View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] in his essay The Last Reader, Ricardo Piglia writes that "Borges's greatest lesson is perhaps the certainty that fiction doesn't only depend on the person who constructs it but also on the person who reads it." And he adds: "What is particular to Borges (if such a thing exists), is the capacity to read everything like a fiction and believe in its power. Fiction as a theory of reading."
<3
[...] What makes Macedonio's story remarkable is how earnestly he wrestles with tigers that we all face. It isn't the felicity of his prose, or the prescience of his ideas -- though his prose is often felicitous and his ideas often prescient. Rather, it's the open heart with which he takes up his pen and seeks, through its wanderings, to find a way to love the sound of the kettle on the stove, the crumbled mate leaves on the tablecloth, the arrangement of the furniture in the room -- all the dull, pedestrian details of everyday life that clearly offer more irritation than fascination. And somewhere in these details, the tiny tinkerings that he inexhaustibly and minutely calibrates in every corner of his life, is the beloved. ANd in the beloved, in the other, there is passion, and death, and art, and eternity.
[...] Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression. [...]
[...] Edie won’t tell Marie tonight about the time he threw a book across the room at her, about how it momentarily woke her up and she almost left until he talked her back down into believing it was her fault, that she had to be better, that she had to be more honest with him, more attentive, more giving. She was overreacting, anyway. It was just a book. His shock at her shock! Nothing was going to hurt her. It was all in her head, her damaged little head that only he could see clearly and understand and still love.
damn are all men like this
Tilt your head back, he’d said with the exact intimate tone her father had used when she’d gotten a bloody nose on his watch as a kid, and later she found out that tilting backward is the exact wrong thing to do for a bleeding nose, but she did as she was told, both as a girl and right then, and tasted blood in the back of her throat; but when he’d come toward her with a dish towel, she’d instinctively flinched away from his hand, and he threw the towel at her feet. You’re trying to make me seem like a villain! This is not my fault!
ackkk
You know—I almost do want it to be true. The permission to just fuck around and live alone forever and never need anyone else’s company in particular, and for that never to seem lacking. But maybe it’s the fact that the body decays that makes this kind of intimacy important.
So that someone finds you if you have a stroke? So that someone’s there to clean up your vomit after the chemo?
Yeah, I guess so.
But if that’s the role, then it seems like the selection process is asking all the wrong questions. Or it’s like—people fall in love for reasons that are nice at the time and totally useless a year later.
This is chamomile! I’m fine. I just mean I made the choice to give up my autonomy to him, to trade it for what felt like protection, or deliverance—after how many gender studies classes? How stupid am I?
Well, you skipped class a lot.
lol
[...] That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel real sexual pleasure with another human body, but then again, What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father, she took a sip of wine, I mean what am I even saying? And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage. It does seem like a lot to manage, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line: But you’re married right to a woman right? Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, Yes, I am. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.
She had not really liked either boy, but instead felt confused about her position, in each of their lives, as a desired object. She stayed up late at night trying to pray, trying to address, in the divine gaze of God, her fear that human-on-human love was really the root of all suffering, all malaise, all bad music, all good music, all addiction, all psychological problems, all joy, all art, all laughter, all sorrow, all ecstasy, most pregnancies and therefore most human beings from the best to the worst, and therefore all global warming, all disaster, all war, all science, all art, all waste, all of us and all of it, and wasn’t it true that the only way out, the only way to soberly and respectably pass your life, wasn’t the only honest option to devote yourself entirely to God and nothing else, to never align yourself with something so base as another person, to avoid the distraction of heartbreak and longing and mixed feelings, to avoid romantic entanglements altogether? Or was refusing God’s (perfect, but twisted, but perfect) creation a kind of sacrilege on its own?
Edie tries to remember for a minute, then all at once she does—I asked him why suffering existed, and he told me he had chosen to suffer.
But that didn’t answer your question, Marie interrupts, but Edie keeps on.
And I asked him why he had chosen to suffer, and he said that all life required it, and he had chosen to be alive, therefore he had chosen this pain. And I asked him if everyone chose to be alive, and he said no, that some people and some animals are here against their wishes, but that eventually they either come around or get out.
i do like this