Status Updates From La mujer de papel

I am nothing
I'll always be nothing (...)

Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa's bissexual dandy poet, wrote that. He is welcome in my home anytime. I am nothing. I should aspire to become a speck.

(...) Forget the industrialized countries; I can work with writers from the third world, Ireland! Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín, or Anne Enright. [:D]

There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can't think of one in any of the languages I know. Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit. Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun's Kuboaa. Maybe the word is just mother

Like Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa, I am a pantheist. I follow the lesser gospel, now deemed apocryphal. I worship - well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don't have the stomach to believe in anything - at the shrines of my writers. I am in large measure a Pessoan.

It's not as if you're born with the ability to love António Lobo Antunes.

[Até um libanês sabe isso! :-) ]

I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain? (...) What good is a personal skylight if I«m the only one who see its light? How special!

[5*, sem dúvida!]

These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they're reading a fashion magazine. I ordered books and if no one bought them, I carried them home. (...) I like to consider my little thefts a public service. (...) For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood"?

Crates, crates, boxes and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Noteboom; Kis, Karasu and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.