Jeff Reiter

“As a writer, you make yourself less real with each book you write. [...] The despair you feel is that of one who lives in two dimensions and is trapped inside a square, in the middle of an infinite piece of paper.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade.

And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the factory gates in a Mélies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“Art has no meaning if it’s not an escape. If it’s not born of a prisoner’s despair. I can’t respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid