Читать книгу The Angel Of History - Bruno Arpaia - Страница 5

It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.

– Walter Benjamin (from ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, English translation copyright Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc.)

‘Why the fuck are you asking questions up and down every street in town? What the fuck is all this gossip-collecting for?’

‘So I will know what I’m doing when I lie.’

– Mario Vargas Llosa (from chapter 8 of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, translation copyright by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)