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)