Recovered fragments of New York City

[Newland Archer i la cosina de la seva esposa, Ellen Olenski, al Metropolitan Museum, observen restes de Troia (Ilium, en llatí) i s’observen l’un a l’altra, i es deixen portar per la malenconia, com si coneguessin ja el seu destí]

…they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments of Ilium. […]

Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects—hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.

“It seems cruel,” she said, “that after a while nothing matters … any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: ‘Use unknown.’”

“Yes; but meanwhile—”

“Ah, meanwhile—”

As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.

“Meanwhile everything matters—that concerns you,” he said.


Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Chapter 31

En prenc nota

“Ya se sabe: quien mucho abarca, poco aprieta; y quien mucho alude, poco dice”
Rodrigo Fresán, a la seva ressenya de La memoria del tiburón, de Steven Hall, a ABCD, 13 de desembre 2008.

Only connect...

"I opened Walt Whitman for a quotation, & he started speaking to me. That the unseen is justified by the other... That the spiritual world might be robust - ! ... No more fighting, please, between the soul & the body, until they have beaten their common enemy, the machine."

E.M.Forster, Diary, 16 june 1908

Obtuseness

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its hihghest. Live in fragments no longer. (...) Nor was the message difficult to give. (...) But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things and ther was no more to be said."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.188)

Overrated

"Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that because of his open mind, he should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been interested in human beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend when books are mentioned. so Tibby's attention wandered when "personal relations" came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists"

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.250)

Neglected roads

"Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches taht have never joined into a man. (...) Happy the man who sees from either aspect the gory of those outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall fin easy going.
It was hard going in the roads of Mr Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.187)

Madness or sensibleness

"That's foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we've often argued that. The real point ist that there is the widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yurs was romance; mine will be prose. I'm not running it down- a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr Wilcox's faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy really. I'd even say" ─ [Margaret] looked at the shinning lagoons─ that, spiritually, he is not as honest as I am. Doesn't satisfy you?"
"No, it doesn't," said Helen, "It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.177)

Atonement

Something that she did not understand took hold of the girl and pulled her through. Though the vision was over, and she had returned to the insipidity of the world, she remembered what she had learnt. Atonement and confession- they could wait. It was in hard prosaic tones that she said: "I withdraw everything".

(E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924)

Què estàs llegint?

En la sàtira d’Alan Bennet la sobtada fal·lera lectora de la reina provoca molts mals de cap perquè la reina es mostra absent, desinteressada per les seves obligacions, poc motivada, comença a ser inpuntual, incomoda a ministres i caps d’estat preguntant “Què estàs llegint?”, pretén dir la seva i posa més pegues que mai a la feina dels seus assessors: que si la correcció política és ridícula, que si llegir informes mastegats no és el mateix que tractar directament amb les fonts, etc. Però la reina també troba en la lectura per trencar el protocol i la gàbia de plata: ensopega amb una via per començar a imaginar com veuen i viuen el món els que no tenen sang blava i descobreix una forma d’alliberar-se del pes que representa sentir-se diferent sense haver-ho triat.

“Books did not defer. All readers were equal, and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night, when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised.” (Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader, Faber&Faber, 2007, p.31)

Resoldre contradiccions

“[…] we travel back an hour or two in time, a few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that 'character' is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.”

David Lodge, Nice Work, Part I, Chapter 2, p.39

La influència de Kafka en Quevedo

“Mi tío adoraba a Stalin. Lo quería como se quiere a un hijo descarriado. Veía sus defectos.

Guardaba los discos con los discursos del generalísimo en álbumes rojos. Había álbumes así: con cordoncillos y un retrato en relieve del caudillo.

Cuando resultó que Stalin era un bandido, mi tío se sintió sinceramente desolado. Luego se enamoró de Malenkov. Decía que Malenkov era ingeniero.

Cuando destituyeron a Malenkov, trasladó su afecto a Bulganin. Bulganin tenía el aire de un policía provincial de antes de la revolución. Y mi tío era justamente de provincias, de Novorosiisk. Quizá quisiera de verdad a Bulganin, un hombre que le recordaba los ídolos de su infancia.

Luego quiso a Jruschov. Y cuando echaron a Jruschov, a mi tío se le agotó la capacidad de amar a más gente. Se hartó de malgastar en vano sus sentimientos.

Decidió entregar su amor a Lenin. Lenin llevaba muerto desde hacía mucho tiempo, de modo que era imposible destituirlo. Ni siquiera era fácil dañar como es debido su imagen. Era imposible, por tanto, quitarle a mi tío aquel amor...

Por lo demás se diría que el hombre se desarmó ideológicamente. Sin abandonar su afecto por Lenin, quiso por igual a Solzhenitsyn. También quiso a Sájarov. Sobre todo, por haber inventado éste la bomba de hidrógeno. Y no haberse dado, sin embargo, a la bebida y luchar por la verdad.

A Brézhnev mi tío no lo quería. Brézhnev se le antojaba un fenómeno pasajero (impresión que no se vio confirmada por el tiempo)...”

Serguéi Doblatov, Los nuestros, Barcelona, Áltera, 1999. (trad. Ricardo San Vicente)

El seu sentit de l’humor i la prosa absolutament despullada, de frases curtes i poca literatura, em recorda molt Wladimir Kaminer, el dj del berlinès “Burger Café” i home de ràdio (RadioMultiKulti) que fa uns anys, amb un llibre de relats, era a les llistes dels més venuts a Alemanya, on viu des de principis dels noranta.

East of Eden (II)

Adam said to his guests "I just remembered that I have forgotten to write to my brother for oven ten years." The Bacons shuddered under his statement and exchanged glances.
(...)
Adam restlessly opened drawers and looked up at the shelves and raised the lids of boxes in his house and at last he was forced to call Lee back and ask, "Where is the ink and the pen?"
"You don't have any," said Lee. "You haven't written a word in years. I'll lend you mine if you want." He went to his room and brought back a squat bottle of ink and a stub pen and a pad of paper and an envelope and laid them on the table.
Adam asked, "How did you know I want to write a letter?"
"You're going to try to write a letter to your brother, aren't you?"
"That's right."
"It will be a hard thing to do after so long", said Lee.

East of Eden

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt -and there is the story of mankind.