p. xvii …any writer has the right to look for "spices" in the work of any other writer, but the "final sauce" has to be of his or her own making.
p. 9 An uncle of mine, a canon with full prebend, liked to say that love of temporal glory was the perdition of souls, who should covet only eternal glory. To which another uncle, an officer in one of those old infantry regiments called terços, would retort that love of glory was the most truly human thing there was in a man and, consequently, his most genuine attribute.
p. 18 The minute that passes doesn't matter to time, only the minute that's coming. The minute that's coming is strong, merry, it thinks it carries eternity in itself and it carries death, and it perishes just like the other one, but time carries on.
p. 32 What was it that my old primary teacher wanted, after all? Memorization and behavior in the classroom. Nothing more, nothing less than what life, the final class, wants, with the difference that if you put fear into me, you never put anger.
p. 46 And that was how I disembarked in Lisbon and continued on to Coimbra. The university was waiting for me with its difficult subjects. I studied them in a very mediocre way, but even so I didn't lose my law degree. They gave it to me with all the solemnity of the occasion, following years of custom, a beautiful ceremony that filled me with pride and nostalgia - mostly nostalgia.
p. 53 The sensuality of boredom: memorize that expression, reader, keep it, examine it, and if you can't get to understand it you may conclude that you're ignorant of one of the most subtle sensations of this world and that time.
p. 58 Fear obscurity, Brás, flee from the negligible. Men are worth something in different ways, and the surest one of all is being worthy in the opinions of other men.
p. 86 So I, Brás Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of the equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one's conscience.
p. 110 The world may have been too small for Alexander, but the eaves of a garret are an infinity for swallows. Take a look now at the neutrality of this globe that carries us through space like a lifeboat heading for shore: today a virtuous couple sleeps on the same plot of ground that once held a sinning couple. Tomorrow a churchman may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet, and they will all bless that corner of earth that gave them a few illusions.
p. 111 …the main defect of this book is you, reader. You're in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly.
p. 117 The intensity of love was the same, the difference was that the flame had lost the mad brightness of the early days and had become a simple sheaf of rays, peaceful and content, as with marriages.
p. 143 As I contemplated how it chastely and completely covered her knee, I made a subtle discovery, to wit, that nature foresaw human clothing, a condition necessary for the development of our species. Habitual nudity, given the multiplicity of the works and cares of the individual, would tend to dull the senses and retard sex, while clothing, deceiving nature, sharpens and attracts desires, activates them, reproduces them, and consequently, drives civilization. A blessed custom that gave us Othello and transatlantic packets.
p. 158 …public opinion is a good glue for domestic institutions.
p. 161 … Uninstructed reader, if you don't keep the letters from your youth, you won't get to know the philosophy of old pages someday, you won't enjoy the pleasure of seeing yourself from a distance, in the shadows, with a three-cornered hat, seven-league boots, and a long Assyrian beard, dancing to the sound of Anachreonic pipes. Keep the letters of your youth! Or, if the three-cornered hat doesn't suit you, I'll use the expression of an old sailor, a friend of the Cotrims. I'll say that if you keep the letters of your youth, you'll find a chance to "sing a bit of nostalgia." It seems that our sailors give that name to songs of the land sung on the high seas. As a poetic expression it's something that can make you even sadder.
p. 165 We kill time; time buries us.
p. 166 Yes, it was fitting for me to be a father. The life of a celibate may have certain advantages of its own, but they would be tenuous and purchased at the price of loneliness.
p. 181 Good Lord! You've got to be a man! Be strong! Fight! Conquer! Dominate! Fifty is the age of science and government. Courage, Brás Cubas. Don't turn fool on me. What have you got to do with that succession from ruin to ruin, from flower to flower? Try to savor life. And be aware that the worst philosophy is that of the weeper who lies down on the riverbank to mourn the incessant flow of the waters. Their duty is never to stop. Make an adjustment to the law and try to take advantage of it.
p. 194 Why is is that a pretty woman looks into a mirror so much if not because she finds herself pretty and, therefore, it gives her a certain superiority over a multitude of women less pretty or absolutely ugly? Conscience is just the same. It looks at itself quite often when it finds itself pretty. Nor is remorse anything else but the twitch of a conscience that sees itself repugnant.
p. 195 …man executes, to the turn of the wheel of the great mystery, a double movement of rotation and translation. Its days are unequal, like those of Jupiter, and they comprise its more or less long year.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen, r. Mar. 2014
p. xii Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you remember all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You remember episodes that you have not thought of for years and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.
p. 19 I walk up and down through the empty hall examining everything carefully in the brightly lit cases, delighted to discover that there is absolutely nothing there that I would wish to own. I had spent forty years modestly collecting this kind of garbage and then, let us hope, grown wiser, the next twenty years giving it away.
p. 27 Into that chill building rushes a great warm, soft, languorous movement of tropical southern air that is simply amazing in its power to seduce. It is the sweet air of Brazil...
p. 46 My curiosity is too easily satisfied - or rather I have learned that the fascination of a strange place is centered in its people rather than in its views and monuments.
p. 76 Here is what is horrible about dying, I decide: not that you are obliterated by death but that everything you love is also obliterated. The eyes close for the last time, the brain deprived of oxygen comes unplugged, and everything, everything is destroyed, the world disintegrates - trees, lakes, mountains, children, wind and sunshine, the sea, canoes floating across tranquil rivers, ponds full of frogs, night and the stars, music and the music of silence.... [but] death destroys not only everything we love, but everything we hate as well. Our rages, our betrayals, our failures, our capacity for evil. It is all destroyed. How can death, then, be anything but a friend since so much more pain than joy is obliterated.
p. 83 And what suffering won't a man endure to live in his own hut on his own land, proud and half-mad with the delusion that to some extent he is in control of his own destiny.
p. 90 What is heaven for most of us if it is not the satisfaction of having worked hard for yourself, and of knowing that after you have eaten well that you will lie down, make love, and fall into the deep eight-hour sleep of total obliteration that you have earned?
p. 106 [Salvador] is a city where, underneath the normal pursuits, the people in it seem to be thinking of nothing else but their power to attract and of the great psychic charges that are going off between people in their most casual encounters. Connections are being made; people are looking at one another and with innocent delight.
p. 135 It is intensely moving to be in a city where everyone believes in God, and I consider joining them, not because I believe in God, but because, though the spectacle is depressing for its ritual, I believe in the emotion that has joined them together.
p. 171 If life has any meaning at all toward the end, it is certainly only in one's ability to draw from the well of memory a satisfying amount of intense experience to contemplate, for the things that are forgotten are only symbols for the parts of us that have already died. Part of the middle-class tragedy lies in the facility with which intense experience can be synthesized and bought.
p. 206 When I refuse to cook for them and drag them off to some restaurant to eat strange food that is past their comprehension, I feel a vague guilt now as though I were taking them to a pornographic movie that would by teaching perverse techniques confuse and complicate the pure, straightforward intensity of their romantic and passionate sensibilities.
p. 236 Are we not all born with a certain bias, an innate proclivity for feeling either that man is more good than bad or that he is more bad than good? This basic way of looking at mankind probably even determines the way we vote. Do we join a political party that demands more freedom to more nearly achieve our potential, or a party that wants more restrictive laws to curtail our evil instincts? Did I, who had always believed in more freedom, still believe in the face of the abuses that had been committed in its name?
p. 270 In a larger sense home, that symbol of stability, is only one more concept being shattered by a crazy world where whole nations are stood against the wall and where millions are driven to clog the roads as they stagger toward another border and a temporary haven. There is no way to buy or beg continuity; there is no spot on earth from which one may not be driven. Home is where you are; home is where you find yourself. (Reading that sentence over and giving it a double meaning I note with a glow of pride that we have arrived at the edge of profundity.) It is that cubic space that the body claims - if roofed, that area where you store your dirty clothes and your books.
p. 273 Man is most godlike when he sweats; the potential moral beauty of man lies in this simplest of things; man doing well something that he loves doing - the juggler juggling, the baker baking bread, the teacher before a class of children; a farmer hoeing out a row of corn. Even the trained killer who kills well fulfills, in some inscrutable way, his deepest contract with life and forgets for a time his own mortality, that stinking death that awaits him, too.
p. 19 I walk up and down through the empty hall examining everything carefully in the brightly lit cases, delighted to discover that there is absolutely nothing there that I would wish to own. I had spent forty years modestly collecting this kind of garbage and then, let us hope, grown wiser, the next twenty years giving it away.
p. 27 Into that chill building rushes a great warm, soft, languorous movement of tropical southern air that is simply amazing in its power to seduce. It is the sweet air of Brazil...
p. 46 My curiosity is too easily satisfied - or rather I have learned that the fascination of a strange place is centered in its people rather than in its views and monuments.
p. 76 Here is what is horrible about dying, I decide: not that you are obliterated by death but that everything you love is also obliterated. The eyes close for the last time, the brain deprived of oxygen comes unplugged, and everything, everything is destroyed, the world disintegrates - trees, lakes, mountains, children, wind and sunshine, the sea, canoes floating across tranquil rivers, ponds full of frogs, night and the stars, music and the music of silence.... [but] death destroys not only everything we love, but everything we hate as well. Our rages, our betrayals, our failures, our capacity for evil. It is all destroyed. How can death, then, be anything but a friend since so much more pain than joy is obliterated.
p. 83 And what suffering won't a man endure to live in his own hut on his own land, proud and half-mad with the delusion that to some extent he is in control of his own destiny.
p. 90 What is heaven for most of us if it is not the satisfaction of having worked hard for yourself, and of knowing that after you have eaten well that you will lie down, make love, and fall into the deep eight-hour sleep of total obliteration that you have earned?
p. 106 [Salvador] is a city where, underneath the normal pursuits, the people in it seem to be thinking of nothing else but their power to attract and of the great psychic charges that are going off between people in their most casual encounters. Connections are being made; people are looking at one another and with innocent delight.
p. 135 It is intensely moving to be in a city where everyone believes in God, and I consider joining them, not because I believe in God, but because, though the spectacle is depressing for its ritual, I believe in the emotion that has joined them together.
p. 171 If life has any meaning at all toward the end, it is certainly only in one's ability to draw from the well of memory a satisfying amount of intense experience to contemplate, for the things that are forgotten are only symbols for the parts of us that have already died. Part of the middle-class tragedy lies in the facility with which intense experience can be synthesized and bought.
p. 206 When I refuse to cook for them and drag them off to some restaurant to eat strange food that is past their comprehension, I feel a vague guilt now as though I were taking them to a pornographic movie that would by teaching perverse techniques confuse and complicate the pure, straightforward intensity of their romantic and passionate sensibilities.
p. 236 Are we not all born with a certain bias, an innate proclivity for feeling either that man is more good than bad or that he is more bad than good? This basic way of looking at mankind probably even determines the way we vote. Do we join a political party that demands more freedom to more nearly achieve our potential, or a party that wants more restrictive laws to curtail our evil instincts? Did I, who had always believed in more freedom, still believe in the face of the abuses that had been committed in its name?
p. 270 In a larger sense home, that symbol of stability, is only one more concept being shattered by a crazy world where whole nations are stood against the wall and where millions are driven to clog the roads as they stagger toward another border and a temporary haven. There is no way to buy or beg continuity; there is no spot on earth from which one may not be driven. Home is where you are; home is where you find yourself. (Reading that sentence over and giving it a double meaning I note with a glow of pride that we have arrived at the edge of profundity.) It is that cubic space that the body claims - if roofed, that area where you store your dirty clothes and your books.
p. 273 Man is most godlike when he sweats; the potential moral beauty of man lies in this simplest of things; man doing well something that he loves doing - the juggler juggling, the baker baking bread, the teacher before a class of children; a farmer hoeing out a row of corn. Even the trained killer who kills well fulfills, in some inscrutable way, his deepest contract with life and forgets for a time his own mortality, that stinking death that awaits him, too.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Brazil on the Rise by Larry Rohter, r. Mar. 2014
p. 82 In Brazil, work may be a necessity and can sometimes bring satisfaction. But learning to enjoy one's time on earth is an art, and those who have mastered that art are held in high esteem.
p. 249 But until it throws off the inferiority complex that has dogged it for so long, Brazil is likely to remain yoked to a foreign policy that is essentially reactive, and the rest of the world will have to continue to tread lightly if it wants to gain Brazil's cooperation and avoid giving offense.
p. 249 But until it throws off the inferiority complex that has dogged it for so long, Brazil is likely to remain yoked to a foreign policy that is essentially reactive, and the rest of the world will have to continue to tread lightly if it wants to gain Brazil's cooperation and avoid giving offense.
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