Vom Beobachten des Beobachters der Beobachter

Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Der Auftrag

a book that I can only recommand ... So weit an den Rand des Abgrundes aber hat sich keiner gewagt wie er ... [Klara Obermüller - Die Weltwoche]

Out of the Fire, into the Cold

I saw him running like mad in the night. I looked around - no one was following him, so I asked him:

- What are you running from?

- I just escaped the great fire.

- What fire?

- Haven’t you heard? The fire that burned down the Great Library.

- Gosh! I did not know... So, how did you get out?

- When the flames reached the first chapter of Green and Yellow, Black and Snow, I jumped off the pages, then off the shelf and left the burning library running for my life.

- Excuse my ignorance, but what book is Green and Yellow, Black and Snow? And - pardon my boldness - what is your name?

- My name is Tontinto, and Green and Yellow, Black and Snow is the book where I was born and where I lived until today. It’s a rather new book, maybe this is why you did not hear about it.

And he started crying so hard that I began shedding huge tears, too. After a while, I asked him:

- Tontinto, were there many survivors?

- Oh, lots and lots, it looked like rush hour. Practically everybody got out, you know, they were running around, there was panic, but I saw all the clowns, I saw Winnie the Pooh, and Alice, and Dorothy, I saw Hänsel and Gretel holding hands while running, and Cinderella, and Snow White, a bunch of witches, and the Wizard. Plus a lot of others I don’t know well: Hamlet, and Phaedra, and Aeneas, Jonah, Odette, Marcel the Sensitive - all running (well, not all, an old guy, Oedipus, was limping and jumping) and calling each other’s names. There were too many to remember them all.

- And the dragons, the dinosaurs, the flying horses...?

- Yup, all of them are safe. I think that they are roaming around now in the cold. I feel so bad for them. Some of them rode on elephants, some on dinosaurs; the flying carpets and horses were booked solid, you can imagine. On a large carpet I saw Simbad, the Little Mermaid, Alladin, the forty thieves, Don Quixote, and the seven dwarfs flying away.

- So no one was left behind, Tontinto, right?


- Not quite, there were the salamanders and a funny bird called Phoenix, I think. A few of us tried to go back and save them, but there was a group of women who were holding hands and were singing all the time who did not let us pass. Funes, a great guy with whom I made friends, remembered that they were called the chorus, and said that you should not mess with them. But, anyway, the salamanders and the bird were dancing and playing in the fire, and as they seemed to enjoy themselves there, we left. And you know what? I think that a dragon set the library on fire, but I cannot be too sure.

- Wow, what a story! I said. And where are all of them now?

- They all got lost, like me. And they have no place to return to - the books are gone, my book is gone. I have no home....

And he started crying again, it broke my heart. Tontinto needs a home so badly... but what can I do? I am not a good storyteller, I gave him shelter in this story for a few minutes, but he needs a good story to live in. Is there anyone around who wants to write a story and be a foster writer for poor Tontinto? He is round like a ball and green like a frog, has two eyes on the same side of his head - the other is the dark side of Tontinto. He is a very nice chap, speaks a little French, and used to be a funny jester in his book.

Please help! Anyone?



Ilinca, Andrei & Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu

"... am recitit povestea, mi-am amintit de ziua in care am scris-o, acum vreo opt ani, sarind din asternuturi spre cana de cafea, printre pijamalele lor cu girafe si pinguini; copiii sint acum mari, adica nu mai sint copii in casa - ar trebui sa fac ceva. iar rick wakeman-ul de pe blogul tau nu e mai putin nostalgic."

Alberto Manguel - A History of Reading / Eine Geschichte des Lesens

Manguel takes us through the history of reading as if leading us room by room
through the infinite library Borges constructed in one of his famous stories.


Ein AUSERGEWÖHNLICHES Buch. Ein Meta-Buch - ein Buch über die Bücher.
Lies, um zu leben. - Gustave Flaubert [Brief an Mll. de Chantepie, Juni 1857].

Ein Genuß, von Kapitel zu Kapitel - für die ohne zu lesen, nicht leben können.

my recommendation,

We – Yevgeny Zamyatain

Freedom and Criminality

“Liberation?” Astonishing how the criminal instincts do survive in the human species. I choose the word criminal advisedly. Freedom and criminality are just as indissolubly linked as . . . well, as the movement of an aero and its velocity. When the velocity of an aero is reduced to 0, it is not in motion; when a man’s freedom is reduced to zero, he commits no crimes. That’s clear. The only means to rid man of crime is to rid of it …

Paradise

“Paradise,” he began, and the p meant spray. “The old legend about Paradise-that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait . . . listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil-because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we give him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple-Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness. Here’s where the ancients would stand around discussing things, weighing this and that, racking their brains: is this etichal, unetichal? . . . Well, you get the point. What I’m saying is, there’s this great poem of Paradise, right?

Limit of Function

Well, of course, it’s clear that you can’t establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it’s also clear that what I felt yesterday, the stupid “dissolving in the universe” if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that’s exactly what death is-the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e. love and death. . . .
Yes, that’s it, that’s it. That’s why I’m afraid of I-330, why I fight against her, why I don’t want . . . But why do those two exist side by side in me: I don’t want and I want? That’s just what’s so horrible: What I want is that blissful death of yesterday. What’s so horrible is that even now, when the logical function has been integrated, when it’s obvious that is contains, as a hidden component, death itself, I still want her, my lips, my arms, my chest, every millimetre of me wants her . . .


Who you really are

“Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading. . . .”


Entropy and Energy

. . . Or, no, I’d better put it in your language so you’ll understand it sooner. Look – there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement. Our – or rather, yours – ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy as they worshipped God, But we anti-Christians, we . . . “