Susie

“But what actually is Monteverdi's L'Orfeo?.... Perhaps it forms a perfect microcosm of what it means to exist at all: an emptiness that can nevertheless contain so much beauty, profundity, insight, and possibility”
― Yuval Sharon, A New Philosophy of Opera

“At night the cathedral becomes younger. The wrinkles of time cannot be seen upon it, and it seems to return to its Cossack youth, when it rose from the rushes in a youthful blossoming of beauty and shone for the first time in these steppes with the heavenly hemispheres of its domes...”
― Oles Honchar; trans. by Leonid Rudnytzky, The Cathedral

“Two long slim goddesses with shining black braids, who could have been twins, they looked so alike, but the commentator made a point of saying they weren't even sisters... Following a few graceful bounces, they jumped. The first microseconds were perfect. I felt that perfection in my body; it would seem it's a question of 'mirror neurons': when you catch someone doing something, the same neurons that they activate in order to do something become active your brain, without you doing a thing. An acrobatic dive without budging from the sofa and while eating potato chips: that's why we like watching sports on television. Anyway, the two graces jump and, right at the beginning, it's ecstasy. And then, catastrophe! All at once you get the impression that they are very very slightly out of synch. You stare at the screen, a knot in your stomach: no doubt about it, they ARE out of synch... One of them is going to reach the water before the other! It's horrible!... I sat there shouting at the television: go on, catch up with her, go on! I felt incredibly angry with the one who had dawdled. I sunk deeper into the sofa, disgusted. What is this? Is that the movement of the world? An infinitesimal lapse that has succeeded in ruining the possibility of perfection forever?... All the words we should have said, gestures we shoul dhave made, the fleeting moments of kairos that were there one day and that we did not know how to grasp and that were buried further in the void... Failure, by a hair's breadth... What if literature were a television we gave into in order to activate our mirror neurons and give ourselves some action-packed cheap thrills? And even worse: what if literature were a television showing us all the things we have missed?”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“These conversations ended various ways: one could lose, but also one could make gains, win, emerge from the office a worker of a different specific gravity: there, elements transformed before one's eyes. Loboda knew that the secretary was a man of tempestuous nature, capable of unpredictable decisions. He had to act, so as not to give him a single opportunity.”
― Oles Honchar, The Cathedral