, withering slowly from the slog. Sand licks persistently at its split, shoeless feet. Tiny, immeasurable droplets of perspiration trace down its furrowing brow, the residue evaporating; taste, salty, too drained to brush the side of its own face with its palm. Hopes that perhaps the slowly strengthening desert winds will cease in blowing dust into its eyes are slim. The sun is like an angry red monster, pounding down on the exile with flaming fists; the wicked fires beat down on it.

Its grip is fixed tightly around the tattered satchel hidden underneath its ancient, musty rags. The package is to become secrecy, to ensure security. The package is to reach its final destination, before the Critical Event. The package is to deliver hope to a dying civilization. The package is the only thing it is meant to exist for. There will surely be opposition looking to take the package, but so far the only opposition have been the arid grounds on which it is meant to traverse, and the sporadic swathes of dead heat that wash over it.

Marks of the stranger’s winding path are scored deep into the gilded sands of the tainted landscape; an etched, windswept conduit, the only remnant of its final journey, a course stretching far back - tens of miles - to its own pod. The expedition is drawling, aching from earlier threatens to return with agonizing results, pain creaks from every receptor in his body; it cries with the feelings of pain. Yet it continues to walk. The wanderer still travels across the vast expanses of an ancient bone yard. It seeks salvation. Not even the elements will stop him; its own unwavering determination will seek to that.

Yet the elements are relentless, as unrelenting as the force that drives it to succeed in its ambitious undertaking. The days are long and rolling in this hostile environment - it’s a struggle to survive, but it must get there, it must. Over the dunes, across the tundra, over the dunes, across the tundra, the surroundings are bleak and repeating; with, perhaps, the exception of the gradually dipping sun. Yet the wanderer continues ambling forth, scaling yet another ridge intrepidly in his journey.

If only, it anticipated, perhaps the end will be in sight here. Just over this next dune… It presses forward, begrudgingly, with only just a slither more hope that the coming prospect will bear fruit. It battles through the familiar throbbing that decides to revisit. It strides up the glistening orange mountain leaving pockmarks where it steps. It holds its breath as it takes the final step, yet is greeted with more endless expanses of gold. The peripheries of his vision are flooded with the same, bland visage of a molten landscape of dusty orange and fiery yellow.

It is new to these lands. Even the horizon shys away from him.

You stole my heart from my sleeve,
ripped it from the seams and unpicked the stitching.
Laid it open.
Stared into the heartstrings and then,
one-by-one
pulled it apart.
Re-tying them,
and stitching my beat onto your clothing.

You took my lungs,
removed them from the cage of my chest,
between iron bars. My heart flutters, a trapped bird,
it’s strings tying it down.
You hold it close, treasure it, 
Treat it as if it were your own.
As you remove my lungs, take a breath from me
with your lips.