I’m accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
On sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.
Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story.
You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions – carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others’. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events.
There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.
Reading means stripping yourself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say.
Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.
It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move.
We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves, he thinks now. The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.
If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.
In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right – and of being more just than the many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire for revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do.
But our mother, the most distant from him, perhaps, seemed the only one who could accept him as he was, maybe because she didn’t try to find an explanation.
We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I’ve ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing.
Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they’d soon have to give an account of themselves.
Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change.
Chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria.
This is already true now, when you are still occupied, each with the other’s presence, in an exclusive fashion. Imagine how it will be in a little while, when ghosts that do not meet will frequent your minds, accompanying the encounters of your bodies tested by habit.
But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?
There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one’s strength.
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.