'...Poètes et mendiants, musiciens et prophètes, guerriers et racaille,
tous créatures de cette réalité effrénée, n’avons eu que peu de choses à
demander de notre imagination, car le défi principal pour nous a été de
rendre notre vie crédible sans avoir assez de ressources
conventionnelles pour y arriver ..'.
The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of
painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in
Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez
in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.
These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched
realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together
with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials
derived from myth and fairy tales.
'...but even now we barely begin to understand the most rudimentary facts
about human personality. Is the self unitary, or is it a shifting
collection of fragments, turning inward upon themselves in a recursive
illusion? Do our personalities persist through time, or are we a
sandpile of our own unreliable memories? It is trite to say that one is
not the same person now as twenty years ago. How about five minutes ago?'
'..Great city-destroyingquarrels begin with what turn out, to be, in
retrospect, absurdly flimsy reasons. Modern historians will doubtless
try to attach deeper causes to the quarrels—just as Hammurabi may have
returned his shoes in a symbolic gesture of refusal, perhaps the braying
hippo was a conventional cultural code for some other, economic
quarrel. But our own experience suggeststhe reverse: people with money
and power are annoyed when their shoes don’t quite fit; great powers
come to grief over the noise a hippo makes, or is thought to make, even
when the moat is nowhere near the palace.'
'...Orwell and Kafka may be cliches, argues Hitchens, because the Soviet
Union and other totalitarian states are cliches. It's as though they
used 1984 as an instructionmanual.'
