Agonies and Ecstasies
eBook - ePub

Agonies and Ecstasies

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Agonies and Ecstasies

About this book

Much of life is spent on autopilot. In this vast percentage of our waking time, we are as somnambulists, externally moving about but internally thoroughly unmoved. Then there are the rare moments and experiences that take us out of that mundanity and thrust us into some other place. Here, experience is so intense that it encompasses evident contradictions--elated but melancholic, redeemed yet doomed, potent to the nth degree but more deeply aware than at any other moment of the fragile and delicate state of everything and of its unbearable yet exhilarating finitude, exploding with love for the entirety of creation but haughtily superior in the way of gods looking down on a fallen world. The most central element of the experience is the feeling of being intoxicated with the hypnotic certainty that there exists nothing beyond what is present just then, and the triumph of the illusion that one will never, ever die. I have tried to write some of those sacred moments, to capture them in the bottle of magic that is writing, and to communicate them to others in a form that might evoke something of the experience itself.

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Yes, you can access Agonies and Ecstasies by Alexander Riley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. TITLE PAGE
  2. PREFACE: AGONIES AND ECSTASIES
  3. WAKE
  4. SPIRITS OF DEAD ROCK STARS
  5. THE IMPOSSIBLE
  6. TONY AND TIFFANY
  7. WALTZ
  8. OVERHEAD, THE MOON
  9. KEYBOARD AESTHETICS
  10. THE SCARY MOVIE
  11. ON THE DENTIST’S CHAIR WITH A RADIO HIT OF 1978 IN HIS EARS
  12. NIGHT FLIGHT
  13. CONSUMING FLESH
  14. THREE CINEMA FACES
  15. PIGEONS
  16. CONTACT
  17. PHIL AND HIS GUITAR
  18. VERA C.
  19. LES PLEUREUSES
  20. TRANSITION: SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 1996
  21. EIGHT YEARS BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, CHILD
  22. THE ARCHIVES
  23. THE PET RABBIT
  24. MEXICAN JUMPING BEANS
  25. THAT MAGICAL SPACE
  26. AN ODD COUPLE AND THEIR CITY
  27. TEN MILES ALONG THE PERIPATETIC WAY
  28. SUFFERING AND HOPE
  29. WHAT THE MONKS ARE DOING
  30. OLD CRABTREE
  31. THE HARP, THE VOID, THE PROMISE
  32. BOXES OF BOOKS
  33. LES CIMETIÈRES
  34. CASCADE STREET ‘98
  35. THE ONLY ONE ALONE
  36. WORDS MORE THAN WORDS
  37. THE SECRET DEATH
  38. BELIEF: A DEFINITION
  39. A BARN AND A BRIDGE
  40. WHEN JOHN CAGE DIED
  41. SILVIA AND/AS THE DEVIL
  42. BEDTIME EPIPHANY
  43. VISIONS IN TWO CARS
  44. DIE FRÖHLICHE WISSENSCHAFT À PARIS
  45. THOSE JUGGLING FIRE AND THOSE IN THE PATH OF HURRICANES
  46. DEATH DEPICTED
  47. A TREE FALLS
  48. IRRETRIEVABLY, INEVITABLY
  49. FIREFLIES
  50. CATERPILLAR AND HAWK
  51. SEA OF CORTEZ
  52. JUSTIFICATION