The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

I was surprised by how little effort it took me to summon up the words I had spoken or heard, things I’d seen, pain I’d suffered and now overcome; I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training.

They admired me, feared me a little, and I realized that one could get used to this fear and admiration, that they were like a drug.

Life, in those days that now seem to have belonged to somebody else, was full of possibilities. The possibilities, as I would later discover, also belonged to somebody else: they were gradually, imperceptibly extinguished, like a tide going out, until they left me with what I am today.

(And I tell myself at the same time that we’re terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn’t actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.)

There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

Quiero catar silencio. Non curo de compaña, I want to sample silence. I won’t be cured by companionship.

What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, that’s what I say.”

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others.

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.”