Invention Of Solitude Quotes

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

لا يوجد ما هو أفظع من مواجهة متعلقات رجل ميت. لها حياة ومعنى بحياته، وعندما تنتهي حياة الإنسان تتغير طبيعة أشياءه للأبد.

It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...

رجل يجد الحياة قابلة للعيش على "سطح" نفسه، من الطبيعي جداً أن يكتفي بإظهار "سطحه" للآخرين.

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

في منزل والدي كان الهاتف يرن يوميا ٢٠ مرة، ولـ ٢٠ مرة يوميا أخبرت أحدهم بأنه ميّت".

كان يكذب كلما شارف على إظهار نفسه بوضوح، يكذب ويسرف ويدللّ كذبته. على أية حال كان الحل ألا يقول إلا القليل عن نفسه كل مرة

One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely

حتى الوقائع قد لا تقول الحقيقة دائمًا.

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling that he could be located.

تشعر وكأن لا شيء يملك القدرة أبدًا على اقتحامه واختراقه، كأنّ لا حاجة له لأي شيء ممّا يعرفه العالم.

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

And then one day the walls of your house finally collapse. If the door is still standing, however, all you have to do is walk through it,and you are back inside. It's pleasant sleeping out under the stars. Never mind the rain. It can't last very long.

لا أحد يتصل في الثامنة صباحاً في يوم العطلة وإن حصل ذلك فهو لنقل أخبار لا تستطيع الانتظار، هذه الأخبار تكون عادةً سيئة.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

You are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, a creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me. I am perishing already, I am failing, I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better! Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

لا شيء أكثر رهبة من مواجهة أغراض رجل مات. الأشياء تهمد أيضًا، فمعناها كامنٌ في دورها خلال حياة صاحبها وحسب.

سيشعرك بأنه ما من شيء يستفزه، وأنه لا يحتاج لأي شيء يقدمه هذا العالم. رجل بلا شهية."

He finds it extraordinary that on some mornings, just after he has woken up, as he bends down to tie his shoes, he is flooded with a happiness so intense, a happiness so naturally and harmoniously at one with the world, that he can feel himself alive in the present, a present that surrounds him and permeates him, that breaks through him with the sudden, overwhelming knowledge that he is alive. And the happiness he discovers in himself at that moment is extraordinary.

توافد أقارب والدي من كل مكان، نريد قطعة الأثاث هذه،نريد هذه الآنية الفضية وبعضهم كان يرتدي ملابسه لتجربتها ويثرثرون مثل البجع".

لا شيء أكثر رهبة من مواجهة أغراض رجل ميت.

بعد وفاة والدي بأيام وقعت أسوأ اللحظات التي مررت بها، كنت اعبر الباحة الامامية للمنزل تحت المطر الغزير المنهمر، أحمل في يدي مجموعة من ربطات العنق التي امتلكها، حوالي مائة ربطة عنق أو تزيد، تذكرت بعضها من طفولتي، النقوش، الألوان، الاشكال، لقد طبعت في ذاكرتي وضميري منذ أيامي الأولى. القيت بها في صندوق كبير للتبرعات، وفي تلك اللحظة بالذات بكيت، بكيت والدي. كان القاء ربطات العنق في الصندوق الضخم أشدّ علي من النظر لتابوته وهو ينخفض في الارض، القاء ربطات العنق كان أشبه بالدفن. حينها وأخيراً أدركت بأن والدي .. قد مات.

... I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: "Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of iron, like a hydrant or a lamp post. Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence.

And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.

Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts.

Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements […] are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it

كذبه أوجد من نفسه مخلوقا صناعيا يتلاعب به كما يشاء ويتلاعب بالآخرين من خلاله

لا حُزن يُصيب الوالدين أعظم من الحزن النّابع من العجز; إذّ عليهم أن يتقبّلوه، حتى لو فاق ذلك قدرتهم

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.

What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain

that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells –or roughly the same number as there are people in the world– which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: “Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.

قد تمكن من الإبقاء على مسافة تفصله عن الحياة لكي يتجنب الانغمار في جريانها وسرعة أشيائها.

تمضي الأيام و مع كل يوم ينسحب خيط من الألم الداخلي نحو العلن ، شعور بالفقد لم يكُفّ عن الإنغراس فيه ، إنه عالق به و لا يتركه

تعلمت أنه ليس ثمة ما هو أسوأ من مواجهة أشياء رجل ميت

The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now.

If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet, if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?

They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.

لا حزنيصيب الوالدين أعظم من الحزن النابع من العجز؛ إذ عليهم أن يتقبلوه، حتى لو فاق ذلك قدرتهم، وكلما ازداد تقبلهم له، كلما ازدادوا تعاسةـ

ما من أمر باقٍ في توالد حياتنا سوى الموت؛ هذه هي الحقيقة التي لا يمكن تبسيطها، إننا فانون.

وممّا يُحسب لأبي أنه لم يغضب مني أو يجعلني أُضحوكة. لقد ضحِك، ولكن بطريقة جعلتني أضحكُ أنا أيضاً

إن عليك أن تأتي إليه وأن تُخبره بما يعتمل فيك، دون أملٍ بأن يكتشفه هو بنفسه بشكل عفويّ. وهذا يُفسد مقدِّماً سرورك باستجابتِه، ويُعيق انسجاماً لطالما حلُمتَ به قبل البدء بالبوح.

كالبيت الذي كان مرتّبًا بشكلٍ جيّد ولكنّه يتهافت من الدّاخل. كان رزينًا، خارقًا، ورابطَ الجأش، ولكّنه فريسة للكدَر، وفي داخله عنفوانٌ من السّخَطِ لا يمكن إيقافه.

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.

Como dice uno de los personajes de Becket, «el hábito es el mayor insensibilizador». Y si la mente no es capaz de responder a la evidencia material, ¿cómo reaccionará ante la evidencia emocional?

It's urgent-love. It's urgent- a boat upon the sea. It's urgent to destroy certain words, hate, solitude, and cruelty, some mornings, many swords. It's urgent to invent a joyfulness, multiply kisses and cornfields, discover roses and rivers and glistening mornings- it's urgent. Silence and an impure light fall upon our shoulders till they ache. It's urgent- love, it's urgent to endure.

There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them forevermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

إنه دائم الغياب منذ ما قبل رحيله فقد اعتاد القريبون منه على تقبل عزلته و اختفاءه عنهم منذ وقت بعيد وعلى اعتبار ذاك الغياب خصيصة جوهرية لوجوده ، لهذا وقد رحل الآن لن يكون صعبا على العالم استيعاب حقيقة غيابه الأبدي. لقد قامت طبيعة حياته بتهيئة العالم لموته فقد كانت نوعا من الموت الاستباقي ، و إذا ما جاء أحد على ذكره فسيتم ذلك بصورة باهتة وبصوت خافت لا أكثر

When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

حجم كفيه والجلد الذي اخشوشن حول مفاصله يأكل القشرة المتكونة على سطح الشوكولا الساخنة الشاي بالليمون أكوابه الموزعة حول المنزل، أكوابه بالحواف السوداء، حول حوض الغسيل، على الطاولات. مشاهدته يلعب التنس. الطريقة التي تطقطق بها ركبته أحيانا وجهه. شبهه بإبراهام لينكن. شجاعته مع الكلاب. وجهه من جديد. وجهه. السمكة الاستوائية.

I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.

Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself - not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought: a darkness in the bones.

Memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time.

He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.

عليّ أن أبتكر الطريق في كل خطوة ، مما يعني أنني لن أطمئن أبدا إلى مكاني

(...) if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real.

I believe that getting stuck is often an essential part of the creative process. And when we are stuck—if we have managed to escape the heave and rush of the world, if we have managed to secure solitude and quiet and space without time—then our minds can roam and explore and invent in unfettered freedom. But too often we dread being stuck. Especially our students and young people. We believe that if we are stuck we are failed. On the contrary, we should welcome getting stuck. We should embrace getting stuck. That's when discovery begins.

Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one’s life so that nothing is ever lost.

Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.

He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the forum of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him - but it never got through.

The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation.

Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being. Now that he was gone, it would not be difficult for the world to absorb the fact that he was gone forever. The nature of his life had prepared the world for his death—had been a kind of death by anticipation—and if and when he was remembered, it would be dimly, no more than dimly.

In the interim, in the void between the moment he opens the door and the moment he begins to reconquer the emptiness, his mind flails in a wordless panic. It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of his room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole.

Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.

بمكوثه في الغرفة لفترات طويلة من الزمن ومتصلة يقوم بشحن فراغ الغرفة بالأفكار ، لهذا يتسبب خروجه من الغرفة في تبديد الحميمية التي يحاول نسجها ، أو يجعلها غير ملموسة على الأقل. يجر أفكاره معه متى ما خرج وأثناء فترة الغياب تلك تقوم الغرفة بتفريغ نفسها ومحو كل جهوده لسكناها وجعلها مأهولة ، عليه أن يبدأ كل شئ من جديد عندما يعود ، وهذا يتطلب جهدا مضنيا وعملا روحيا ضخما

But I would tell Mother none of this. Nor would I tell her that at the hour of his death, I was floating free in the ocean, in a solitude I would remember all of my life, the gulls cawing over my head and the white flag flying at the top of the pole.

In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well. If, while he was alive, I kept looking for him, kept trying to find the father who was not there, now that he is dead I still feel as though I must go on looking for him. Death has not changed anything. The only difference is that I have run out of time.

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life.

He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, “vouloir dire,” which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says.

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak.

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people’s lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.

The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friens know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. (Woolf's Darkness)

Maybe the truth is that saying goodbye seems to me a rejection of human warmth - even the minimal warmth that makes us feel solitude less. I mean real solitude, which rises up by surprise and lasts a few seconds, the solitude that derives not from lack of company or affection, but from our innate separateness from one another.

Since all is plenum, all matter is connected and all movement in the plenum produces some effect on the distant bodies, in proportion to the distance. Hence every body is affected not only by those with which is in contact, and thus feels in some way everything that happens to them; but through them it also feels those that touch the ones with which it is in immediate contact. Hence it follows that the communication extends over any distance whatever. Consequently, every body experiences everything that goes on in the universe, so much so that he who sees everything might read in any body what is happening anywhere, and even what has happened or will happen

Nevertheless, this anger was inside him—I believe constantly. Like the house that was well ordered and yet falling apart from within, the man himself was calm, almost supernatural in his imperturbability, and yet prey to a roiling, unstoppable force of fury within. All his life he strove to avoid a confrontation with this force, nurturing a kind of automatic behavior that would allow him to pass to the side of it. Reliance on fixed routines freed him from the necessity of looking into himself when decisions had to be made; the cliche was always quick to come to his lips (“A beautiful baby. Good luck with it”) instead of words he had gone out and looked for. All this tended to flatten him out as a personality. But at the same time, it was also what saved him, the thing that allowed him to live. To the extent that he was able to live

He realized that for Ponge there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing. For no word can be written without first having been seen, and before it finds its way to the page it must first have been part of the body, a physical presence that one has lived with in the same way one lives with one's heart, one's stomach, and one's brain. Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He might forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory.

الأبناء نيام، فإذا مات الٱباء انتبهوا. انتباه على قبضة توشك أن يفرط منها عمر وذاكرة و جذور. يقظة تريد أن تلحق؛ أن تستنفذ ما يسعى الزمن إلى مواراته إلى الأبد كأنه لم يكن.... لئلا يبسط النسيان رداءه ويجر ذيوله، لابد من العودة إلى الوراء و نفض الأدراج وزيارة الأماكن القديمة؛ تحريك الصورة و إراقة الضوء والبجث بين الظلال لعل الأب لم يزل هناك. لعله في حومة تاريخه وذاكرته يبعث معنى ويرسل فهما لما غاب أو أسيئ تفسيره.....

There is also the equal and opposite temptation to look at the world as though it were an extension of the imaginary. [...] Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees...

Mỗi cuốn sách là một hình ảnh của sự cô độc. Đó là một vật thể hữu hình người ta có thể cầm lên, đặt xuống, mở ra đóng lại, và những từ ngữ thể hiện lại sự cô độc của một con người trong nhiều tháng, nếu không phải nhiều năm, vì thế mỗi từ ngữ người ta đọc trong một cuốn sách có thể nói với họ rằng họ đang đối diện với một mảnh của sự cô độc ấy. Một người đàn ông ngồi cô đơn trong phòng và viết. Cho dù cuốn sách nói về nỗi cô đơn hay sự đồng hành, nó vẫn cần phải là một sản phẩm của cô độc.

In Views of Nature Humboldt conjured up the quiet solitude of Andean mountaintops and the fertility of the rainforest, as well as the magic of a meteor shower and the gruesome spectacle of catching the electric eels in the Llanos. He wrote of the ‘glowing womb of the earth’ and ‘bejewelled’ riverbanks. Here a desert became a ‘sea of sands’, leaves unfolded ‘to greet the rising sun’, and apes filled the jungle with ‘melancholy howlings’. In the mists at the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek – ‘optical magic’, as he called it. Humboldt created poetic vignettes when he wrote of strange insects that ‘poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk upon the turf’.

Early in the summer of 1980, shortly after his son turned three, A. and the boy spent a week together in the country, in a house owned by friends who were off on vacation. A. noticed that Superman was playing in a local theater and decided to take the boy, on the off-chance that he would be able to sit through it. For the first half of the film, the boy was calm, working his way through a bin of popcorn, whispering his questions as A. had instructed him to do, and taking the business of exploding planets, rocket ships, and outer space without much fuss. But then something happened. Superman began to fly, and all at once the boy lost his composure. His mouth dropped open, he stood up in his seat, spilled his popcorn, pointed at the screen, and began to shout: "Look! Look! He's flying!

Imagination, it is safe to say, is more highly developed in human beings than in any other creature. Although animals dream, and sub-human primates certainly show some capacity for invention, the range of human imagination far outstrips that exhibited by even the cleverest ape. It is clear that the development of human imagination is biologically adaptive; but it is also the case that we have had to pay a certain price for this development. Imagination has given man flexibility; but in doing so, has robbed him of contentment.

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.

But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas (Van Gogh - The Bedroom), he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can't get in, and once you are in, you can't get out. Stifled among the furniture and everyday objects of the room, you begin to hear a cry of suffering in this painting, and once you hear it, it does not stop. 'I cried by reason of mine affliction...' But there is no answer to this cry. The man in this painting (and this is a self-portrait, no different from a picture of a man's face, with eyes, nose, lips, and jaw) has been alone too much, has struggled too much in the depthts of solitude. The world ends at that barricaded door. For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself. And it is a thing so heavy, so unbreatheable, that it cannot be shown in any terms other than what it is.

Kundera was also a postmodernist writer, but he completely lacked this embracing of other worlds, with him the world was always the same, it was Prague and Czechoslovakia and the Soviets who had either invaded or were on the point of doing so, and that was fine, but he kept withdrawing his characters from the plot, intervening and going on about something or other while the characters stood still, waiting as it were, by the window or wherever it was they happened to be until he had finished his explanation and they could move forward. Then you saw that the plot was only ‘a plot’ and that the characters were only ‘characters’, something he had invented, you knew they didn’t exist, and so why should you read about them? Kundera’s polar opposite was Hamsun, no one went as far into his characters’ world as he did, and that was what I preferred, at least in a comparison of these two, the physicality and the realism of Hunger, for example. There the world had weight, there even the thoughts were captured, while with Kundera the thoughts elevated themselves above the world and did as they liked with it. Another difference I had noticed was that European novels often had only one plot, everything followed one track as it were, while South American novels had a multiplicity of tracks and sidetracks, indeed, compared with European novels, they almost exploded with plots. One of my favourites was A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, but I also loved Love in the Time of Cholera. Kjærstad had a little of the same, but in a European way, and there was also something of Kundera in him. That was my opinion anyway.

Dr Bone was over sixty when she was arrested in Hungary in 1949. A notable linguist, she had been invited to Hungary to translate English scientific books into Hungarian. She herself had joined the Communist Party in 1919. She was accused of being a British agent, but refused to make a false confession or in any way to collaborate with her interrogators. This elderly lady spent seven years in prison before she was finally released in November 1956. For three of those years she was denied access to books or writing materials. The cell in which she was first confined was bitterly cold and had no window. Worse was to come. For five months she was kept in a cellar in total darkness. The walls ran with water or were covered with fungus; the floor was deep in excrement. There was no ventilation. Dr Bone invented various techniques for keeping herself sane. She recited and translated poetry, and herself composed verses. She completed a mental inventory of her vocabulary in the six languages in which she was fluent, and went for imaginary walks through the streets of the many cities which she knew well. Throughout these and other ordeals, Dr Bone treated her captors with contempt, and never ceased to protest her innocence. She is not only a shining example of courage which few could match, but also illustrates the point that a well-stocked, disciplined mind can prevent its own disruption.

Đôi khi có cảm giác như chúng ta đang lang thang quanh một thành phố mà chẳng có mục đích nào. Chúng ta bước xuống phố, ngẫu nhiên rẽ vào một con phố khác, ngừng lại để ngắm nghía những khe gờ đắp nổi của một tòa nhà, cúi xuống để nghiên cứu một vết than trên vỉa hè gợi nhắc cho ta về những bức tranh mà ta ngưỡng mộ, nhìn vào khuôn mặt những người đi ngang qua phố, cố gắng hình dung ra cuộc đời họ mang theo bên trong mình, bước vào một quán ăn rẻ tiền cho bữa trưa, bước ra ngoài và tiếp tục con đường tới dòng sông (nếu thành phố này có một dòng sông), để ngắm những con thuyền khi chúng trôi qua, hoặc một con tàu lớn đậu ở bến cảng, có thể sẽ lẩm nhẩm hát một mình khi bước đi, hoặc có thể huýt sáo, hoặc cố nhớ lại điều chúng ta đã quên. Đôi khi dường như chúng ta chỉ tìm cách giết thời gian, và chỉ có sự mệt mỏi mới khuyên chúng ta nên dừng ở đâu và khi nào. Nhưng cũng như bước chân này sẽ dẫn tới bước chân khác, ý nghĩ này chắc chắn nối đuôi theo ý nghĩ trước đó, và trong một sự kiện thì một ý nghĩ sinh ra nhiều hơn một ý nghĩ khác (có thể là hai hay ba ý nghĩ, bình đẳng với nhau về tất cả những hệ quả sau đó), việc không chỉ theo ý nghĩ từ khởi nguyên cho đến đoạn kết luận mà còn phải lần ngược lại ý nghĩ ban đầu để theo chân ý nghĩ thứ hai tới kết luận của nó, rồi quay sang ý nghĩ thứ ba và cứ thế, với cách này, nếu chúng ta cố gắng dựng nên hình ảnh quá trình hoạt động của tâm trí, một mạng lưới các đường đi sẽ bắt đầu được vẽ ra, giống như hình ảnh của mạch máu trong cơ thể con người (trái tim, động mạch, tĩnh mạch, mao mạch), hoặc như hình ảnh một bản đồ (các con phố, chẳng hạn thế, nhất là một thành phố lớn, hoặc thậm chí những con đường, như trong bản đồ của các nhà ga, trải rộng, cắt đôi, và uốn khúc quanh co hết cả châu lục), vì thế điều chúng ta thực sự làm khi rảo bước qua thành phố là suy nghĩ, và suy nghĩ theo cách mà những ý nghĩ ấy tạo ra một hành trình, và hành trình ấy không nhiều hơn cũng chẳng ít hơn những bước chân chúng ta bước, vì thế, vào đoạn cuối, chúng ta có thể an tâm mà nói rằng mình đã trải qua một hành trình, và thậm chí chúng ta không rời khỏi phòng thì đó vẫn là một hành trình, và chúng ta có thể an tâm mà nói rằng chúng ta đã ở đâu đó, thậm chí ngay cả khi chúng ta chẳng biết đó là nơi nào.