Tom Vu Quotes

And then—some visionary, through some accident— —accident, Mahavira?— —through some quirk of metabolism, through some drug perhaps, has his doors of perception opened for an instant and he almost sees—presque vu!—the entire being and he knows for the first time that there is a whole … other pattern here … Each moment in his life is only minutely related to the cause-and-effect chain within his little molecular world. Each moment, if he could only analyze it, reveals the entire pattern of the motion of the

episode, I’d had a sense of déjà-vu, a sense of having read this article, or one very like it, at least once before. Oh, a dead parachutist: one of those. Everyone can recognize and understand that situation. Before I’d ever heard of Vanuatans, the first joke I learnt to tell as a child was about a classified ad for a used parachute, “no strings attached.” To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon—only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.

J’avance avec mon chargement, tant bien que mal, attirant sur moi les regards des gens qui s’étonnent d’un rien. Depuis qu’elle ne travaillait plus, elle regardait tout ce qui bougeait sur le petit écran, revendiquant son appartenance à la caste très prisée des ménagères de moins de cinquante ans. Parce que dehors il faisait froid et que mon frigo était vide, parce que cela faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas surpris les regards complices que des musiciens s’échangeaient, que je n’avais pas vu une liste de chansons posées sur le sol ou une serviette roulée en boule sur un tom basse.