Borges on heaven and hell

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

– Jorges Luis Borges

 

A journey into the jungle and into the past

Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Everything in anything; the universal seen in the particular

Because everything’s implicit in anything… you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit, and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing around obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with the energy to live and think – when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.

– Aldous Huxley, “Point Counter Point”

Portraiture, the capturing of the self and the passage of time; decay

The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty. Afterward she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.

– Aldous Huxley, “Point Counter Point”

The world is no narrow place

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

– Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”

On the passions, an inability to sustain their intensity

He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit, had found them set forth solemnly in books, and had wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction. A brief anger had often invested him but he had never been able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself passing out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease of some outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark and murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire him with a brief iniquitous lust: it too had slipped beyond his grasp leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was the only love and that the only hate his soul would harbour.

– James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Existential malaise, post-prandial

He ate his dinner with surly appetite and, when the meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips… His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening duck, while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed and human for a bovine god to stare upon.

– James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Orwell, briefly, on masks

He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.

– George Orwell, from the essay “Shooting an Elephant”

Toska: a definition

Toska – a Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

– Vladimir Nabokov, from “Eugene Onegin: Commentary and Index”