Michael > Recent Status Updates

“It’s a common belief that blind or partially sighted people will pick up on sounds first and foremost, but that isn’t the case with me. The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.”

“I can only walk around looking at people’s gravestones and considering them as works of art because I’m alive. What a foolish thing it is to dream of one’s own gravestone.”

“For years I engaged in a kind of secret ‘saudade,’ a strange overseas longing, a wistfulness about a place I had never been and wasn’t sure I’d ever gave the chance to go. That place was Montevideo.”

“It made me laugh to think that I’d gone to Paris to turn into a North American from another time and had ended up selling drugs to North Americans of the here and now.”

“Dates are destined for oblivion, but they situate men in time and bear a multiplicity of connotations.”

“She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything. She knew that the only life left to her was one hemmed in by niggling doubts and cold questions.”

“No matter if your interest is in ways of life, food or kimono, you can only really begin to understand something once you have studied it through all four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter. This is even truer of natural features such as mountains and rivers, which change far more often than seasonally, shifting their forms from morning to evening, in sunshine and in rain.”

“In Hokkaido’s natural forests, young Ezos rise from their fallen ancestors. Of course, the forests’ mature spruces scatter countless seeds upon the ground each year. But conditions in Hokkaido are harsh. Sprouting is no guarantee of success. The seeds which implant on fallen trees are the lucky ones: they have been granted better conditions for growth.”

“The world, according to Mallarme, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.”

“The match to end the career of the old Master should have had in it the affectionate attention of his juniors, the finesse and subtlety of the warrior’s way, the mysterious elegance of an art, everything to maje it a masterpiece in itself; but the Master could not stand outside the rules of equality.”

“‘So,’ the Professor had gone on to explain, ‘if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude. . . .’”

“Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, only the good-bye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart—but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become, after all, a blank sheet.”

“Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that ‘photography’ and ‘alchemy’ were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals.”

“The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death was approaching. He wanted to question himself, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound, he was sure. He had heard the mountain.”

“You can’t imagine what profound misery of a moral sort there is in the attempt, which so many people make, to confine everybody to a specialty. For my part, I find a tremendous advantage in living ‘from’ one activity and ‘for’ another…”

“In their walks, in their games, in their mutual friendships it was Joaquin, the more willful of the two, who seemed to initiate and dominate everything. Still, Abel, who appeared always to yield, always did as he pleased. The truth was that he found not obeying more important than commanding. The two almost never quarreled.”