Posts filed under “literature”.
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Oscar Humlum and I had been travelling companions for a long time before we met, though without knowing it.
There was nothing strange about this. It was perfectly normal. Because, for an orphan in Denmark, everything was very strictly regulated. Across the country ran certain tunnels that were invisible; they ran alongside each other, absolutely parallel. So, when Humlum and I met, we did not talk much about the past. This silence – it was so as not to pry, but also because we knew that, in a way, we had been travelling together, even though we had not seen one another.
Runaway by Alice Munro
She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was – you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in.
Joseph O’Neill on Beckett’s Letters
We also learn of pulled teeth, dry pleurisy (“I feel all right except for a reluctance to sneeze & belch”), intestinal pains, boils and — brace yourself — “a sebaceous cyst in my anus, which happily a fart swept away before it became operable.”
Autumn
Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night -
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
TE Hulme (1912)
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Mrs McCullers, I love you.
Margarita G. Smith, the sister of Carson McCullers, remembers “best one evening at a university lecture. After she had recited Stone Is Not Stone in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence. Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, ‘Mrs McCullers, I love you.’
