Читать книгу The Physics of Sorrow - Georgi Gospodinov - Страница 8

EPIGRAPHY

O mytho é o nada que é tudo.¹

—F. Pessoa, Mensagem

There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between . . .

—Gaustine, Selected Autobiographies

The world is no longer magical. You have been abandoned.

—Borges, 1964

. . . And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images . . .

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X

Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording.

—Gaustine, The Forsaken Ones

I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water . . . to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matter—to be matter.

—Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony

. . . mixing

memory and desire . . .

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Purebred genres don’t interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.

—Gaustine, Novel and Nothingness

If the reader prefers, this book may be taken as fiction . . .

—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

1 Myth is the nothing that is everything.