Jeffrey Foucault in his latest newsletter:

I spoke long letters into my phone, edited them in little cafés over greasy tacos and black coffee, worked on them for days in a row, and deleted them. When I was younger I believed there must be some magic combination of words, some alchemical arrangement which if discovered could locate a clarity wholly fugitive otherwise. I don’t believe that anymore. Or rather, I believe that clarity is possible but its survival between human beings is rare, and words are at best a form of translation. Most of what we would say isn’t sayable, and what we do say doesn’t help all that much. I still like to write letters though.

Jorge Luis Borges, in the foreword to his 1969 “In Praise of Darkness”:

Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the orb. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own. I hope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remembered; in this world, beauty is so common.