Livia J. Elliot

Because on a street in Rio de Janeiro I glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that as a boy I grew up in the northeast. I also know about things because I'm alive.

If there is any truth to it—and of course, the story is true though invented—may everyone recognise it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold—there are those who lack the delicate essential.

For her [...] reality too was very little. She could deal better with her unreality, living in sloooow motion [...] vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the inside of nature.

[...] she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don't even look at her.

How much of it had been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many entrusted with a message to be memorised and delivered.

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible-that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense [...] or Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded [...]

Why do you wish to discredit the past, even to dehumanising the last civilisation? So that you need not learn from their mistakes?