Plinio el Joven, en el libro tercero de sus Epístolas, escribe que no hay libro tan malo que no tenga algo bueno. Ese dictamen, que Cervantes leyó, confirma mi sospecha de que la belleza es común. Así lo insinúa el incompleto catálogo que se llama Otro poema de los dones. Sería muy raro que esta antología, que abarca más de medio siglo, no ( Read more... )

...and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about ( Read more... )

I have been taking George to Prospect Park twice a day for more than three years, but her running is still a revelation to me. Effortlessly, joyfully, she runs quite a bit faster than the fastest human on the planet. And faster, I’ve come to realize, than the other dogs in the park. George might well be the fastest land animal in Brooklyn. Once or ( Read more... )

«Он безжалостно поносил (говоря часто заведомую неправду) страны Запада, и в частности Италию, проведя в этой стране большую часть времени.» Это про Горького :)

...and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o’clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with given my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places, and more people trickling in even after the film had already started but I didn’t care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the ( Read more... )

...the denunciation at about this time of the prominent constructivist mathematician Nikolai Luzin. Luzin was accused of taking "a Menshevik and Trotskyist po­sition in mathematics, as is apparent in his intention to deprive the proletariat of the important weapon of transfinite induc­tion."

( Read more... )

Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?”

“Give me a break,” I said, after an incredulous pause.

“No, am serious,” he said mildly. “I am alcoholic. I know it! I was alcoholic from ten years old, when I took my first drink. But you, Potter-you’re like my dad. He drinks-he ( Read more... )

“Shit.” I stood appalled at the bar, ice tongs in hand, feeling sick to think of another person ruined by the same poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked my own life.

...

BY THE TIME I left, after eleven, the rain had stopped and the streets were glassy with water and Kenneth the night man (same heavy eyes and malt-liquor smell, bigger in ( Read more... )

еду, - рассказывает, - как обычно в дамаск, и тут
чувствую, что-то не то, оборачиваюсь посмотреть,
кто там сигналит, может, менты пасут,
смотрю, не то что-то, цветут эти цветы, а так
не бывает, они вообще не цветут, особенно сквозь гудрон,
на автобане особенно, на разделительной полосе,
и вокруг все гудят, понимаешь, одновременно все,
окна открыты и ( Read more... )