"Whatever I feel, in the true substance with which I feel it, is incommunicable; and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is, so in order to transmit to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language... What I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it means perverting the true nature of what I felt."
Fernando Pessoa
Monday, December 10, 2007
Speaking of Buster Keaton...
McSweeney's said it well: "This guy makes Charlie Chaplin look like Jeff Foxworthy."
But Natalia Ginzburg's essay "Film" said it best: "Buster Keaton, as far as I know, left no memoirs. The silence within him and the silence surrounding him must have been immense. Old age vented its fury on him, laying waste his body and his parched, bare, defenseless face. And yet he remained himself, sealed in his silence, loyal to the infinite despair that could only be speechless, human speech being so pathetically inadequate, forever loyal to the infinite freedom of never uttering a single word."
(The picture links to her essay, but only read it if you have already watched the short film in the post below.)
Saturday, December 8, 2007
A few gems from Haruki Murakami
“…by listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you go there.”
All from Kafka on the Shore
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you go there.”
All from Kafka on the Shore
Friday, December 7, 2007
Why Don't We Love Science Fiction?
Why Don't We Love Science Fiction?
" 'The truth is,' Aldiss has written, 'that we are at last living in an SF scenario.' A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism."
" 'The truth is,' Aldiss has written, 'that we are at last living in an SF scenario.' A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism."
On life
"I happened to see a cart pass by on the street carrying a mirror, a huge mirror with a gilt frame. It was reflecting the greenish evening sky, and I stopped to watch it go by, feeling an immense happiness, the sense that something important was taking place. I had been feeling very happy even before seeing the mirror, and suddenly I felt as though the very image of my happiness was passing by, the resplendent green mirror in its gilt frame...
"I was always arrested by dismal, seedy people and things; the reality I sought was contemptible, without any splendor. There was a touch of malice in my taste of digging up minute details, an avid petty interest in tiny things, tiny as fleas. I was a dirtdigger, perversely bent on hunting for fleas. The mirror on the cart seemed to offer new possibilities, maybe the capacity to focus on a more glorious and radiant reality, a brighter reality that didn't call for minute descriptions and clever conceits but could be realized in one joyous, resplendent image."
Natalia Ginzburg
"I was always arrested by dismal, seedy people and things; the reality I sought was contemptible, without any splendor. There was a touch of malice in my taste of digging up minute details, an avid petty interest in tiny things, tiny as fleas. I was a dirtdigger, perversely bent on hunting for fleas. The mirror on the cart seemed to offer new possibilities, maybe the capacity to focus on a more glorious and radiant reality, a brighter reality that didn't call for minute descriptions and clever conceits but could be realized in one joyous, resplendent image."
Natalia Ginzburg
On growing up
"Now, in this new home we've made for ourselves, we no longer want to be poor, we're even a little frightened of being poor. We feel a curious fondness for the things around us, for a table or a rug, we who would always spill ink on our parents' rugs; this new fondness of ours for a rug is somewhat troubling, we're somewhat ashamed of it. We still walk through the streets at the edge of the city now and then, but back home we carefully wipe our muddy shoes on the doormat. We take a new pleasure in sitting at home under the lamp, the shutters sealed against the dark city."
Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg
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