[b]Mario Vargas Llosa
When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.[/b]
Come on, what could possibly be more dangerous in politics than purity?
The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o’-the-wisp.
Believe it or not, that’s the good news.
Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don’t know. Why didn’t you follow your calling?
Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.
Because I was a coward, son, he finally murmured. Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don’t follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don’t do what I did, don’t betray it.
Another smugly contemptuous dig at the working class, he thought. Like the world even needs artists!
A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.
Not unlike all the rest of us.
Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges’s pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.
A “statuesque quality”. Right. Like the real world isn’t everywhere here.
The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.
Boy, does that take me back.