#*sensasi

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The Outsider by Albert Camus (translated by Joseph Laredo)

The light leapt up off the steel and it was like a long, flashing sword lunging at my forehead. At the same time all the sweat that had gathered in my eyebrows suddenly ran down over my eyelids, covering them with a dense layer of warm moisture. My eyes were blinded by this veil of salty tears. All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes. 

That was when everything shook. The sea swept around ashore a great breath of fire. The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down the sheet of flame. My whole being went tense and I tightened my grip on the gun. The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. I shook of the sweat and the sun. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.

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The Book of Queens by Joumana Haddad

Am I the only person on the face of this earth who's more frightened to live than to die? More terrified to be happy than to be miserable? I look at the cheerful face smiling at me, and I feel desperate and alone, like a still drop of water in a running river. How can these people be cheerful? Don't they know this is a scam? That they are trying to cheat the void? My mind orders me to feel god, but my heart won't obey. Somewhere between two, the nerves has been cut, communication blocked. This heart of mine is empty, no, it's full—of corpses. They are all crammed in it like worms, eating me up, slowly chewing my organs. Nibble, nibble, nibble, there goes my left lung. Is that why I can barely breathe? How much does a heart weight? An empty heart, a non-heart, without the load of love, passion, disappointment, anticipation, affection, ache, excitement, desire, regret, doubt, anger, resentment, warmth, ambition, faith, anxiety, suspicion? Without the load of all these we have lost along the way? An old woman I've never seen before comes and kisses me. I feel a strong urge to wipe the wet sensation of her lips off my cheeks. I feel like slitting my cheeks open with my long painted nails so that they bleed away this lie. Her kiss is a brown stain of my soul, telling me what a dirty fraud I am. She says, "I hope we'll see your children soon." I do not want any children. My wombs is crammed with corpses too. No place for a baby there. The worms would eat it bit by bit. I do not want any children. Not as long as children can die.

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Orang-Orang Proyek oleh Ahmad Tohari

... mata ternyata benar merupakan karunia yang luar biasa. Setelah lama berada dalam lingkungan gelap, mata melakukan adaptasi. Kabul merasakannya. Kini matanya menangkap pemandangan sekitar dalam tingkat remang karena bantuan cahaya bintang dan lampu ting yang nyalanya hanya sebesar gabah. Memang, semuanya remang-remang; rimbun pohon, bantaran kali, rumpun bambu. Dan dalam jarak beberapa depa di atasnya Kabul kadang melihat kelebat kelelawar.

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Oranges and Apples by Alice Munro, from Friends of My Youth

Her jeans had the smell jeans get when they’ve been worn a while without being washed—a smell not just of the body but of its labor. He could smell cleaning powder in them, and old cooking. And there was flour that she’d brushed off on them tonight, making the pastry for the pie.  The smell of the shirt was of soap and sweat and perhaps of smoke. Was it smoke—was it cigarette smoke? He wasn’t sure, as he sniffed again, that it was smoke at all. He thought of his mother saying that Barbara was not well educated. His mother’s clothes would never smell this way, of her body and her life. 

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.” And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! He yearned ... never to say another sentence, another word ...

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A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

There was an eerie nose-silence, followed by a giddy awareness of . . . not-cheese smells. Cold, washed chalk smells of freshly cracked rock, the dank fragrance of unseen plants clinging slickly to life. Warm smells, animal smells. People smells. Feet, sweat, hair grease, fatty soap . . . and yet each fragrance different, personal. It was so overwhelming that Neverfell was glad of her mask, with its familiar scent of musty velvet.

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A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

In the drab and pungent calendar of her life, a visitor was more than a holiday — it was a blessed intrusion of light, life, air, colour and news. For days before such a visit her excitement would be almost painful, her mind a hornets’ nest of anticipation. For days afterwards her lungs filled more easily, and her mind had new memories and thoughts to turn over and play with, like a child with freshly unwrapped gifts.