réalisme magique

'...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.

Transcendence

'...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?'

des éclairs

Les époques travaillées par l’interrogation métaphysique demeurent les moments culminants, les vrais sommets du passé. (Écartèlement)

understandingly

 

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Bertrand Russell, "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

bronze, iron, and digital

'..Great city-destroying quarrels 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 suggests the 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.'

persuasion

'...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 instruction manual.'