Solyaris

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.
[...]
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature... more »

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.
[...]
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.
[...]
It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass. "
(Vladimir Nabokov)


I wish I had a library exactly like the one of the Stalker in Tarkovski's masterpiece, as huge and beautifully untidy as that one.

"Solitude, pulchra soror, I would like to give you my heart, but you are my heart, Soledad. I would like to give you my memories, but the memories we have them together, the same, because you have always accompanied me. I sometimes felt you like a light reflected by the sea waters, you’ve been fog and night to me, you’ve been my strength. You surely do recall that desolate sunrise, tired like a dusk. Or the white afternoon when death tried to tear apart my heart with her crystal claw and when love pulled through, leaving me to suffering and to the world.
Limpid waters ooze like black tears on the black stone of a rock, that’s how I feel you sometimes. And I sometimes feel you purified of any events, pure form. Soledad, it’s almost the time, and we’ll leave together, young how we’ve always been, over ages, forever. "
Petru Creţia , "The Clouds"

"De ce-aş fi trist, că toamna târzie mi-e frumoasă?
Pridvoarele-mi sunt coşuri cu flori, ca de mireasă.
Fereastra-mi este plină
De iederi împletite cu vine de glicină.
Beteala şi-o desface la mine şi mi-o lasă,
Cînd soarele rămâne să-l găzduiesc în casă.
O prospeţime nouă surâde şi învie
Ca de botez, de nuntă şi de feciorie.

De ce-aş fi trist? Că pacea duioasă şi blajină
Mă duce ca o luntre prin linişti de lumină?
E un surâs şi-n vraful de cărţi, să mă alinte,
Vieţi noi tresar vioaie din foste oseminte.
Văd frunza că scoboară din ramuri câte una.
Le ruginise bruma, le argintase luna.
Aud şi gânguritul de dragoste cu jele,
Oprit cu porumbeii pe coama casei mele.

Luceferii de noapte, scăpărători, i-adun
Din cerul ca o coadă deschisă de păun.
Singurătatea-mi doarme culcată-n somn alături,
De-a lungul, între pături.
Mă-ntreabă câteodată, trezită dintr-un vis:
- „Eşti tot aici cu mine şi tot cu mine-nchis?”
Nu mă sfiesc de dânsa, nici ei nu-i e ruşine
Că fuge să se-ascundă de lume lângă mine.

De ce-aş fi trist? Că nu ştiu mai bine să frământ
Cu sunet de vioară urciorul de pământ?

Nu mi-e clădită casa de şiţă peste Trotuş,
În pajiştea cu crânguri? De ce-aş fi trist? Şi totuş… "

Tudor Arghezi


I wish I had a library exactly like the one of the Stalker in Tarkovski's masterpiece, as huge and beautifully untidy as that one.

"- The Migrations that the historian, guided by accidental ceramic shards and bronze objects, tries to fix on a map, and that weren't understood even by the populations that performed them.
-The Divinities of the dawn that left no idol and no symbol
-The furrow of Cain's plow
-The dew on the grass of Paradise
-The waters that do not know they are the Gange
-The weight of a rose of Persepoils
-The weight of a rose of Bengal
-The many faces that a mask, now displayed in a shopwindow, has put on
-The last dream of Shakespeare
-The pen that wrote the strange line: "He met the Nightmare and her name he told"
-The first mirror, the first hexameter
-The pages that an exiguous man had read and that revealed to him he could be Don Quijote
-The sunset whose fiery red lingers on a Cretan amphora
-The golden ring of Polycrates that the Destiny refused
Each one of those lost, forgotten things never ceases to project a wide shadow and determine what you do today or what you are going to do tomorrow"
(from "The warp" by JLB)

I love endlessly discussing about books and the universe of reading. I love to talk about unique atmospheres, entangling plots and fascinating characters. I miss a phrase, a being, a place in a book as much as I could miss a real place, and even more. I am deeply in love with literature, and I am interested in everything around her: her crafters, her masters, her peculiarities, her cruelness and boundless beauty. because literature is my soul. because literature is our weapon against forgetfulness, longing, sadness, death. literature can teach how to relive ourselves of our bodily disorders and fleshy incommodities and perceive only the bitter-sweet tenderness of life. because literature is our soul....

"A book is a thing among other things, a volume lost among the many volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it finds its reader, the man destined to its symbols. An unexpected emotion is born then, which we call beauty, this wonderful mystery that neither psychology, nor philosophy can't decipher. "The rose doesnt's have a why" said Angelus Silesius; over centuries, Whistler would declare: "Art is a thing that happens". " -Jorge Luis Borges.

"The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of
his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion." Henri Frédéric Amiel « less