Life is a weapon. Where should we injure, upon which obstacle should we exert our muscles, over which summit should we hang our desires? Would it be better to waste ourselves all at once and die the ardent death of the bullet flattened against the wall or to grow old in the path without end and outlive hope? The forces that destiny forgot for an instant in our hands are tempests. To him who has his eyes open and his ears on guard, to him who has once risen above the flesh, re

1 Beyond oppositions there is no unity. Beyond oppositions there is only variation. 2 Negation discloses the constituent parts. Negation pluralizes. 3 Theory and practice—the object and its shadow, the shadow and its object. They exist in isolation only when we are half-asleep. 4 The immediate reactions of the practical world narrow our sensibility, map onto it abrupt and unforgiving angles. It is the counterintuitive approximation that ascertains any sort of depth, and withi

Sotavento : “There is a mechanism in which each person is, purposely, the marionette of himself, as I said before; and then at the end, comes the kick that knocks the whole theatre apart.” I can’t stop seeing the novel in these terms. I mean, some authors are eloquent about their work. Others aren’t. But Pirandello is definitely among the former. Babor : His philosophical background tempts most of his critics into looking for a key such as that. To be sure, you have used an o

1 The ultimate unity is a coexistence of unities. The ultimate unity is the ultimate plurality. 2 All of our unities are tenuous delineations, which the mind itself presents as shifting embodiments. Perhaps we wished to preserve in them the sway of self-forgetting acts. To a degree, we have succeeded. The related obsessions with highlighting and erasing the delineations stand in the way. 3 Perhaps there lingers the thought that all human creations can be familiar to us. It is

1 We would find in a sublime calculus that nature is prodigal and our consciousness reticent. Perhaps the arduous labyrinth of our body is home to all correspondences, otherwise too subtle and intractable. 2 Goethe, Emerson, Coleridge, and Swedenborg assimilate the vocabulary of the sciences with ease. They profess the belief that human beings are the sum of creation and, therefore, free to understand themselves through any of its parts. 3 When we grow aware of the path that

Any theory that does not culminate in a law or in a demonstration is improbable, because all theories are conjectures about the nature of things. Theory is the field in which the order of things that generally flow into the mare magnum of speculation and fantasy takes hold and spreads. The protean or universal condition of any theory allows us to conceive it as a genre of art. No one is surprised by the existence of a discipline of the spirit called theory of art, but I am s

The forehead — The place of humans in Creation. Humans are a means, not an end. Human ends are, to the Divinity, only means. Thus, evil...

I Leaning on a streetlamp of Puerta del Sol, amused, he watches people go by. He's neither short nor tall, neither thin nor fat, neither...

Pelopia All that is left of honey is its viscous drift. The rustle of distant leaves is inaudible. The luxuriant hyacinths are as frigid as the palace urns. And the caresses of her partner are dull lacerations. The sword alone gathers no dust. It whispers deliverance. What of the child? A path that demands vigor from her now vaporous feet. Pylades He has known sorrow. But none as deep as Iphigenia’s. She is a caryatid, a support of her family’s ceaseless transgressions. And t

It is high noon. He guides his horses to a holm oak. He is in no hurry. His brothers are scattered throughout the slopes of the mountain. They bask in the sunlight and hardly set an eye on their prey. The hares and the partridges amble near the forgotten bows. It is a day of inactivity. Or, in the paternal words, of communion. They have learned from their father that labor and rest are interwoven gifts. And why should they be skeptical? Cadmea’s walls endure. The opaque luste

Euryanassa Each wave pursues its forebear without pause. She suspects pausing is the great solecism of humankind. Nature cascades, improvises, loves the forward movement. Nature is an unstoppable guarantee of balance. Her life, and all those other lives around her, lies in pauses, gains significance from intrigues, second thoughts, and guesswork. What could she have said to her son? What word could have outlasted his eventual doubt? Had they been as simple as the sea, presenc

She focuses on the discreet dance of her blue drapery — on the rhythmic folding and unfolding, on the interspersed hints of evanescent figures, on the play of light and shadow, on the odd thread that calls attention to the wind’s greater effect. It is clear that the grace of the whole relies on the frantic workings of its minuscule parts. In an instant, the drapery is violently let loose. She cannot even attempt to grab it. A thin branch stops what would have been a long voya

There is a light warmth traveling through his body. It makes him sensible to the blades of grass that have gathered round his contour. A receding current brings a vivifying scent and hints at the presence of a field. He opens his eyes with strange effort. They put forth a variegated blur. His lips are numb, and he surmises his vocal cords have accumulated rust. He straightens up, realizing almost immediately that his whole body shares the subdued weakness. As he is about to f

I confess that the contrarian spirit does not irritate me to the extent it does the generality of men. If a person always contradicts...

Saint Augustine corrects at a felicitous hour the heretical mistakes of his youth. But everything that was not ridiculous and puerile in...

Juan and Pedro reached the age in which it is necessary to work in order to live. Sons of workers, they had no opportunities to acquire a...

Sotavento: Isn’t this great proof that genius, or talent, or whatever you want to call it, can transform anything into art? The name in...

Sotavento: But the love angle is shoehorned. We can admit as much. He has to concede something to his audience, and that’s the easiest...

I love peace and solitude. I aspire to live in a spacious old house, where there is no other sound but that of a fountain. It will occupy...

It is a shame that those who know not how to write do so, and it is a bigger shame that those who could handle the pen fruitfully abandon it. The inept, by dint of working, become less inept. By dint of walking, though it be blindly, they achieve something. Blunders serve as guides; failures, as teachers. In any case, one could always stop reading them and deny circulation. But the idle talents diminish, and there is no defense against the damage of their sterility. The stubb