Hopscotch

by Julio Cortázar

I took advantage of such moments to think about useless things, a practice I had begun some years before in a hospital and which all seemed richer and more necessary every time since.

It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.

I had come to accept La Maga’s disorder as the natural condition of every moment,

Holding La Maga, that materialized nebula, I begin to think that it makes just as much sense to model a doll out of crumbled bread as to write the novel I will never write or to give my life in the defense of ideas that could redeem whole peoples.

every act entailed the admission of a lack, of something not yet done and which could have been done, the tacit protest in the face of continuous evidence of a lack, of a reduction, of the inadequacy of the present moment. To believe that action could crown something, or that the sum total of actions could really be a life worthy of the name was the illusion of a moralist. It was better to withdraw, because withdrawal from action was the protest itself and not its mask.

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

Klee is much more modest since he asks for the co-operation of the viewer and is not sufficient unto himself. The fact of the matter is that Klee is history while Mondrian is atemporality.

Ronald had just put on an old Coleman Hawkins record and La Maga seemed resentful that the explanation was ruining the music, and besides, it wasn’t what she usually expected from an explanation, a tingling of the skin, a need to breathe deeply as Hawkins must have breathed just before taking another turn at the melody and as she would breathe when Horacio would deign to explain some really deep line of poetry for her, adding to it that other fabulous depth which could have been now if he instead of Gregorovius had been explaining this business about Lutetians, and how he would have made it blend into Hawkins’s music, along with the green candles, a tickle, a deep breath which would be the only thing she could be sure of, something comparable only to Rocamadour or Horacio’s lips or sometimes an adagio from Mozart that could barely be heard because the record was in such bad shape.

To understand. Not to make sense: to understand. A hint of a paradise that can be won again: It cannot be that we are here in order not to be.

How often I wonder whether this is only writing, in an age in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one’s self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one’s self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature again?

está…It would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of bringing it up impoverishes it, that is to say, falsifies it, that is to say, transforms it into something else. How many eons between the Yin and the Yang? How many, perhaps, between yes and no? Everything is writing, that is to say, a fable.

It would seem that the usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought to be. An unavoidable detention in the varying degrees of the dramatic, the psychological, the tragic, the satirical, or the political. To attempt on the other hand a text that would not clutch the reader but which would oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers to him underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric directions.

“A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader’s time and substitute author’s time. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and in the same form.

For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.”

“Il souffrait d’avoir introduit des figures décharnées, qui se déplaçaient dans un monde dément, qui jamais ne pourraient convaincre.”

A penciled note, almost illegible: “Yes, he suffers once in a while, but it is the only decent way out. Enough of hedonistic and prechewed novels, with psychologies. One must aim at the maximum, be a voyant as Rimbaud wanted to be. The hedonistic novelist is nothing but a voyeur. On the other hand, enough of purely descriptive techniques, of ‘behaviorist’ novels, mere movie scripts without the saving grace of images.”

There are different times even though they may be parallel. In this sense, one of the times of the so-called Middle Ages can coincide with one of the times of the Modern Ages. And that time is what has been perceived and inhabited by painters and writers who refuse to seek support in what surrounds them, to be ‘modern’ in the sense that their contemporaries understand them, which does not mean that they choose to be anachronistic; they are simply on the margin of the superficial time of their period, and from that other time where everything conforms to the condition of figure, where everything has value as a sign and not as a theme of description, they attempt a work which may seem alien or antagonistic to the time and history surrounding them, and which nonetheless includes it, explains it, and in the last analysis orients it towards a transcendence within whose limits man is waiting.”