Status Updates From Landscape Painted with Tea

“somewhere on the shores of the South Seas, where the stars are farthest from their images, passengers off a ship ate a huge tortoise. Five hundreds years later, on that same shore, a sailor found its shell and curled inside it for the night. In the morning, rested and cheerful, he pushed his arms, legs, and head through the openings of the shell, and descended into the sea in a private game with himself.

"A priest makes his wife swear that she will never eat without him;Otherwise she will turn into a wolf.And she makes him swear that he will never drink without her; otherwise he will turn into a goat. Sometime later, during her husband’s absence, she peered into his deaf book. She became absorbed in the reading, ate a leaf of cabbage, an turned into a wolf.When he came home, the priest ran straight into the beast."

Critics are like medical students:they always think a writer is suffering from the very disease they happen to be studying at the time.But a writer always suffers from the same disease,the disease of crisscrossing words,of building,from the one tongue in his mouth,two. What is a book,really,other than a collection of words well crossed?However, there is also the reader who suffers from the same love: of crosswords.

as I drink from the bottle of brandy,my thoughts,like birds in the sky, suddenly flock together and then vanish again,after first intertwining & carding east and west.When their time comes,they fly away from each, each with its flock,somewhere to their own south.Because our thoughts, too,need warmth to recover from our winters and harshness and return to us again only after the coldness in us passes...if it passes...

'The amount of fear in the world is constant; it neither decreases nor increases, and it must always be distributed to all beings, like water. What do you think? I think that the last people on earth will go crazy with fear. Somewhere in Africa wild animals are afraid for me, too, in this sense. The less afraid I am, the more afraid somebody else is, and tomorrow perhaps you will be less afraid on my account..

On her own again,Madame Amalia lined her trunks with lavender,placed walnut leaves in between her blouses and wild flowers in her wig,filled her gloves with sweet basil,sewed verbena in the hems of her dresses& went back to her wandering travels & her "blue,dark-pretty" dresses,wearing a locket with a picture of the late Alexander Pfister,who looked like someone who might have been her patron or lover,but not her son

'In sleep one doesn't age', claimed engineer Pfister, and he slept with his young wife 16 hours a day. She adored him, nibbled the ivory rings on his fingers, and lit her long black cigarettes on his pipes. She washed these porcelain and meerschaum pipes in cognac, and every so often had a mad desire to light one of them herself. Noticing this, Pfister said:
'What in October seems to us like March is really January'.

One evening they suddenly got married during a storm, had the piano brought out onto the terrace in the rain, and during the wedding feast listened to the rain beat down on the piano keys. And they danced to that music.

"Foods are my only friends", Miss Riznic opined, usually to her lady companions, and, indeed, her enormous Vienna library was entirely devoted to the alchemy of tastes and smells. It was stacked to the ceiling with history books on the culinary arts, essays about food related religious bans, about the Pythagoreans' nonuse of beans, about Christian fasts, about then Islamic ban on pork and alcohol;

He did the river by dipping his brush in "tropanas"-a dark fruit tea-mixing it with "sweet orange", a light pink in color, and the bright-red hibiscus. The vineyards were depicted in the dark colors of the purple "hyssop" mixed with chamomile, producing what is called "afternoon green". The sky was painted with a brush made of calf's ear, with very weak souchong tea, picked in May, and rapidly roasted green tea.

While he worked, he decided that eternity and infinity were asymmetrical, and he amused himself by trying to check this idea mathematically. Then he cleared the snowdrift from a shop and in its display window noticed a barely legible advertisement. He blew on the glass and read:
Three-Dimensional Photographs of the Soul
X-Rays of Dreams

Mount Athos was no longer visible from the ship. All one could see was that over there, on the other side of the waves, a quiet reigned on the land, the silence of earth, inaudible to the ear of the passerby, not because of the rumbling sea between it and him, but because only a bird on a branch can understand silence. Man cannot.

Maladies are like different robes, my good sir; one puts them on when one must and takes them off when one can, because seldom in life can one survive naked. Who knows from what coldness and misery maladies protect us! Think about it! The only thing that really stands between us and the biggest secret of all is our malady. It is easier to fall ill than to learn the truth.

A book, if you expects wonders of it, should also be read twice. It should be read once in youth, when you are younger than its heroes, and the second time when you are advanced in age and the book's heroes become younger than yourself. That way you will see them from both sides of their years, and they will be able to put you to the test on the other side of the clock, where time stands still..

I'll tell you how to recognize him! He has pitched a roof among four trees and let his house grow! Every day he buckles his belt on a different hole, puts his cassock on inside out one day, wears it backward the next, so that nothing ever becomes a habit. He believes that the same applies to vices, that even they should not be left to the force of habit, that they should be spared it.

"do you know, dear sir," said Father Luka chattily, "that I have a dog that snores? And I can't make him break the habit. Do you, perhaps, know of a cure? it's annoying, you know, because it always wakes me up. The way our life here is organized, the most precious and rarest thing is sleep. It would be hard to add up ten nights of sleep in a month from all of us together in Chilandar.

"all births are similar, and every death is different," Atanas Svilar thought, and took his illness along on the trip while his son, Nikola, took the major's guitar, stuffed with prewar money.
Svilar gazed at his son, thought how he was growing out of childhood, and tried to understand him. Childhood resembles no other time of life. It has something of the mystery and inaccessibility of the future.

and when the air raid was over, they would go out to see what the 'new town' looked like. The view opened up more and more each time, as entire buildings disappeared, and once, among the ruins, high up on the 3rd floor, they recognized from the sale remaining picture and bookshelf the room where they had been served apple tea on a visit. A tap was peeing from that floor, and the bookshelf was swaying.

'one sees into the past better by night than by day' whispered Atanas Svilar, and decided:
'all sexual acts in the universe are in some way connected, in some way they interact' and he hoped he would be able to find, in the messages of the women he had had, something like the equation of his own personality, something like an answer to the basic question that plagued him like hay fever:

in the long summer nights, while pondering over his past life as he added wine to his water (because the reverse is a sin) Svilar usually asked himself 2 questions: how come he had hay fever for life, so that TEA smelled to him like sweat, and how come he was unable to lay his hands on a real job as an architect, the work for which he was made.
It was as though the right hand was more sinful than the left, after all

The years passed, he felt his saliva changing taste, he knew he was savoring some wines for the last time; he worked as though his ears were not planted on holes, by still he remained outside his profession and felt he was growing old in strokes, like a clock. Twice, at the ages of 24 and 42 he undertook ambitious projects, entire housing settlements, which were never transposed from paper to reality.

However, the devil had the last laugh. Despite his expertise, which was never disputed, despite his enormous working energy, which ruined his clothes and his hair, Atanas Svilar was simply unable to find a job in his field. And the drop of time cannot be wiped off the face with a sleeve, like a drop of rain. It stays there forever.
But nobody has tears in just one one.

As soon as the first hermit sat down in his own shadow and drank in the first dew, the fish and the lamb separated. Irrevocably and for all time at their disposal, they began to divide into two castes. Into those linked to the sun and those linked to tuater, into those with the lamb and those with the fish, into those with quiet and those with silence in their hearts...

When a little sleep came upon them, it was a veritable salvation from the horror in which they were compelled to live. But even in their dreams they were assailed by terrors, by beasts with freckled lips and navels instead of eyes, and they, like a drowning man on dry land, struggled to reach wakefulness, although the waves of dreams kept spinning them in a circle.

They wore the tips of their mustaches braided like whips. For generations they had not smiled, and wrinkles recorded the years in the upper areas of their faces. They aged from their thoughts, not their joys.
They knew the Jews called them Edomites; they called themselves salt. It takes a long time for a man to use up a handful of salt, they thought, and were patient.