Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings - such as the message of a church sermon - the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we're able to imagine things that don't actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks.

"If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded."

...

"Daydreaming builds on this fundamental capacity people have for being able to project themselves into imaginary situations, like the future," Malia Mason, a neuroscientist at Columbia, says. "Without that skill, we'd be pretty limited creatures."

...

While much of the evidence linking daydreaming and creativity remains anecdotal, rooted in the testimony of people like Fry and Einstein, scientists are beginning to find experimental proof of the relationship. In a forthcoming paper, Schooler's lab has shown that people who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, which require people to make a set of unusual connections.

"Daydreams involve a more relaxed style of thinking, with people more willing to contemplate ideas that seem silly or far-fetched," says Belton. While such imaginative thoughts aren't always practical, they are often the wellspring of creative insights, as Schooler's research shows.

Augusto Monterroso

Los libros son obra de la soledad e hijos del silencio.
Como la pereza me había acostumbrado a ir aplazando mi trabajo para el día siguiente, me figuraba que podía ocurrir lo mismo con la muerte.
El tiempo de que disponemos cada día es elástico; las pasiones que sentimos lo dilatan, las que inspiramos lo encogen y la costumbre lo llena.
Las pasiones esbozan nuestros libros, el reposo de los intervalos los escribe.
Un libro es un gran cementerio en el que, en la mayoría de las tumbas, no se pueden leer los nombres borrados.
Una obra que contiene teorías es como un objeto en el que se ha dejado la etiqueta del precio.

Marcel Proust

Wunderschönes und trauriges Buch, ich kann es nur empfehlen! Hatte es mir vor einiger Zeit auf diese Rezension von Tilman Krause hin gekauft:

"Zeit der Abwesenheit" bemächtigt sich auf originelle Weise Prousts. Doch nicht so sehr dieser bildet das Zentrum, sondern ein sechzehnjähriges Bürgersöhnchen, das 1916, da die Männer abwesend, weil im Krieg, sind, unter dem Einfluss des großen Autors seine "éducation sentimentale" erlebt, die durchaus handfeste Formen annimmt, für die allerdings weniger Proust als vielmehr der Sohn einer Wäscherin zuständig ist, der den kleinen Vincent in die Wonnen der Liebe einführt. Sehr französisch, elegant, kokett, das Ganze!

Começou com uma pergunta: há quanto tempo você não bebe margueritas lamentando, discutindo e exaltando segredos reais com um homem? E há quanto tempo não goza?

Então descobri. Só faltavam as margueritas!

Eu gozo quando leio.

Acabei de gozar com Alain e Marcel. A perspicácia me excita. A ironia das preliminares habilmente conduzidas por Amis também. A literatura me faz gozar. Claro que o sexo convencional como o conhecemos também. Mas ando apaixonada e extasiada com o orgasmo literário.

Explico:

Há alguns minutos, encharcada de suor por Botton e arrepiada de tesão com a recém descoberta de um Proust inseguro, achei uma declaração do último: “Na literatura, a amizade retorna de repente à sua pureza original. Não existe falsa cortesia entre os livros. Se passarmos a tarde com esses amigos, é genuinamente porque queremos assim.” E também: “Nós rimos do que Molière tem a nos dizer apenas quando o achamos engraçado; quando ele nos chateia, não sentimos medo de parecer irritados, e quando realmente estamos cheios dele, simplesmente colocamos o livro de volta na prateleira, como se ele não tivesse nem gênio nem celebridade.”

E então cheguei a conclusão da “falsa cortesia” dos tempos atuais. Proust se referia à presença dela nas amizades, por mais sólidas que fossem. Nesses tempos percebo-a conturbando outras relações.

Hoje, algumas pessoas nos poupam de uma amizade com melindres, expondo abertamente – claro que com um delicado jogo de palavras – críticas, sugestões e conselhos sobre nossas atitudes, escolhas e opiniões; por outro lado, utilizam-se da, como chamou Proust, “falsa cortesia” nas relações amorosas. Não me refiro aqui apenas às relações realmente de amor, e sim a qualquer relação onde o sexo, ou a vontade dele, esteja presente.

Tentarei através de um exemplo.

Ando ouvindo muito de pessoas próximas: “cansei de joguinhos!”, “não sei fazer joguinhos!”, “acho que ele ta fazendo isso por causa daquilo.” Os “joguinhos” são a “falsa cortesia” dos tempos pós-modernos. Apliquemos ao Proust supracitado.

“Na literatura, o amor/sexo retorna de repente à sua pureza original. Não existem joguinhos entre os livros. Se passarmos a tarde com esses amantes, é genuinamente porque queremos assim.”

Nas novas relações amorosas, nos privamos de passar a tarde com o amante não porque queremos assim, mas porque calculamos uma estratégia de conquista insana onde quanto menos juntos estivermos, mais vontade causaremos ao parceiro. Se genuinamente queremos estar com ele, não nos é permitido a demonstração de tal, segundo as regras dos infames “joguinhos” – sim, criamos regras subjetivas, conhecidas por poucos e facilmente mutáveis por qualquer um.

Na literatura não! Posso gozar com qualquer escritor que me excite, sem ser taxada como uma mulher carente, desesperada. Posso debater qualquer assunto, qualquer segredo sem sofrer as conseqüências que os prováveis julgamentos do ouvinte me trariam. Posso declarar minha vontade de estar em sua companhia. Me liberto das insuportáveis dúvidas criadas pela sociedade sobre como devemos agir indiferente para instigar no outro a vontade de ter nossa ilustre presença cada vez mais.

Diante do atual ou possível amante, rimos de qualquer estupidez. Rimos até mesmo de algo que não era uma piada. Rimos porque queremos conquistar. Rimos quando o defeito mais insuportável do ser adorado se expõe. Rimos para causarmos uma impressão que não é verdadeira, mas que nos trará benefícios, nos trará a realização, a concretização de um capricho.

Quando ele nos chateia, simplesmente sumimos. Adotamos a regra de número 45, parágrafo segundo, inciso quarto do “Código de Joguinhos”, e assumimos que essa pessoa não é o bastante para conviver com nossa superior inteligência, delicadeza e genialidade. Não explicamos, não demonstramos, não permitimos a verdade a esse ser agora tão desprezível.

Percebe porque os orgasmos literários têm obtido maiores sucessos do que os físicos? Percebe que é loucura – sem contar perda de tempo - a construção tão elaborada de estratégias de conquista? Deixamos de aprender, de trocar, de transmitir, absorver e tantos outro verbos, por conta de uma exigência escondida da sociedade. É irrecuperável o tempo que perdemos tentando ser indiferentes na esperança de causar algum sentimento de valor no outro.

Aliás. Verdade seja dita. Quem foi o maldito que sugeriu um dia que a indiferença pode atrair o amor? E quem foi o mais maldito ainda que caiu nessa? A indiferença existe, foi criada, exatamente para causar o oposto. O amor é atraído pela inocência, pela honestidade, pelo dócil, pela gentileza, pela companhia, pela lealdade, pela admiração e por tantas outras palavras que nunca, em tempo algum, combinariam com indiferença. Menos ainda com a paranóia que esse plano estratégico é capaz de causar.

Perdemos o prazer de aproveitar uma relação presente em detrimento da tortura de configurar como faremos para obter, através da indiferença, uma futura relação.

Tudo isso não tem sentido algum. É o sadomasoquismo light – sem contato físico. O prazer através da falta de prazer.

To give an impression of the volumes, here are a few figures:

Duration so far: 77 hours
Estimated duration of the work when it will be finished: 150 to 200 hours
Hours of work so far: 15 years
Hours of work estimated at approximately 1993 to 2050
Number of readers so far: 789
Estimated number of readers: 1500 to 2000

The filming of readers has already taken place in different performances and in many events and places such as: Belluard-Bollwerk Festival (2001), the Biennial of Contemporary Art Lyon (2001), the Biennale of Contemporary Art Sélest'Art (2003), a space here Khiasma with the Foundation Guerlain (2004, 2008), the Villa Medicis in Rome (2007), and the International Film Festival La Rochelle (2008 ).

She has started to co-operate aswell with the digital adventuress Agnes of Cayeux (aka Jel Olaria, collective x-network) around the "Kiss of the Matrix", with the Theatre de la Villette.
The project is a web-surfers shooting involving 3,000 volunteers to read each a short part of the work of Proust in front of their webcam. This shooting will take place on 27 September 2008, as part of an event by the Theatre de la Villette in Paris

The Bibliothèque francophone in Second Life and Metavers is proud to invite you to meet these two personalities on Thursday 4 September 21.15.(Paris time)

In addition, the Bibliothèque Francophone is requesting 30 volunteer avatars to perform a live reading of Proust (in French) on  Wednesday 8 October 2008 and collective under the kiss. To register, simply comment on  of Bibliothèque Francophone de SL and Metaverse:
http://sldirect.blogspot.com...

Veronique Aubouy / Agnes of Cayeux

Thursday, September 4 2008/Friday september 4
21:15 french time/12: 15 pm SLT
Bibliothèque Francophone, Fraonesque - Ebeoplex Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ebeoplex...

Granita. Flower of my adolescence, torment of my nights. Will I ever see you again? Granita. Granita. Gran-i-ta. Three syllables, the second and third forming a diminutive, as if contradicting the first. Granita, may I remember you until your image has become a shadow and your abode the grave.

My name is Umberto Umberto. When the crucial event occurred, I was submitting boldly to the triumph of adolescence. According to those who knew me then, and not those who see me now, Reader, in this cell, haggard, with the first traces of a prophet's beard stiffening my cheeks . . . According to those who knew me then, I was an ephebe of parts, with that hint of melancholy due, I believe, to the Mediterranean chromosomes of a Calabrian ancestor. The young girls I met desired me with all the violence of their burgeoning wombs, transferring me into the telluric anguish of their lonely nights. I scarcely remember those girls, as I myself was the horrible prey of quite another passion; my eyes barely grazed their cheeks gilded in the slanting sunset light by a silken transparent down.

I loved, dear Reader, dear friend! And with the folly of my eager years, I loved those whom you would call, in your sluggish thoughtlessness, "old women." From the deepest labyrinth of my beardless being, I desired those creatures already marked by stern, implacable age, bent by the fatal rhythm of their eighty years, horribly undermined by the shadow of senescence. To denote those creatures ignored by many, forgotten in the lubricious indifference of the customary usagers of sturdy Friulan milkmaids of twenty-five, I will employ, dear Reader—oppressed here again by the reflux of an intrusive knowledge that impedes, arrests any innocent act I might venture—a term that I do not despair of having chosen with precision: nornettes.

How can I describe, O you who judge me (toi, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblance, mon frere!), the matutinal prey offered the crafty fancier of nornettes in this swamp of our buried world? How can I convey this to you, who course through the afternoon gardens in banal pursuit of maidens beginning to bud? What can you know of the subdued, shadowy, grinning hunt that the lover of nornettes may conduct on the benches of old parks, in the scented penumbra of basilicas, on the graveled paths of suburban cemeteries, in the Sunday hour at the corner of the nursing home, at the doors of the hospice, in the chanting ranks of parish processions, at charity bazaars: an amorous, intense, and--alas--inexorably chaste ambush, to catch a closer glimpse of those faces furrowed by volcanic wrinkles, those eyes watering with cataract, the twitching movements of those dry lips sunken in the exquisite depression of a toothless mouth, lips enlivened at times by a glistening trickle of salivary ecstasy, those proudly gnarled hands, nervously, lustfully tremulous, provocative, as they tell a very slow rosary!

Can I ever recreate, Reader-friend, the sinking desperation on sighting that elusive prey, the spasmodic shiver at certain fleeting contacts: an elbow's nudge in a crowded tram—"Excuse me, madam, would you like a seat?" Oh, satanic friend, how dared you accept the moist look of gratitude and the "Thank you, young man, how kind!", when you would have preferred to enact on the spot a bacchic drama of possession?—the grazing of a venerable knee as your calf slides between two rows of seats in the pomeridian solitude of a neighborhood cinema, or the tender but controlled gasp—sporadic moments of extreme contact!—of the skeletal arm of a crone you helped cross at the light with the prim concern of an eagle scout.

The vicissitudes of my idle youth afforded me other encounters. As I have said, I had a reasonably engaging appearance, with my dark cheeks and the tender countenance of a maiden oppressed by a delicate virility. I was not unaware of adolescent love, but I submitted to it as if paying a tolling, fulfilling the requirements of my age. I recall a May evening, shortly before sunset, when in the garden of a patrician villa—it was in the Varese region, not far from the lake, red in the sinking sun—I lay in the shade of some bushes with a fledgling sixteen-year-old, all freckles and powerless in the grip of a dismaying storm of amorous feelings toward me. And it was at that moment, while I was listlessly granting her the desired wand of my pubescent thaumaturgy, that I saw, Reader, at a window of the upper floor, the form of a decrepit nanny as she bent almost double as she unrolled down her leg the shapeless mass of a cotton stocking. The breathtaking sight of that swollen limb, with its varicose marbling, stroked by the clumsy movement of the old hands unrolling the lumpy article of clothing, seemed to me (to my concupiscent eyes!) a brutal and enviable phallus soothed by a virginal caress: it was at that moment that, seized by an ecstasy redoubled by distance, I exploded, gasping, in an effusion of biological assent that the maiden (foolish tadpole, how I hated you!) welcomed, moaning, as a tribute to her own callow charms.

Did you ever realize, my dull-witted instrument of redirected passion, that you had enjoyed the food of another's repast, or did the dim vanity of your unripe years portray me to you as a fiery, unforgettable accomplice in sin? After leaving the next day with your family, you sent me a postal card signed "Your old friend." Did you perceive the truth, revealing to me your perspicacity in the careful employment of that adjective, or was yours simply a bravado use of jargon, the mettlesome high-school girl rebelling against correct epistolary style?

Ah, after that, how I stared, trembling, at every window in the hope of glimpsing the flaccid silhouette of an octogenarian in the bath! How many evenings, half hidden by a tree, did I consummate my solitary debauches, my eyes trained on the shadow cast against a curtain, of some grandmother sweetly engaged in gumming a meal! And the horrid disappointment, immediate and destructive (tiens, donc, le salaud!), when the figure, abandoning the falsehood of those ombres chi noises, revealed itself at the sill for what she was, a naked ballerina with swelling breasts and the tanned hips of an Andalusian mare!

So for months and years I coursed, unsated, in the deluded hunt for adorable nornettes, caught up in the pursuit that was born, indestructible, I am sure, at the moment of my birth, when a toothless old midwife—my father's desperate search at that hour of the night had produced only that hag, with one foot in the grave!—rescued me from the viscous prison of the maternal womb and revealed to me, in the light of life, her immortal countenance: a jeune parque.

I seek no justification from you who read (a la guerre comme a la guerre); I am merely explaining to you how inevitable was the concurrence of events that brought me to my triumph.

The soiree to which I had been invited was a sordid petting party with young models and pimply university students. The sinuous lewdness of those aroused maidens, the negligent offering of their breasts through unbuttoned blouses in the swirl of the dance, disgusted me. I was already thinking to run away from that place of banal traffic among crotches as yet intact, when a shrill, strident sound (will I ever be able to express the dizzying pitch, the hoarse descent of those vocal cords, long exhausted, the allure supreme de cri centenaire?), the tremulous lament of an ancient female, plunged the assembly in silence. And in the frame of the doorway I saw her, the face of the remote Norn of my natal shock, the cascading enthusiasm of her lasciviously white locks, the stiffened body that stretched the stuff of the little, threadbare black dress into acute angles, the legs now thin and bent opposing arcs, the fragile line of her vulnerable femur outlined under the ancient modesty of the venerable skirt.

The insipid maiden who was our hostess made a show of tolerant politeness. She raised her eyes to heaven as she said, "She's my granny . . ."

At this point the intact part of the manuscript ends. What can be inferred from the scattered lines that follow suggests that the story continued more or less in this fashion: A few days later, Umberto Umberto abducts his hostess's grandmother, carrying her off on the handlebars of his bicycle, toward Piedmont. At first he takes her to a home for the aged poor, where, the same night, he possesses her, discovering among other things that the woman is not without previous experience. At daybreak, as he is smoking a cigarette in the semidarkness of the garden, he is approached by a dubious-looking youth who asks him slyly if the old woman is really his grandmother. Alarmed, Umberto Umberto leaves the institution with Granita and begins a dizzying race over the roads of Piedmont. He visits the wine fair at Canelli, the annual truffle festival at Alba, participates in the historical pageant at Caglianetto, inspects the livestock market at Nizza Monferrato, and follows the election of Miss Milkmaid in Ivrea and the sack race in honor of the patron saint's day in Condove. At the end of his mad odyssey through that northern region, he realizes that for some time his bicycle has been slyly followed by an eagle scout on a motor scooter, who eludes every attempt to trap him. One day, at Incisa Scapaccino, when he takes Granita to a chiropodist, leaving her alone for a few minutes while he goes to buy cigarettes, he discovers, on returning, that the old woman has abandoned him, running off with his new kidnapper. For several months he sinks into deep depression, but finally finds the old woman again, fresh from a beauty farm where her seducer has taken her. Her face is without a wrinkle, her hair is a coppery blond, her smile is dazzling. Umberto Umberto is overwhelmed by a profound sense of pity and resigned despair at the sight of this destruction. Without a word, he purchases a shotgun and sets out in search of the villain. He finds the young scout at a campsite rubbing two sticks together to light a fire. He shoots once, twice, three times, repeatedly missing the youth, until finally two priests wearing leather jackets and black berets overpower him. Promptly arrested, he is sentenced to six months for illegal possession of firearms and hunting out of season.

1959

Umberto Eco

Translated from the Italian by William Weaver

This is an excerpt from Eco's Misreadings

Harcourt, Inc., 1993

• Marat
  As I sat there in the Bastille
  for thirteen long years
  I learned
  that this is a world of bodies
  each body pulsing with a terrible power
  each body alone and racked with its own unrest
  In that loneliness
  marooned in a stone sea
  I heard lips whispering continually
  and felt all the time
  in the palms of my hands and in my skin
  touching and stroking
  Shut behind thirteen bolted doors
  my feet fettered
  I dreamed only
  of the orifices of the body
  put there
  so one may hook and twine oneself in them. ~ The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss (??)

• If I could stand to see her crying,
  I would tell her not to care.
  When she learns of all your lying,
  Will she join you there?
  Country girl I think you're pretty
  Got to make you understand
  Have no lovers in the city
  Let me be your country man
  Got to make you understand. ~ Neil Young ("Country Girl (I Think You're Pretty)")

• Some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate. Fain wou'd I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity... All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho' such is my weakness, that i feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning. ~ ??
  

• One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others. ~ Norman Mailer

• I won't go so far as saying cannabis actively damaged my health, but it decimated my record collection. I mean that literally. About six months after discovering the devil weed, I traded in my Beatles LPs for the soundtrack album of The Harder They Come. ~ Toby Young

• The drug [cannabis] is really quite a remarkably safe one for humans, although it really is quite a dangerous one for mice and they should not use it. ~ JWD Henderson, director of the American Bureau of Human Drugs, Health and Welfare

• How can I tell you that I love you
  I love you, but I can't think of right words to say,
  And I long to tell you that I'm always thinking of you,
  I'm always thinking of you,
  But my words just blow away, just blow away.
  It always ends up to one thing, honey,
  And I can't think of right words to say.
  Wherever I am, girl, I'm always walking with you,
  I'm always walking with you, but I look and you're not there,
  And whoever I'm with, I'm always, always talking to you,
  I'm always talking to you, and I'm sad that you can't hear
  Sad that you can't hear,
  It always ends up to one thing, honey,
  When I look, and you're not there.
  I need to know you, need to feel my arms around you,
  To feel my arms surround you, like sea around a shore,
  Each night and day I pray in hope that I might find you,
  In hope that I might find you, because hearts can do no more,
  Can do no more. ~ Cat Stevens ("How Can I Tell You")

• Hendrix's 'Little Wing' is painfully short and painfully beautiful. It's like your grandfather coming back from the dead and hanging out with you for a minute and a half and then going away. It's perfect, then it's gone. ~ John Mayer
  

• I can't go on like this.
  That's what you think.
  If we parted? That might be better for us.
  We'll hang ourselves to-morrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.
  And if he comes?
  Then we'll be saved...
  Well? Shall we go?
  Pull on your trousers.
  What?
  Pull on your trousers.
  You want me to pull off my trousers?
  Pull ON your trousers.
  (realizing his trousers are down). True.
  He pulls his trousers up.
  Well? Shall we go?
  Yes, let's go.
  They do not move. ~ Samuel Beckett (Waiting For Godot)

• The three little pigs rejoiced that justice had triumphed and did a little dance around the corpse of the wolf. Their next step was to liberate their homeland. They gathered together a band of other pigs that had been forced off their lands. This new band of porcinistas attacked the resort complex with machine guns and rocket launchers and slaughtered the cruel wolf oppressors, sending a clear signal to the rest of the hemisphere not to meddle in their internal affairs. Then the pigs set up a model socialist democracy with free education, universal healthcare, and affordable housing for everyone. ~ ??
  

• The earth laughs beneath my heavy feet
  At the blasphemy in my old jangly walk
  Steeple guide me to my heart and home
  The sun is out and up and down again
  I know I'll make it, love can last forever
  Graceful swans of never topple to the earth
  And you can make it last, forever you
  You can make it last, forever you
  And for a moment I lose myself
  Wrapped up in the pleasures of the world
  I've journeyed here and there and back again
  But in the same old haunts I still find my friends
  Mysteries not ready to reveal
  Sympathies I'm ready to return
  I'll make the effort, love can last forever
  Graceful swans of never topple to the earth
  Tomorrow's just an excuse
  And you can make it last, forever you
  You can make it last, forever you. ~ Smashing Pumpkins ("Thirty-Three")
  

• The one thing I really liked about the 80s hair-band videos that needs to come back, the one reoccurring motif, were the bands that would rock so fucking hard, they could change the physical properties of things. Like they would blow holes through walls from their rocking, or go up to your shitty Honda Civic and go "Squibaly Doo!" and all of the sudden it's a sleek Lamborghini --"Hey! Thanks Nightranger!" Squibbaly flabbidy doo! ~ Patton Oswald
  

• "When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
  "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
  "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
  Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
  "It's the same thing," Pooh said. ~ The Tao of Pooh
  

• You are what you love, not what loves you. - Nicholas Cage in Adaptation
  

• Picking apples for the kings and queens of things I've never seen
  Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
  Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
  Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
  Oh, distance has the way of making love understandable
  Oh, distance has the way of making love understandable
  Cheer up, honey, I hope you can . . . ~ Jeff Tweedy/Wilco ("Radio Cure")
  

• I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles
  in our eyes are mirror images and when
  we kiss they're perfectly aligned . . .
  But everything looks perfect from far away,
  "Come down now," but we'll stay . . . ~ The Postal Service ("Such Great Heights")
  

• [. . .] Souls, in general, are living mirrors or images of the universe of creatures, but minds are also images of the divinity itself, or of the author of nature, capable of knowing the system of the universe [. . .] each mind being like a little divinity in its own realm. That is what makes minds capable of entering into a kind of society with God [. . .] the collection of all minds must make up the city of God, the most perfect possible state under the most perfect of monarchs [. . .] Finally, under this perfect government [. . .] everything must result in the well being of the good, that is, of those who [. . .] find pleasure in the consideration of his perfections according to the nature of genuinely pure love, which takes pleasure in the happiness of the beloved. This is what causes these wise and virtuous persons to [. . .] content themselves with what God brings about by his secret, consequent, or decisive will, since they recognize that if we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is. ~ Aristotle
  

MARCEL PROUST::

• Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
  

• Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
  

• A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
  

• A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
  

• Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
  

• Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
  

• If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
  

• If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
  

• Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
  

• In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
  

• It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
  

• It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
  

• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
  

• Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
  

• Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
  

• Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
  

• Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
  

• Love is a reciprocal torture.
  

• Love is space and time measured by the heart.
  

• No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
  

• Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
  

• Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
  

• People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
  

• People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
  

• The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
  

• The only paradise is paradise lost.
  

• The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
  

• The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
  

• The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
  

• The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
  

• There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
  

• There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
  

• Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
  

• Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
  

• Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
  

• Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
  

• We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
  

• We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
  

• We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
  

• We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
  

• We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
  

• Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
  

• Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
  

• One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. (II 282)
  

• When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves. (II 253)
  

• The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is caught, men in general before they have to die. That is the amulet which preserves people—and sometimes peoples—not from danger but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases allows them to brave it without actually needing to be brave. It is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains the lover who is counting on a reconciliation, on a letter. For me to cease to expect a reconciliation, it would have sufficed that I should have ceased to wish for one. (II 252)
  

• The imagination, when it changes its nature and turns into sensibility, does not thereby acquire control of a large number of simultaneous images. (IV 710)
  

• The mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. (IV 718
  

• [My love for them was genuine . . .] But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it . . . It was as though a virtue that had no connection with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities. (IV 719)
  

• When sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements. (IV 519)
  

• Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious . . . and I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose . . . The race that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. Things in it show a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed . . . Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps. / The horses of sleep, like those of the sun, move at so steady a pace, in an atmosphere in which there is no longer any resistance, that it requires some little meteorite extraneous to ourselves (hurled from the azure by what Unknown?) to strike our regular sleep (which otherwise would have no reason to stop, and would continue with a similar motion world without end) and to make it swing sharply round, return towards reality, travel without pause, traverse the regions bordering on life—whose sounds the sleeper will presently hear, still vague but already perceptible even if distorted—and come to earth suddenly at the point of awakening. Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then… Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostate, without a thought, a we that is void of content. What hammer-blow has the person or thing that is lying there received to make it unconscious of everything, stupefied until the moment when memory, flooding back, restores to it consciousness of personality?" (IV 517-518
  

• One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day. But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking man, having deserted the other time. Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life. We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence . . . It seems a positive waste. We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours. If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life. (IV 519)
  

• She's full of fun. She never leaves a hotel without relieving herself first in a wardrobe or a drawer, just to leave a little keepsake with the chambermaid who'll have to clean up. Sometimes she does it in a cab, and after she's paid her fare, she'll hide behind a tree, and she doesn't half laugh when the cabby finds he's got to clean his cab after her. (IV 515)
  

• . . . if there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on others. (IV 676)
  

• A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to posses other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star. (V 343)
  

• Vinteuil had been dead for a number of years; but in the sound of these instruments which he had loved, it had been given him to go on living, for an unlimited time, a part at least of his life. Of his life as a man solely? If art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worthwhile to sacrifice anything to it? Was it not as unreal as life itself? (V 339)
  

• One remembers an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it. (V 323)
  

• Society is like sexual behavior, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices. (V 313)
  

• It is what is immediately above our heads that gives us the impression of altitude and not what is almost invisible to us, so far is it lost in the clouds. (V 306)
  

• The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night—that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known. (V 282)
  

• No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged sojourn in the bosom of an inner vice, that is to say of a way of thinking different from theirs. (V 275)
  

• What asylum doctor has not had his own attack of madness by dint of continual association with madmen? He is lucky if he is able to affirm that it is not a previous latent madness that had predestined him to look after them. The subject of a psychiatrist's study often rebounds on him. But before that, what obscure inclination, what dreadful fascination had made him choose that subject? (V 272)
  

• It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form, the only form that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities. (V 270)
  

• No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling. (V 268
  

• And indeed I was well aware now that before I forgot her altogether, I should have to traverse in the opposite direction, like a traveler who returns by the same route to his starting-point, all the sentiments through which I had passed before arriving at my great love. But these stages, these moments of the past are not immobile; they have retained the tremendous force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then soaring towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future. (V 753)
  
• It's from adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old men.
  

TOM WOLFE::

• Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
  

• If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.
  

• In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
  

• Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?
  

• Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
  

• The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
  

• The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
  

• There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
  

• This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
  

• We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
  

VLADIMIR NABOKOV::

• He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm [. . .]

  Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. (Invitation to a Beheading)
  

• A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
  

• A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
  

• A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
  

• A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
  

• All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
  

• Caress the detail, the divine detail.
  

• Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
  

• Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
  

• Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
  

• It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
  

• Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
  

• I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
  

• I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
  

• I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
  

• Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
  

• Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
  

• My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
  

• No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
  

• Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
  

• The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
  

• The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
  

• The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
  

• The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
  

• The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
  

• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
  

• The tiny madman in his padded cell . . .
  

• There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
  

• There is only one school of literature—that of talent.
  

• You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
  

JOHN IRVING::

• And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
  

• And I find—I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
  

• Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
  

• Half my life is an act of revision.
  

• I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
  

• I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
  

• I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave—and nothing but laughter to console them with.
  

• I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
  

• There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
  

• Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
  

• You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
  

• You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.
  

• You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.
  

• You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
  

• Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
  

• "Maybe it's become the eye you see your dreams with," Garp told him.
  "Sort of," Duncan said. "But it seems so real."
  "It's your imaginary eye," Garp said. "That can be very real."
  "It's the eye I can still see Walt with," Duncan said. "You know?"
  "I know," Garp said.
  

JOHN STEINBECK::

• A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
  

• A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
  

• A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
  

• A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
  

• Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
  

• I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.
  

• I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
  

• I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
  

• I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
  

• I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.
  

• I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
  

• Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
  

• In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
  

• In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
  

• It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
  

• It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
  

• It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
  

• It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
  

• Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
  

• Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
  

• Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
  

• Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
  

• No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
  

• No one wants advice—only corroboration.
  

• One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
  

• Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
  

• The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
  

• The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
  

• The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
  

• The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
  

• The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
  

• These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.
  

• This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
  

• Time is the only critic without ambition.
  

• Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
  

• We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
  

• Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
  

• Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
  

JOHN MALKOVICH::

• I can have incredible self-discipline. But see, I think it's obviously a form of stupidity.
  

• I haven't physically attacked anyone in a couple of years.
  

• I only have two rules for my newly born daughter: she will dress well and never have sex.
  

• I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.
  

• I've permitted myself to learn and to fail with some regularity. And that is probably the one thing I was given, and that I'm still grateful for.
  

• You have to do things people see or you don't get to do anything.
  

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ::

• A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
  

• Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.
  

• An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.
  

• Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
  

• He who awaits much can expect little.
  

• I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.
  

• If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.
  

• It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
  

• Necessity has the face of a dog.
  

• No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
  

• Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
  

• She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
  

• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.
  

• The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
  

• The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
  

• Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
  

• What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
  

JOSE SARAMAGO::

• I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
  

• I don't think there is anything more effective than demanding and keeping a vigilant watch over rigorous respect for human rights.
  

• I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
  

• I'm a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level.
  

• In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
  

• Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
  

• People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
  

• Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
  

• The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
  

• The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
  

• The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
  

• The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.
  

• Up to and including The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, I was describing statues, insofar as a statue is the external surface of a stone.
  

• What I try to do when I write is to get people thinking. I wouldn't like to leave this life without at least knowing that I tried to do something.
  

• Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
  

UMBERTO ECO::

• A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
  

• But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
  

• I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
  

• Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
  

• Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
  

• The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
  

• The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
  

• The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

• There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

• Translation is the art of failure.

• When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
  

JAMES JOYCE::

• A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.
  

• A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
  

• Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
  

• Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
  

• I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
  

• Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
  

• Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
  

• My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
  

• Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
  

• Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.
  

• Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
  

• The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
  

• The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
  

• The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
  

• There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
  

• Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
  

• Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
  

• Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
  

• Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
  

VIRGINIA WOOLF::

• A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
  

• A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
  

• Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
  

• Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
  

• Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
  

• But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
  

• Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
  

• Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
  

• Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
  

• Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible . . .
  

• For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
  

• Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
  

• I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
  

• I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
  

• I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
  

• I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
  

• If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
  

• If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
  

• It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
  

• It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
  

• It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
  

JORGE LUIS BORGES::

• To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
  

• Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
  

• The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live. (331?)
  

• Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
  

• The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
  

• Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
  

• Life itself is a quotation.
  

• Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.
  

• . . . . The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.
  

• Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
  

• In general, every country has the language it deserves.
  

• And yet, and yet… To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irrevocable and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (Nonfictions 332)
  

• Strictly speaking, the life of a being lasts as long as an idea. Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point, so life lasts as long as a single idea. (Fictions 331)
  

• Langauge is so saturated and animated by time that, quite possibly, not a single line in all these pages fails to require or invoke it. (318
  

• He died in exile: as with all men, it was his lot to live in bad times.
  

• While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and in this way every man is two men.
  

• …penetrate this unstable world of the mind. A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an inexhaustible labyrinth, a chaos, a dream—the almost complete disintegration that David Hume reached. (321)
  

• Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to disrupt and confound the series in time? Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare? (323)
  

• Before the sun goes down, you're going to get the chance to show which one of you is toughest. I'm going to have your throats cut, and then you're going to run a race. Like they say – may the best man win. (388, The Other Duel)
  

• A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
  

CORMAC MCCARTHY::

• In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse's heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it. (All the Pretty Horses)
  

• If there is a pattern there it will not shape itself to anything these eyes can recognize. Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing. Do you believe in fate?
  

** * * * * * * **

• In the Guarani language, ne'e means both "word" and "soul."
  The Guarani Indians believe that those who lie or squander words betray the soul. ~ Edwardo Galeano
  

• For you, that night, a line formed of dreams wishing to be dreamed, but it was not possible to dream them all. ~ Eduardo Galeano
  

• So the Platonic Year/ Whirls out new right and wrong/ Whirls in the old instead;/ All Men are dancers and their tread/ Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong ~ W. B. Yeats, "The Tower"

• I've never seen you looking so bad, my funky one. You tell me that your superfine mind has come undone. Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend. Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again. And when the demon is at your door, in the morning he won't be there no more. Any major dude will tell you. - Steely Dan
  

• The flashing and golden pageant of California,/The sudden and gorgeous drama . . . ~ Walt Whitman's "Redwood Tree," 83-4
  

• Sometimes you know you're standing on a cusp, and you know that in knowing it you've gone over to the other side, or at least almost entirely so, entirely except for one toe that still hangs on; one toe or one finger or one shoulder blade curving back to meet another shoulder blade which curves forward to meet yours in a reminder that, if you had wings, this, right here, is where they would sprout. ~ Kamila Shamsie (Kartography)
  

• Yesterday's man died in the man of today, today's man dies in the man of tomorrow ~ Plutarch
  

• Do you really think it's cool to hit the sauce when you've got a bun in the oven? ~ Steve Zissou

A regény mindhárom szerelmi története, az eltérések ellenére, tartalmazza azokat az elemeket, motívumokat és elgondolásokat, melyek, részben, a bemutatott novellában is megtalálhatók. Proust úgy fejti ki teóriáját a szerelmről, hogy történetein keresztül mindig ugyanazt meséli el, de mindig különböző perspektívából.

A szerelmek azonban mindig ugyanabban a menetben játszódnak le : a kezdetet a véletlen hívja életre, majd egy rövid, boldog fázis után, melyben a vágy megszilárdul és a szerelmes a szerelmének varázslatos identitást kölcsönöz, bekövetkezik a féltékenység, ami vagy a teljes birtoklással, (mint Swann esetében), vagy a végleges veszteséggel (mint Albertine szökése), avagy (mint a novellában), a szerelem közömbössé változásával végződik.

Az itt közölt novella férfihőséről azt mondják, "nagyon kedves ember, de semmi figyelemre méltó nincs benne". Ugyanígy vélekedik Swann is, amikor egy színházi estén véletlenül megismerkedik Odette de Crécyvel, akit "ha nem is éppen csúnyának, de érdektelennek talált..."

A novella hősnője a férfi szerelméről álmodik a tükör előtt, s arról, hogy a férfi majd őmiatta elhalasztja utazását, vagy vele utazik el. "Az ámítás fátyla kezdett beláthatatlan időre szeme elé ereszkedni." S mivel nem talál magyarázatot a férfi távolságtartására, úgy gondolja, ennek utána kell járnia.

Ehhez hasonlóan jár el Swann is, aki csak esténként látogat Odette-hez és fogalma sincs a nő múltjáról, de a mindennapjairól sem, s ezért szükségesnek érzi, hogy képzelete a hiányzó ismeretet kiegészítse ábrándjaival; közben mindenfelé kérdezősködik és nyomoz Odette után és faggatja viselt dolgairól, míg végül egy névtelen levélből tudja meg, amit amúgyis sejtett, de amit először mégsem akart elhinni.

"A szerelem élete, a féltékenység állandósága, számtalan sok vágy és kétely halálából s változásából áll..." - olvashatjuk a Swann-ban. Azonban mikor Swann észreveszi, hogy énje már nem engedelmeskedik régi érzelmeinek, így folytatódik "...biztatta magát, jobb pihenni, mindenre kerül majd idő, és éppolyan eltompultan zsugorodott össze a közönyben, mint az álmos utazó..." (Gyergyai Albert fordítása)

Ugyanezzel a melankólikus lemondással egyezik meg az eltűnt novella végkifejlete is, mikor a hősnő felismerve a társalgás közben, hogy a szerelemről alkotott képzete a férfi számára idegen dolog, "...tekintete egyszercsak ellenfele szíve mélyéig hatolt... s érezte, hogy itt minden szó hasztalan." (ld. itt)

* * *

A szerelem kialakulásának további két formája a következő :

1.
Az egyik, a színlelt egykedvűség, melynek lélektani háttere – Proust szerint – pontosan az, amit a novellában a hősnő akar a férfival szemben alkalmazni, s aminek lényege: "ha nem szeretlek, majd belém szeretsz" – vagyis az a színlelés, aminek aztán az ember maga esik áldozatul.

Marcel a "Szodomá"-ban hasonló eszközzel közeledik Albertine-hez: „Miután túl voltam a vallomáson és [...] végre nem kellett attól tartanom, hogy Albertine szerelmet hallhat ki szavaimból, olyan gyengédséggel szólhattam hozzá, melyet már régóta nem engedtem meg magamnak..." (Szodoma és Gomorra, (1995) 266.old). Dehát mi, az olvasók, már tudjuk jól, hogy Marcel az, aki valójában szerelmes.

2.
A másik érzelmi csapda az, amikor egy nem várt helyzet, a veszteségtől való félelem érzetét váltja ki. Mikor Swann egyik alkalommal Odette-et sem Verdurin-éknél, sem másutt a városban nem találta, "...az a közöny, amelyet olyan könnyen játszhatott... egyszerre megtört" (Swann szerelme)

Ezt az érzelmi fordulatot éli át a novellánk hősnője is, mikor megtudja, hogy a férfi egy hosszú utazásra indul, s így a szerelemnek még a lehetőségét is elveszítheti. Ennyi elegendő ahhoz, hogy szenvedélye máris lángra gyúljon.

A felébredő bizonytalanságot Proust a szerelem nélkülözhetetlen kellékének tartja. Ami azt a feltevésünket, hogy Proust regényének alapmotívumai az itt közreadott, fiatalkori novellában már megszülettek, megerősíti, hogy meggyőződését Proust a "Bimbózó lányok.."-ban ismét kifejti:

... De ezt az első bizonytalanságot, hogy [a lányok] jönnek-e vagy sem bizonyos nap, növelte az a még súlyosabb, hogy látom-e egyáltalán őket, mert hisz azt sem tudtam róluk, nem kell-e elutazniuk Amerikába, vagy pedig visszatérniük Párizsba. Ez pedig máris elég volt hozzá, hogy kezdjem megszeretni őket...

És így folytatja:

...hogy eláradjon rajtunk az a bizonyos szomorúság, a jóvátahetetlenség érzete, a szorongás és mindaz, ami előkészíti a szerelmet, ahhoz – mivel a szenvedély nem is tán egy bizonyos személyt, inkább pillanatnyi tárgyát iparkodik oly görcsösen átkarolni – valami lehetetlenség kockázata szükséges. Így befolyásolnak már akkor is mindazok a hatások, amelyek a későbbi szerelmek folyamán is ismétlődnek (mert hisz könnyen létrejöhetnek, főképp a nagyvárosok életében, ha például egy munkáslányt szeretünk, akinek nem ismerjük a szabadnapját, s akit ijedten, s hiába keresünk a műhelyből jövet) – s legalábbis az én életemben mindez többször megújult. Lehet, hogy e körülmények elválasztahatatlanok a szerelemtől..." (Bimbózó lányok árnyékában - Gyergyai Albert fordítása)

Marcel Proust szerelem-elmélete vitára indíthat, de az csak hasznos lehet, mert az ellenvetések során mindenkinek alkalma nyílhat önmagába nézni és képességét a szerelemre tökéletesíteni.

Posted by Járday György

Marcel Proust

Namost, innen egy harmadik párhuzam is húzható a regény utolsó ciklusához, "A megtalált idő"-höz, amikor a háború miatt rosszul világított Párizsban, az elbeszélő esti sétáját teszi, s az utcák tele vannak frontról szabadságra érkező katonákkal. A gyarmatokról és más Európán kívüli országokból a legkülönfélébb embertípusok vesznek részt a háborúban, s az utcán afrikaiak Szenegálból, hinduk fehér turbánban, nők egyiptomi tunikákban teszik egzotikussá a képet. A sötét utcákon bolyongva, az elbeszélő Marcel, váratlanul Charlus úrral találkozik, aki majd a távozásakor így szól:

...Nincs meg ebben Decamps-nak, Fromentin-nek, Ingres-nek, Delacroix-nak egész napkeletje?, mondta, megbámulva egy elhaladó szenegálit...

S aztán így folytatódik:

...Sem Decamps, sem Delacroix napkeletje nem jelent meg képzeletemben, mikor a báró elment, hanem az én Ezeregyéjszaka könyvem régi keletje, amit annyira szerettem, s mialatt a fekete utcák belsejében egyre inkább eltévedtem, Harun al Rasíd kalifára gondoltam, mikor kalandok nyomába eredt, városának letűnt negyedeiben...

De az összefüggést tovább erősíti, ami ezután történik. Marcel ugyanis a sötét városban végül egy nem várt helyre téved, egy hotelba, szodomiták hoteljába, vagyis éppoly messzire kerül, mint a báró a villamossal, vagy, mint a 20 évvel korábbi novella férfihőse a kültelkeken.

Mindez egyaránt lehet a kiszámíthatatlan véletleneknek és a tudatos kompozíciónak nagyívű, megdöbbentő műve.

Posted by Járday György

Com os livros, não há amabilidade. Estes amigos, se passarmos o serão com eles, é porque realmente temos vontade disso. A eles, pelo menos, muitas vezes só os deixamos a contragosto. E quando os deixamos, não temos nenhum desse pensamentos que estragam a amizade: — Que terão eles pensado de nós? — Não tivemos falta de tacto? — Teremos agradado? — nem o medo de sermos esquecidos por um deles. Todas estas agitações da amizade expiram no limiar dessa amizade pura e calma que é a leitura. Também não há deferência; só rimos com o que diz Molière na exacta medida em que lhe achamos graça; quando ele nos aborrece, não temos medo de mostrar um ar aborrecido, e quando estamos decididamente fartos de estar com ele, pômo-lo no seu lugar tão bruscamente como se ele não tivesse nem génio nem celebridade. A atmosfera desta pura amizade é o silêncio, mais do que a palavra. Porque nós falamos para os outros, mas calamo-nos para connosco mesmos. É por isso que o silêncio não traz consigo, como a palavra, a marca dos nossos defeitos, das nossas caretas. Ele é puro, é verdad