???

starting over

[snswllr]

He waved his hand in the air, as if to erase what he'd said, and added, "These words seem like gibberish to you, but they are a miner's psalms. Each occupation has its own language. I was born hearing them, and through them I came to know the world. God made language for that purpose. A dog or a chimpanzee can express rage or fear, but they can't wonder about the meaning of life, right? I'm a creationist, so I believe the Bible when it says that the first thing was the Word. Everything is explained by that. Look around---you won't see anything but foliage and bushes. And do you know why? Because you don't know the name of each plant. Whereas the indigenous people go into the jungle and read. To you it's just a landscape."

The Night Will Be Long, by Santiago Gamboa

[snswllr]

When I finally allowed myself to "allow" Joyce, I became aware that his work is an illustration of the "joy of the difficult." My own epiphany was toward my own poisoned narrowness and the necessity of ridding myself of it, or at least attempting to. The stories in Dubliners, with their sudden endings, their lack of dramatic resolution, their frequent repetitions, call on us, as readers ,to constantly evaluate our own every day lives. What this affirms is not the "meanness" of what we encounter, but the meaningfulness.

What emerges from Dubliners is the notion that difficulty, or supposed difficulty, isa kind of joy. It is liberating.

"Foreword" by Colum McCann, in Dubliners, James Joyce

[snswllr]

One of the great fallacies about Joyce is that he was too obscure. As a teenager I was forever investing in that mythology. Joyce's world seemed rarefied and overly intellectual. I wanted to be a writer, and I dabbled a little in Joyce but could never quite "get" him...

It wasn't until my twenties, when I went to university, far away---in Texas, of all places---that I was required to actually study the texts properly, in detail, to weigh them up and attempt to figure them out in whatever way I could. I was far enough from my homeland that I could begin to peek a little through my fingers. Not so much nostalgia as necessity.

"Foreword" by Colum McCann, in Dubliners, James Joyce

[snswllr]

Joyce's style is one of the unprecedented documentary realism coupled with a grand cinematic sweep. The stories contain some of the most beautiful sentences ever written in English...The word order is sometimes purposefully clumsy...

He was also beginning to inhabit that territory that great artists finally carve out for themselves, using what he knew in order to go way beyond what he should possibly know. He was taking the lived landscape of his childhood and transforming it into something universal. Expanding the degrees of consciousness. Giving a muscularity to the unknown.

"Foreword" by Colum McCann, in Dubliners, by James Joyce

[snswllr]

"So you know "Believing and naming alters reality. That's how we're able to change things, don't you think? Language creates the world. You must have experienced that."

"I might have, maybe unwittingly."

"Have you ever been in love? Fully, I mean?"

...

"Of course, a few times."

"So you know what it means to talk to yourself, to yearn for something, to want reality to change."

The Night Will Be Long, Santiago Gamboa

[snswllr]

He's a good kid, but I'm only just starting to teach him. He does like to fib sometimes. I work with him, talk to him about the Creator and the mountains and the sky and the graves of his ancestors, but he looks at me like he's listening to the rain.

The Night Will Be Long, Santiago Gamboa

[snswllr]

Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles ,blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

[snswllr]

These sympathies and antipathies Cosimo came to recognize in time---or to recognize consciously, but already in those first days they had begun to be an instinctive part of him. Now it was a whole different world, made up of narrow curved bridges in the emptiness, of knots or peel or scores roughening the trunks, of lights varying their green according to the veils of thicker or scarcer leaves, trembling at the first quiver of the air on the shoots or moving like sails with the bend of the tree in the wind. While down below our world lay flattened, and our bodies looked quite disproportionate and we certainly understood nothing of what he knew up there---he who spent his nights listening to the sap running through tis cells; the circles marking the years inside the trunks; the patches of mold growing ever larger helped by the north wind; the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests, then resettling their heads in the softest down of their wings; and the caterpillar waking , and the chrysalis opening. ..The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continuous winking of stars. but at every rise or fall of the wind, every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

[snswllr]

He was saved, covered with blood, the wild beast stuck on his rapier as on a spit, and a cheek torn from under his eye to his chin in a triple slash. He was screaming with pain and victory and frenziedly clinging to the branch, to the rapier, to the body of the cat, in that desperate moment that comes to one who wins for the first time and realizes the agony of victory, realizes too that now he is bound to continue on the road he has chosen and will not be granted any evasion through failure.

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

[snswllr]

...I met Hema in the septic ward at Government General Hospital in India, in Madras, and that brought me to this continent. Because of that, I got the biggest gift of my life--to be a father to you two. Because of that, I operated on General Mebratu, who became my friend. Because he was my friend, I went to prison. Because I was a doctor, I helped to save him, and they let me out. Because I saved him, they could hang him...You see what I'm saying?

[snswllr]

Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

[snswllr]

I often hear this song -- the title I don't know, the tune I can't quite hum -- but the first two lines go something like: 'When I think of the desrt, I think of water / When I think of love, I think of you.'

[snswllr]

When I first arrived in this vast and mysterious land, I used all the communication skills possible to get to know every side of it. Most valuable to me was seeing how people could derive the same joys from life, the same loves and hates as people anywhere else, even while living inthis desert where not a single blade of grass can grow.

[snswllr]

I didn't look down on them. It's not like my personal integrity is much greater than theirs.

[snswllr]

I jumped out of the car with half a mind to laugh myself to death, right then and there, so I could die like one of the Greek gods.

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'What are you thinking about?' Jose asked. 'I was thinking that moths must truly be happiest when they throw themselves into the flame.'

[snswllr]

Whether in a few short days or over the long span of a life, everything disappears in due time: tears, laughter, love, hate, the ups and downs of dreams and reality. On the sand, pure white like snow, there was no trace of the dead. Not even the nocturnal wind could carry aloft their signs.