More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the dark days after the fall of the generals who had caused the disappearance of thousands of people and lost the Malvinas war, Sábato was chosen to chair the commission to investigate the crimes against human rights committed during their reign.
The phrase ‘the good old days’ does not mean that bad things happened less frequently in the past, only – fortunately – that people simply forget they happened.
Even when you think a person hasn’t the slightest trace of vanity, suddenly you discover it in its most subtle form: the vanity of modesty.
Vanity is found in the most unlikely places: in combination with kindness, and selflessness, and generosity.
Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings.
The way he praised my paintings, I knew that he despised them.
On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.’
Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?
I ask myself, though, why reality has to be simple. Experience has taught me just the opposite; it almost never is simple, and when something seems unusually clear, when some action appears to obey a simple logic, there are usually complex motives behind it.
How many times had that damned split in my consciousness been responsible for the most abominable acts? While one part of me strikes a pose of humaneness, the other part cries fraud, hypocrisy, false generosity. While one incites me to insult a fellow being, the other takes pity on him and accuses me of the very thing I am denouncing. While one urges me to see the beauty of the world, the other points out its sordidness and the absurdity of any feeling of happiness.
‘We have no right to think of ourselves. The world is too complex.’
and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life.
