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"En algún lugar de la mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..."
Now that I have nothing to do (No school!), I decided to read "El Quijote" (by Miguel de Cervantes), and that lovely quote is the beginning of the novel...and, I guess, one of my favourite beginnings ever!
Gunter Grass, quote from "Peeling the Onion" from Chapter two...Encapsulations.....speaking of himself much younger..."I observe him reading. It's the only thing he can do for any length of time." ....."Books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds." from Chapter 2, Encapsulations
"Ever wonder,"'Switters asked, "why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It's because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated." Presumably, he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovanizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. This was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.
Tao Te Ching
"When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way" (Lao Tzu Chapter 65).
The Souls of Black Folk, re-reading this one.
"they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world" (W.E.B. Du Bois 104).
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
….There are certain channels of communication that operate outside the frequencies of the most prying investigators. A hundred blackbirds will evacuate a tree precisely at the same second – without a discernible signal of any kind. A variety of orchid, lacking nectar as an enticement but needing to be pollinated, attracts male bees by emitting odours like that of a female bee. A wasp will bore for an hour into the hard wood of a tree at the exact spot where hides a tiny grub in whose body she will lay her eggs: there is no outward sign that the grub is there, yet the wasp never misses. At the disposal of the “lower animals” are invisible clocks and computers about which science can only speculate. Similarly, scientists have discovered and recorded “laws” to which electricity, gravity and magnetism adhere – but they have practically no understanding of what these forces are or why. It would seem that there exists in the space-time grid a system of natural order, a mathematics of energy whose “numbers” are even more of a riddle to us than their progressions. It is this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the “supernatural”. The mystery of migrating butterflies, the mystery of gravity and dreams are but operating arms of the Great Mystery, the perpetuation of which sustains us all. If that declaration has a taste of corn about it, so be it. Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these. However, concerns of this nature can be quite practical and concrete, as we shall see. It is in the realm of High Mystery that certain men and women are destined to act out their lives.
Gunter Grass, part one, "Encapsulations" ....."Still, the case contained Dostoevsky's 'Possessed', Wilhelm Raabe's 'Sparrow Street Chronicle', Schiller's 'Collected Poems' and Selma Lagerlof's 'Gosta Berling'. Something by Sudermann stood side by side with Hamsun's 'Hunger', Keller's 'Green Henry' next to his 'Holiday from Myself'. Fallada's 'Little Man' and 'What Now' was between Raabe's 'Hunger Pastor' and Storm's 'The White Horseman'. Dahn's 'Battle for Rome' was most likely the support for the illustrated volume with the title 'Rasputin and Women', which I later gave to a certain character to read as an antidote to Goethe's 'Elective Affinities'..."
Maybe we remember, anyway, by selectively forgetting, and vice versa ... Then again, some of the things you try most to forget come back and ambush you, often in your calmest moments.
- from The Bird Artist by Howard Norman.
'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.' - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
The opening is just so awesome. :-D
" ....That is an issue neither onion nor amber cares about. They want accurate information about other things, about what else has been encapsulated, about what has been swallowed in shame, about secrets in varying disguise, about nits nesting in sackhair. Eloquently avoided words. Slivers of thought. Things that hurt. Even now..."
"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won't take it."
From Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
(Part I, Chapter 1, Section 5)
from Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass........................."Soon thereafter I witnessed an event that should have made the downfall of the German Reich evident--the organized chaos of defeat moving slowly, then with dispatch, and finally at break-net speed. Was I able to recognize what things ere coming to? Did I realize what was going on with us, with me? Did the never-endinng activity, the all-consuming need for a ladle of soup and a crust of bread, along with fears of various magnitudes, leave any room for insight into the general situation? Was the seventeen year old at all conscious of the beginning of the end, of the gradually increasing dimensions of what was later called the collapse?"................from chapter III
-Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le FanuQuote:
I can't describe to you how chapfallen and angry my cousin looked. She sniffed once or twice, and then said, rather bitterly, in a subdued tone:- "Well, now; I hope you are pleased?"
... the mind can keep its freshness to the last, and ... it is only fools that are overbored. There was a way of never being bored, and the wise man's duty was to find it out... one grows tired of one's self sooner than of anything else in the world... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle when one's occupation had not a high aim. One was idle, therefore, when one was working simply for one's self... Ennui was at the end of everything that did not multiply our relations with life.
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.
-- Stephaneforos!
What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death - the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without - cerements, the linens of the grave?
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
~~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.