[b]Mario Vargas Llosa
Borges’s world is as grounded in the changing nature of existence, that common predicament of the human species, as any literary world that has lasted. How could it be otherwise? No work of fiction that turns its back on life or that is incapable of illuminating life has ever attained durability. What is singular about Borges is that in his world the existential, the historical, sex, psychology, feelings, instincts, and so forth, have been dissolved and reduced to an exclusively intellectual dimension; and life, that boiling, chaotic turmoil, reaches the reader sublimated and conceptualized, transformed into literary myth through the filter of Borges, a filter of such perfect logic that it sometimes appears not to distill life to its essence but to suppress it altogether.[/b]
Let’s file file this one under, “it had to be said.”
Don’t be afraid Mr. Onaka, we need you because none of us drives.
Can you imagine anything as dumb as that? They were going to make a revolution and they didn’t even know how to drive a car.
Let alone a tank.
I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t.
For a few, mysterious and then some.
There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.
If only since the dawn of history.
Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
And then the present to fit the future.
Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.
Anyone disagree?