Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes the directions we take in our lives can be decided by the combination of a few words. — Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim
In the pilot’s cabin, Jean de La Noüe lets go of the joystick
I’m certain the Lockheed Constellation had control wheels, not joysticks. Unless it’s a translation error.
A man from an earlier century, the representative of a world in decline, one soon to be surpassed by the reign of hurried men, Boutet de Monvel would concur with Paul Valéry in his Outlook for Intelligence: “Duration has become unendurable. We have lost the art of fecundating boredom.”
Technology and its language, those formulas produced with a magic wand. Context aside, the difference between advanced technology and magic is negligible, the point being to levitate an airframe of several tons.
The lesson of Cassandra is that the more specifically an oracle speaks, the less she is listened to. And if a prophecy is heard and heeded, every action taken to ward it off helps bring it about. To struggle, to reverse course, is all part of the game, that’s the lesson of the oracle at Delphi. In short, no one escapes his fate.
We like fairy tales, Newton’s apple, eureka moments, grace conceived as a punctual, innate, and ineluctable event, and we erase, because of our penchant for the marvelous, the prior groundwork, the tedious chores, the doubts.
“What would you do if you had a magic lamp and it could grant you one wish?”
Well?
One has always to set off, one’s heart in a jumble, in search of whales.
Peter’s Bar stands out at night in Horta like a beacon, and you sit there and get hammered until you see the sun at the bottom of your glass. You drink your sorrows, you share those of your neighbor, you repair friendships dinged by a long crossing. In this refuge, each shipwrecked soul seeks out, and finds, the memory of his sorrow, and drinks beyond reason the wages of his regrets.
When you love, you come back. A life of breaking the compass, opening up to the cardinal points, and then, at the far end of the world, discovering the commonplace. When you love, you come back. A life of playing hide-and-seek, cheating boredom, cheating death, and, at the far threshold, the old cabin, the origin, the treasure. When you love, you come back. Reviled, despairing, in a jumble, the mind gaudy with strange animals and utopian landscapes, to discover in the depths of the primeval forest a patient, protective sister soul. When you love, you come back. A life that leaves you
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