Monday 18 January 2016

Märchen (10)


MÄRCHEN (10)


'This was her work, to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance.'

(DeLillo, The Body Artist, 84)

Sunday 17 January 2016

Märchen (9)


MÄRCHEN (9)



'Now she was counting the hours until evening, and was alarmed to find how many there still were. How odd that was - you needed so little time to say goodbye, everything seemed worthless when you knew you couldn't take it with you. A kind of drowsiness came over her.'

(Zweig, Fear, 93)

Saturday 16 January 2016

Märchen (8)


MÄRCHEN (8)


'It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentred, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.'

(DeLillo, The Body Artist, 32)

Monday 11 January 2016

Märchen (7)


MÄRCHEN (7)



'All the man's great themes funnelled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.'

(DeLillo, Point Omega, 124)

Sunday 10 January 2016

Märchen (6)


MÄRCHEN (6)



'No trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.'

(Perec, Life: A User's Manual, 119)

Saturday 9 January 2016

Märchen (5)


MÄRCHEN (5)


'Should we choose "freedom from" or "freedom to"? The safe cage or the dangerous wild? Comfort, inertia and boredom, or activity, risk and peril? . . . 

'The majority of us are double-plus unfree: our "freedom to" is limited to approved and supervised activities, and our "freedom from" doesn't keep us free from a great many things that can end up killing us.'

(Attwood, The Guardian, 18-09-16)




Friday 8 January 2016

Märchen (4)


MÄRCHEN (4)


'Moral judgement, individual judgement, individuality itself were not clear ideas in the mind of Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving the longer I sat in my reverie before the Virgin of Rocamadour.'

(Houellebecq, Submission, 136)

Thursday 7 January 2016

Märchen (3)


MÄRCHEN (3)



'He fell into a sort of neurasthenia, a strange lethargy from which nothing, it seemed, could arouse him. Those who had occasion to meet him at that time had the feeling he was in a state of weightlessness, in a kind of sensorial void, a condition of total indifference; indifferent to the weather, to the time of day, to the information which the external world continued to address to him but which he seemed ever less inclined to receive.'

(Perec, Life: A User's Manual, 234) 

Wednesday 6 January 2016

Märchen (2)


MÄRCHEN (2)


'The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.' 

(DeLillo, Point Omega, 21)