Michael’s Reviews > Like a Fading Shadow > Status Update

“A rather sickly disciple of Borges, I had loved in excess, like he says, the sunsets, the slums and misery. Now I was learning to love the mornings, the downtown and serenity.”

I was discovering a capacity I had rarely exercised in my life: the ability to radically change my circumstances and immerse myself in the unexpected; to forget what I had left behind; to lose myself, like in a jungle in the things that really interested me, a novel, a film, a song, an emotion; to disappear entirely, without a trace, not even a thread that could guide me back, no remorse, no nostalgia, no memory.

“He took his time. He enjoyed driving while drinking a cold beer and listening to country music. He liked the somgs of Johnny Cash most of all. Sunglasses, shirt open at the chest, elbow resting on the open window, the moist ocean breeze blowing on his face—he saw himself as if from outside, in disbelief and admiration, like watching a movie or reading a novel where he was the protagonist…”

“One goes into a movie theater to cease to exist. It is because of that, not the size or quality of the image, that something crucial is lost when a film is experienced on a television set, in the domestic light of one’s home, in the calcareous shell of one’s identity. If there are other people in the theater, your shadow becomes one with all the others, it dissolves in a collective stare.”

“Literature and film fed a solitude without introspection, like an adolescence. I only paid attention to myself and even so I could not see who I really was. Once, in an argument with my girlfriend, or maybe she was already my wife at that point, she said: ‘All that sensibility for characters in books and films, yet you’re completely oblivious to those who are actually here with you.’”

“The world is a moving maze of signs, electric shocks, sound waves, brief flashes of light in the dark. The brain re-creates it entirely in its hermetic box, locked within its vault of bone. He believed that it was possible to guide from a distance the steps and actions of someone who has been hypnotized, order them to murder, plant a bomb, or rob a bank.”