Just a word from you is blessing enough, my dear.
Milan imečka was my father's best friend. I grew up with Uncle Milan always around, listening to the grownups talk sitting on his knees. He came every Tuesday to play chess with dad. In 1981 he was imprisoned for conspiracy, treason of the republic and god knows what else. Because he translated Orwell's 1984 into Slovak, among other things.
Anyhow, from prison he wrote letters to his family and friends. My mom collected them and published them in a book form few years back. I helped with the English version. They are perfectly universal in their deep humanity. The most beutiful parts are to his wife, of course, who was a complicated person. Few more excerpts from my most favourite person in the world. It's to his sons, about their mother, his wife. But it could be about any wife and mother:
"You know everything about Mother. Everything has been in vain. She keeps telling me over and over again that she can't live without me. It gets me down. In Milan's (son) reality all values are strictly classified, and he refuses to let lesser values interfere with higher ones, and somtimes they have to give way if for no other reason than to avoid confusion. It's a concept of reality that I fully share. None of us doubts that Mother's reality essentially shares the same hierarchy of life values. But in addition, she holds to some age-old belief that the fire must be kept burning at all costs. I mean this figuratively. It was the attitude of the matriarch of the species that the fire must be protected come what may. Even if half of the men failed to return from the mammoth hunt, the fire in the cave had to be burning whatever happened. Or Mother doesn't guard any fire, because all you need to do is strike a match an dyou immediately have a blue gas flame. As you yourselves discovered long ago, instead of the fire Mother takes care of the day-to-day running of things and wants order in them. None of the three of us is fully capable of appreciating it, most likely because we have never known the desolation and depression engendered by a cold heart, dirt, and disorder. I know it only from hearsay, and it must have been dreadful. Therein lies the origin of our conflicts. We are all focused on the clear centers of our realities, while Mother also wants the paths surrounding that center to be properly sprinkled with sand. What I'm saying is neither entirely simple nor largely symbolic. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure you grasp my meaning, including Mother. I can confide in the two of you that Mother has always reminded me of Susan in Swallows and Amazons. Even if the boat capsized, the most important thing was to dry the crew's clothes so that no one caught cold. Even when the Swallows were about to embark on their greatest adventure, the first thing to be done was wash the frying pan and get Roger off to bed in time. This is something to which I have often given a lot of thought. Let us concede just slightly that the age-old habit of maintaining the normal cultural traits of the human species at all costs was somwhat more than a mere fetish of civilization. Maybe it is easier to face death when one has first brushed one's teeth. But that's not something I'll pass judgment on."
And more:
"In Bratislava I briefly shared a cell with a fellow who was by any normal criteria a burglar, no doubt about it. Yet he related to me a love story that I would never have expected of him. It was a short story of love for his own wife, whom he had married when she was fifteen and with whom he had two children. They lived together until his arrest, and, as he told it, they had never had a single quarrel but enjoyed a harmonious and passionate union. It was odd to be sitting in a prison cell in the evening listening to a plain tale of faithful, lasting, and unblemished affection of the sort one no longer hears in far superior company. He would dreamily tell me how he would go to meet his wife from the afternoon shift at the factory every evening at ten and how he would rub her all over with camphorated oil when they got home because her back ached from the work. He told me how in the evening they would watch their sleeping children with tears running down their cheeks, and many other things that sounded as if they had been copied out of romantic sotires from the last century. And I would wonder to myself whether it wasn't simply self-deception designed to console himself. But no, I would have seen throught a lie of that kind. It was an unconscious copy of Bonnie and Cledy, except that the young burglar would go out alone at night on his housebreaking forays, while his wife stayed at home anxiously minding the children. The genuineness of his feelings was beyond any doubt. This was no prison lie. The young wife was in the same prison, and when the women were exercising in the yard and my companion caught site of his love for a moment he would blench and his eyes would redden. It occurred to me that at any moment he would tear out the bars or punch his way through the meter-thick walls. I've never seen such animal-like longing to escape, to break out of the cage. It was a story that combined, like in the old ballads, a total disrespect for society's laws with tenderness and love for a woman."
Just one or two more, then I'll really quit:
"About a couple of weeks ago, Eva, I sent you a naive poem hidden in an acrostic. It was about us warming up in the April sun. And today I really did warm myself. We didn't get our exercise until the afternoon, and a band of sunlight shone into the exercise yeard. I stood and faced it, letting it bathe my face and entire body. It was so splendid, I almost wept with emotion. I must have forgotten because I was astounded by the enormous power of the April sun. It was scorching hot and blinced me even through closed eyelids. When I opened them I could hardly see anything. The sky was pale blue and the sun was just an intense glow that I couldn't meet eye to eye. Soon I was marvelously warm and my prison sweatsuit was burning my thighs and chest. I prayed for it to last forever. I stood with my face to the sun and suddently forgot where I was, overcome with the feeling of peace and happiness you get when lying on a beach. Everything was flowing out of me and all I could think of was the glowing star to which we owe our lives and which we treat in such paltry fashion. I realized the mental pressure that such a star can exert on prople through its radiation, transforming them according its moods. I submitted to it, trustingly surrendering to its power. It was a splendid moment and raised my spirits enormously. When I returned to the cell, I was blinking like a bat and it took me some time before I could sit down and write this. Maybe the sun will be shining tomorrow too. In fact, it ought to go on getting hotter, because it is outside himan control and no one has the power to extinguish it, thank God for that. If people had the power, they'd have done so long ago to stop it from shining into their neighbor's garden."
And now a different book. Patrick Susskind's Perfume.
Quote: They had formed a circle around him, twenty, thirty people, and their circle grew smaller and smaller. Soon the circle could not contain them all, they began to push, to shove, and to elbow, each of them trying to be closest to the centre.
And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked him like hyenas.
But the human body is tough and not easily dismembered, even horses have great difficulty accomplishing it. And so the flash of knives soon followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of axes and cleavers aimed at the joints, hacking and crushing the bones. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it. A half-hour later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly from the earth. When the cannibals found their way back together after disposing of their meal, no one said a word. Someone would belch a bit, or spit out a fragment of bone, or softly smack with his tongue, or kick a leftover shred of blue frock coat into the flames. They were all a little embarrassed and afraid to look at one another. They had all, whether man or woman, committed a murder or some other despicable crime at one time or another. But to eat a human being? They would never, so they thought, have been capable of anything that horrible. And they were amazed that it had been so very easy for them and that, embarrassed as they were, they did not feel the tiniest twinge of conscience. On the contrary! Though the meal lay rather heavy on their stomachs, their hearts were definitely light. All of a sudden there were delightful, bright flutterings in their dark souls. And on their faces was a delicate, virginal glow of happiness. Perhaps that was why they were shy about looking up and gazing into one another's eyes.
When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
I have many favorite books, this is one of them.
"If you can convince enough people of your worldview, no matter how wrong you are, you're right! The real significance of a meme is it's power to pull together a superorganism."
The Licifer Principle by Howard Bloom
"Finally we counted all our money, decided we could not possibly afford to move and next day went bag and baggage to the most expensive pension in the city. It was wonderful -- big room, windows, clean white billows of curtain, central heating. We basked like lizards. Finally Al went back to work, but I could not bear to walk into the bitter blowing streets from our warm room.
"It was then that I discovered how to eat little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.
"In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
"Listen to the chamber maid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'intérieure. That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
"Take yesterday's paper ... and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course -- it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.
"When you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of questsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. Of course you are sorry, but____
"On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
"All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
"The sections of tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
"There must be some one, though, who knows what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings."
MFK Fisher
"Borderland"
Serve It Forth
I also love Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, but posting an excerpt won't do it justice. That book has to be read in its entirety...
I read Master and Margarita some time back. I loved it also.
"so what's it going to be then"
bm. I don't have the book with me here at work.
Oooh, I love The Master and Margarita too. I agree that you cant put an exerpt though because it is too multifaceted.
I saw the title to this thread and thought, "she's going to quote three men...." et voila!
Now, how did I miss this thread for almost 2 months?
ha! if i could post the entire book as a quote, i would.... hnmmmmmm..... can I?
You must have a deadline.
i have a few, they're all flying by, i can't even turn my head to see them go fast enough...
