The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Monday, March 8, 2010

"Sea frozen inside us"


If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Franz Kafka 

I used this quote to argue the value of books over that of films, but there is better reason I like this quote. I like Kafka. How Kafka feared his father so much he stuttered in his father's presence, how he was an insomniac and spent those long nights clinging to literature is reason enough. But ever since I read "A Hunger Artist" I could not but marvel at his storytelling. His translated version did not suffice; I wished to read it in its original German language. I think this was when the sea frozen inside me finally broke. 
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