Member-only story
Small Islands of Coherence
*
Words have ceased to communicate. Every word is said so that you don’t hear another one. The word, even when it does not affirm, it affirms. The word does not answer, nor the question: it accumulates. The word is the fresh and green grass that covers the surface of the pond. It’s dust in the eyes, washed eyes. Word doesn’t show. The word conceals.
That’s why it’s urgent to peel the words so that the seed turns into a harvest. So that they are instruments of death — or salvation. So that the word is worth only as much as the silence of the act.
Words fall on him. All the words. The Good Ones & The Bad Ones. The wheat and the barley.
But only wheat gives bread.
~ José Saramago — Of this world and others
*
…Then, quite independently of all these literary preoccupations and in no way connected to them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I never managed to discover.
~ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
