Passion is unbridled enthusiasm, exuberant energy, and determined devotion to someone or something.
I have been training for years to be a passionate old woman, just as others train to climb mountains or play chess.
The elderly are treated not as a priority but as a nuisance.
In the past, adulthood arrived at twenty, middle age at forty, and old age at fifty. Today adolescence lasts until past thirty or forty, maturity comes around sixty, and old age starts at eighty. This is the baby boomers’ achievement. Over the last half century they have redefined many cultural aspects for their convenience.
One of the characteristics of Chileans in general, and of the descendants of Spaniards and Basques in particular, is their seriousness, which contrasts with the exuberant temperament so common in the rest of Latin America.
To dismantle the system that sustains civilization is very difficult and takes time, but we are achieving it, bit by bit. The complex and fascinating task of inventing a new order to replace it is long.
Chile, unlike other regions of the continent, did not offer the possibility of wealth beyond dreams. Gold and silver mines could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the minerals had to be torn from the rock with unspeakable effort. Neither did Chile have the climate for prosperous tobacco, coffee, or cotton plantations. Ours has always been a country with one foot in the poorhouse; the most that the colonist could aspire to was a quiet life dedicated to agriculture.
In Chile, poverty and solidarity go hand in hand.
Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen.
Privacy is a luxury of the well-to-do because most Chileans have none. Middle-class families and below live in very close quarters, in many homes several people sleep in the same bed. When there is more than one room, the dividing walls are so thin that every sigh comes right through.
I lived in a state of contained fury that didn’t manifest in tantrums or door slamming, only eternal, accusing silence.
But the moment came when Pancha’s pregnancy was obvious even to him. He felt repulsed by her. He began to see her as an enormous container that held a formless, gelatinous mass that he was unable to view as his own child.
I grew up surrounded with secrets, mysteries, whispers, prohibitions, matters that must never be mentioned.
Inside I carried a burning restlessness.
Seated face to face in complete relaxation, staring into each other’s eyes and murmuring Sanskrit words that could send them all the way to nirvana but that generally had the opposite effect, and they would wind up slipping out of other people’s sight, stretched out beneath the tall reeds in the garden, desperately making love; the books they had read by candlelight, drowning in passion and smoke...
I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom.
Recently, a busload of us tourists crossing the border between Chile and Argentina had to wait an hour and a half while our documents were checked. Getting through the Berlin Wall was easier. Kafka was Chilean.
I am no longer tormented by an excess of discipline, as I was before.
In Chile, the clerk on duty demands that the poor petitioner produce proof that he was born, that he isn’t a criminal, that he paid his taxes, that he registered to vote, and that he’s still alive, because even if he throws a tantrum to prove that he hasn’t died, he is obliged to present a “certificate of survival.
We spent a good part of the twentieth century trying out various forms of revolution, from Marxism to savage capitalism, ranging through each and every intermediate shading. Our hope that a change in government can improve our luck is like hoping to win the lottery: totally without rational foundation.