Poem, "The City" by Constantine Cavafy

You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.


-- C.P. Cavafy, "The City," written 1910, collected in C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1975.

Excerpt, "Air and Dreams" by Gaston Bachelard

We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. If there is no change, there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance -- an explosion -- of unusual images, then there is no imagination.

-- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. E. and F. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), p. 109. Quoted in "Charles Simic's Insomnia" by J. Heath Atchley, Literature & Theology, Vol. 17. No. 1, March 2003, p. 50.