All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a...
It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might ye...
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last...
How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit th...
Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.
But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concer...
You may not want to be my son, but I cannot help but be your father.
The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet f...
It was sublime—and the sublime is not to be trusted.
El silencio donde moraban sus demonios.
Cuando escribo, incluso ahora mientras estoy escribiendo esta frase, esta palabra, soy consciente de la presencia de un lector fantasma que se inclina sobre mi hombro y contempla mi pluma, que tergive...
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The sp...
The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of...
Politeness. Being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the grav...
Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling? Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.
The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.
... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.