https://www.hikaripress.co.uk/book/a-perfect-mother/

www.katherineskala.co.uk

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.  Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance , in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they're a result of all the books that end before them.

Ali Smith Artful 

Henry James

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere. 

Henry James The Art of Fiction Longman’s Magazine 4 (Sep 1884)

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it,  do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength. Giacometti's drawings and paintings show his bewilderment and persistence.  If he had not acknowledged his bewilderment, he would not have persisted.

Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

II

Finally will it not be enough,

after much living, after

much love, after much dying

of those you have loved,

to sit on the porch near sundown

with your eyes simply open,

watching the wind shape the clouds

into the shapes of clouds?

Even then you will remember

the history of love, shaped

in the shapes of flesh, everchanging

as the clouds that pass, the blessed

yearning of body for body,

unending light.

You will remember, watching

the clouds, the future of love.

Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poems

Portrait of a Woman

Must present alternatives.

Change, but on condition that nothing changes.

That is easy, impossible, difficult, worth trying.

Her eyes are, as required, now deep blue, now grey,

black, sparkling, unaccountably filled with tears.

She sleeps with him as one of many, as the one and only.

She’ll bear him four children, no children, one.

Naive, but gives best advice.

Weak, but she’ll carry.

She has no head, so she’ll have a head,

read Jaspers and women’s magazines.

Has no clue what that nut is for and will build a bridge. 

Young, young as usual, always still young.

Holds in her hands a sparrow with a broken wing,

her own money for a long and distant journey,

a chopper, a poultice and a glass of vodka.

Where is she running, perhaps she’s tired.

But no, only a little, very, it’s no matter.

She either loves him or she’s just stubborn.

For better, for worse and for love of God. 

Wislawa Szymborska
from People on a Bridge
translated by Adam Czerniawski