Last Evenings on Earth

by Roberto Bolaño

in a sense they foreshadowed what was to come, in their own sad and skeptical way, which led them one by one to the abyss. I had a soft spot for those writers.

Suddenly I realized that we were at peace, that for some mysterious reason the two of us had reached a state of peace, and that from now on, imperceptibly, things would begin to change. As if the world really was shifting.

He was tenacious in a blind, uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero’s bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it gave him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.