A Luminous Republic

So how does love start from scratch? How does one live in a world with no points of reference?

But trees have no interest in good and evil, insects and plant roots have no interest in the reasons of man, much less his longing, and there is something comforting about that.

Everything fights death, I thought, from maggots to sequoias, from the river Eré to a termite. I will not die, I will not die, I will not die.

And then he put forth a theory as twisted as his bow tie: everyone has their own witness. Someone that we secretly want to convince, someone all of our actions are directed toward, someone we can’t stop secretly talking to. This witness, he added, is not the most obvious, is almost never your spouse or father or sister or lover, is often someone trivial, secondary to the normal course of life.

A gyerekek számára a világ olyan múzeum, ahol a felnőtt őrök talán az idő nagyobbik részében kedvesek, de attól még ők hozzák a szabályokat: minden szilárd, minden öröktől fogva, már jóval előttük is létezett. A szeretetért cserébe fenn kell tartaniuk ártatlanságuk mítoszát. Nem elég, hogy ártatlanok, de annak is kell látszaniuk.

It may be true that the dead betray us when they abandon us, but we too betray them in order to live.

Perhaps it's impossible to understand and forgive others without having first forgiven and understood oneself.

Love and fear have one thing in common: they are both states in which we allow ourselves to be fooled and guided.

To name is to bestow a fate, to listen is to comply

Loss of trust is similar to heartbreak. Both lay bare some internal wound, both make us feel older than we are.

Believing in magic is the same as love: those convinced of its existence, and of falling in love, end up doing so sincerely, and those who doubt their feelings thwart the very possibility of having them, a paradox that leaves us forlorn, wondering what we might have become if only we'd allowed ourselves to believe.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the true purpose of marriage is none other than talking, and this is not only precisely what distinguishes it from other types of personal relationships but also what is most missed: the trivial conversations about everything from the neighbor’s bad mood to how ugly a friend’s daughter is. Pointless and none too insightful observations are the essence of intimacy, what we mourn after the death of our wives, our fathers, our friends. A few months after Maia’s death I was

Comfort is something that sticks to one’s mind like a damp shirt, and only after making an unexpected move does it become clear that one is stuck.

I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative—in Marianne Moore’s line, “Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,” or more like Michelangeli playing Debussy—powerful chords hammered out amidst the most feathery ornaments.

As people, we are fascinated by anything that excludes us... we start by projecting our own qualities onto anything we can't make sense of and end up believing that tigers fall in love, God is a jealous avenger and trees are nostalgic.

seemed we had so many things to talk about, and at the same time nothing to say. Perhaps one of the greatest surprises about marriage is precisely that: the inevitable formality, even when you know the other’s body and habits better than your own. Light filtered in through

Soms lijkt het alsof je aan boord van een machtige onderzeeër moet gaan om de diepten van de menselijke ziel te bereiken, maar vervolgens vind je jezelf terug in een badkuip terwijl je in een duikpak kopje-onder probeert te gaan.

So how does love start from scratch? How does one love in a world with no points of reference?

The written word stays with us; like photography, it too possesses the somber, granular persistence of evidence

Blood courses through everything, it fills everything. Beneath the green jungle, beneath the brown river, beneath the red earth there is always blood, a blood that flows and completes things.

La posesión es un dato puro de conciencia infantil, una categoría con la que se filtra la realidad. Los niños de los altercados, aquellos niños y niñas a los que ya comenzábamos a ver a diario apostados en las calles entre algunos semáforoso durmiendo en pequeños grupos echados juntos a la orilla del Eré y que desaparecían de la ciudad al llegar la noche, compartían con mi hija la conciencia de que - a diferencia de los niños "normales" no eran herederos legítimos de nada. Y como no eran herederos legítimos de tenían que robar.