When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God's will be done, I said. I'm going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Perez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might way I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell's estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women's Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.

Roberto Bolano, By Night in Chile

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece

Better to become an undercover poet.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it's hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. So, for a time, Lorenzo had to do other things. He studied and improved himself. He sang in the streets. Being a hopeless romantic, he fell in love. His disappointments (not to mention humiliations, put-downs and insults) were terrible, and one day -- to be marked retrospectively with a white stone -- he decided to kill himself. One particularly sad summer evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean, Lorenzo jumped into the sea from a rock used exclusively by suicides (every self-respecting stretch of Chilean coastline has one). He sank like a stone with his eyes open and saw the water grow darker and the bubbles streaming from his lips and then an involuntary movement of his legs sent him back up to the surface. Because of the waves he couldn't see the beach, only the rocks and the masts of pleasure craft or fishing boats. Then he went under again. This time too he kept his eyes open: he turned his head calmly (as if under anaesthetic), looking for something, anything, as long as it was beautiful, to be his last memory. But darkness enveloped whatever else might have been sinking with him into the depths and he could see nothing. Then, as the saying goes, his whole life flashed before him like a film. Some parts were in black and white, others in color. His poor mother's love, her pride, her weariness, how she hugged him at night when, in Chile's poor neighborhoods everything seemed to be hanging by a thread (black and white); the trembling, the nights when he wet his bed, the hospitals, the staring, the zoo-like staring (color); friends sharing what little they had, the consolations of music, marijuana, beauty revealed in unlikely places (black and white); love perfect and brief like a sonnet by Gongora; knowing with a fatal certainty (but raging against the knowledge) that you only live once. Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Roberto Bolano, Distant Star

I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name.

I read the letter twice over, then, for all the good it did me, shouted, "There's no one around here like you! You're no simple soul either!" I had seen her using her Parker 51 fountain pen to take notes in class--a brown-and-red tortoiseshell pen--but I had never before seen her handwriting or how she signed her name with the nib of that pen, the narrow way she formed the "O," the strange height at which she dotted the two "i"s, the long graceful upswept tail at the end of the concluding "a." I put my mouth to the page and kissed the "O." Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the "O," the "l," the "i," the "v," the second "i," the "a"--licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

Philip Roth, Indignation

Kung walked

And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put in order his dominions.
And Kung gave the words "order"
and "brotherly deference"
And said nothing of the "life after death."

Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

DFW, RIP

Dilige et quod vis fac.

Always he had tended to think rationally, as a rationalist, that life ends with the death of the human body. But at three that night, wide awake in the darkk, he understood that this is not so. It ends and it doesn't. There is some spiritual power, some mental power, that lives after the body is dead, and that clings to those who think about the dead one, and my mother has revealed hers here in Chicago. People would say this is only more subjectivity. I would have said so myself. But subjectivity is a mystery too. Do birds have subjectivity? Subjectivity is just the name for the route she takes to reach me. It's not that I want to have this contact or that she wants to have this contact, and it's not that the contact will continue forever. It is also dying like the body is dying, this remnant of her spirit is dying too, but it's not quite gone yet. It's in this room. It's beside this bed.

Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson

I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house

He looked at me kindly. "You probably want to sleep a little, yes?"

I did, very much, and I finally went downstairs. And I thought, on the way down to my room, and on the way down into sleep, of all the people in the world dragging themselves from old property to new property, along oceans and highways and Ridge Street, and arriving, in the end, sawed into pieces. I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house, and how he'd never make up with Misha, though they had both loved my mother. America was too large; America with its houses, its highways; it had broken them up, and me as well. No matter what happened with Arielle (and nothing, I may as well tell you now, happened with Arielle), I would never have Jillian back, could never haver her back, did not even want her back, which was the whole trouble--because all the people I'd loved once, or even just knew once, were scattered, never to be seen again in one place. So that all the feelings are expended, received, that one felt at the core of one's being, had turned, in the course of things, to dust.

And outside already it was growing dark.

Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men

But unhappily life isn't organized as logically as that.

"What's a psychosomologist?" "A baffled little physician. The Freudian personalization of every ache and pain is the crudest weapon to have been bequeathed to these guys since the leech pot. If pain were only the expression of something else, it would all be hunky-dory. But unhappily life isn't organized as logically as that. Pain is in addition to everything else. There are hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but they constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologiets lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed."

Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson

The road crossed a great plateau, with hills and undulations to the right, rising to mountains of some height towards the northerly horizon. Just as the winter days I had spent in America three years before had been dark and colourless, so now the earth's surface, a patchwork of greens, was flooded with light. In the long since abandoned pastures stretching towards the mountains grew clumps of oaks and alders; rectilinear plantations of spruces alternated with irregular stands of birches and aspens, the countless trembling leaves of which had opened only a week or so before; and even on the dark, distant slopes, where pine forests covered the mountainsides, the pale green of larches lit by the evening sun gleamed here and there in the background. When I saw those seemingly uninhabited highlands, I remembered the longing for faraway places that I had known when I bent over my atlas as a pupil at the monastery school, and how often I had travelled, in my thoughts, across the states of America, which I could recite by heart in alphabetical order. In the course of a geography lesson that lasted very nearly an eternity -- outside, the early morning blue was still untouched by noonday brightness -- I had once explored the regions I was now driving through, as well as the Adirondacks further to the north, which Uncle Kasimir had told me looked just like home. I still remember searching the map with a magnifying glass for the source of the Hudson River, and getting lost in a map square with a great many mountains and lakes. Certain place names such as Sabattis, Gabriels, Hawkeye, Amber Lake, Lake Lila and Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds have remained indelibly in my memory ever since.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

impatient and angry like a little stupid god

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing--the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in those ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say--so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Elsewhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient--impatient and angry like a little stupid god.

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end;
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge;
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . .

Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son

A snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life

As a boy in his father's church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful. He had played with this thing, but had never allowed it to come alive.

He knew now what this thing was--hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is . . . a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life.

Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts