Juan Tomás

“With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“Pelar una naranja, descortezar el mundo, desvendar el seno de una momia adolescente. Me como una naranja y tengo un día ana­ranjado. En rigor, una naranja me devora por dentro. Necesita de mí para transformarse en otra cosa, para sobrevivir, y cuelga ya, naranja otra vez, al final de los tiempos, del árbol dorado de mi vida.

Toda depredación es una redención. Todo canibalismo es una asunción. Voy a comerme otra naranja. La naranja me ha iluminado los interiores como un sol en gajos, y ha quedado ahí la ese rosa y blanca de su cáscara. Qué nalga breve y pugnaz del mundo acaricio en la naranja. Se reparte su sabor, su olor, su química, por todo mi cuerpo, y aprendo más de la vida, del mundo, del tiempo, gracias a la naranja, que en todos los libros de Kant y Platón. Llevo ya dentro un fanal anaranjado, y siglos de experiencia, sabiduría, decantación, licores, azúcares metafísicos y veranos líricos, que estaban empaque­tados en la naranja, que la habían hecho posible. Comer una naran­ja, desvendar el seno dorado y egipcio de una adolescente. Si hay que creer en algo, creo en la naranja.”
― Francisco Umbral, Mortal y rosa

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wandering

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses