I've been remiss.

I've chewed through a few novels and a small sandwich plate of short stories in the past few weeks, and in the process of getting that done along with my own writing, which seems to be consuming nearly half my waking hours these days, as well as playacting as a tourist during my remaining few weeks here in San Diego, I've acquired quite a backlog of quotes. My ballpoint-blue underlines and triple-pressed page corners scream at me from their spots on my shelves. What is it about quotes that people find so amazing? Not just amazing, but intrinsically binding to being human. We quote and quote and quote, books, movies, poems, presidents, leaders, explorers, inventors. Our series of quotations could serve as a timeline for the history of human capacity of thought and emotion. There are even quotes about how useless quoting quotes are. And true, they are indeed useless, in that they won't do anything for us. Our quotes cannot pay the bills. They can't fill our holes. They won't bring anyone home from war and they won't fix any sociopolitical-economic crisis. But in them a certain level of connectivity steams forth, and when we read something that hits us in just the right way, a phrasing of words or a elucidation of thought, we feel it hit home, as though the words we've just read were not the writer's words at all, but something stolen right out of our hearts - our thoughts and our dreams and our desires, magically transposed on paper for us to see. It is quite possible that art is ourselves reflected back at ourselves, however absurd, tragic, and terrifying that is. Let's start the show.

For a period I was lazing about between novels, enjoying the short story fruits that come from that. The nice thing about that is I can expose myself to different writers I may not have been familiar with - in this case it was from a book of anthologized Latin American short stories, so many of them were new - and then mark their names down on my Find Novels Of list. 

First comes Augusto Roa Bastos, Paraguayan poet, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and author of children's books. Why does it always seem like the Latin American writers dabbled in everything? So many of them seem to carve credential inroads into nearly everything possible, even trying their hand in politics as well. These snippets come from "Unborn", a story, more like a six page fury of words, that braids two voices: a mother and the unborn child she carries inside her, as the two of them work to come to grips with and search their violent memories, spanning the whole spectrum of life to death, love and fear. 

"If you would only listen to me, everything would be better. Because what makes me melt with pleasure and heals me is talking of those things from before being born; not so as to make you suffer, believe me; just so we'll be closer to each other; they make me feel that I am going back inside you again till I'm drenched to the bone with your darkness, snugly wrapped in the warmth of your anxiety, feeling in my head the gentle swaying of your footsteps that calm me with your own concern, in the course of that endless journey through the hills in search of Papa. Let's see if I remember."

"Oh, the sadness of not being able to want what you want, of not being able to make you understand what I want."

"If you don't thrash me again, I myself will ram my head against the adobe wall, against the trees, like a kid goat, till I knock myself senseless and fall to the ground, just to show you that we're of one mind."

"I know that you're right to beat me because of those memories that hurt you; but you're not right to beat me because I can remember so far back. My guilt and my remorse may be very forgetful. I don't know. What I do know is that I have to keep kicking my feet in the same place all the time, hemmed in on all sides, trampling on this heavy, waterlogged sky, that's pushing on my feet; struggling so as not to fall to earth like a flat shapeless lump, an orphan before being born, disliking life before ever coming to know it."

"When he sang he grew to the size of paradise, and people sat in his shadow thinking that life isn't all that bad."

"There is a point at which laughter and weeping are in no way different; that point at which they deliriously bring out their desperation from inside their bodies, emptying them of their bad noises."

"You kept your promise. And I alone know that a dead man, whom people call my father, has come here inside to share with me a place that doesn't have room enough for the two of us. And I know tha sooner or later he is going to end up shoving me out of here. That's why I put up with your beatings, very humbly, without protesting; the insults that you constantly heap on me. I know that your greatest duty is now towards him; that since he is the weakest one now, the one most in need, you're obliged to devote more care to him than me."

Next comes another great one from the legendary giant - literally and figuratively - Julio Cortázar, out of, my love, Argentina, a country I could and hope to see myself living in one day. "The Night Face Up" is a quick furnace-blast of a story I read in a Latin American fiction undergrad class, but once I returned to it a few weeks ago on a train ride home I sunk right into it, wholly immersed in a new depth altogether. The train I was on disappeared into the background, much in the same way past and present blur in this story. The protagonist, after a motorcycle accident in the city, dreams he is an imprisoned Aztec warrior in the War of the Blossoms being carried towards his sacrificial death, while at the same time an Aztec warrior being sacrificed dreams he is a modern day Porteño in the hospital after a motorcycle accident, leaving this ambivalence about who the story is actually about hanging and up to interpretation. Fascinating stuff.  

"To be afraid was nothing strange, there was plenty of fear in his dreams."

"Everything had its number and its limit, and it was within the sacred limit, and he on the other side from the hunters."

"The smell of war was unbearable, and when the first enemy jumped him, leaped at his throat, he felt an almost-pleasure in sinking the stone blade flat to the haft into his chest. The lights were already around him, the happy cries. He managed to cut the air once or twice, then a rope snared him from behind

'It's the fever,' the man in the next bed said. 'The same thing happened to me when they operated on my duodenum. Take some water, you'll see, you'll sleep all right.' 

"He realized that he was running in pitch darkness, although, above, the sky crisscrossed with treetops was less black than rest. 'The trail,' he thought. 'I've gotten off the trail.'"  

"It was difficult to keep his eyes open; the drowsiness was more powerful than he. He made one last effort; he sketched a gesture toward the bottle of water with his good hand and did not mange to reach it, his fingers closed again on a black emptiness, and flares, and face up he choked out a dull moan because the roof was about to end, it rose, was opening like a mouth of a shadow, and the acolytes straightened up, and from on high a waning moon fell on a face whose eyes wanted not to see it, were closing and opening desperately, trying to pass to the other side, to find again the bare, protecting ceiling of the ward."

"He managed to close his eyelids again, although he knew now he was not going to wake up, that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are - a dream in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs. In the infinite lie of the dream, they had also picked him up off the ground, someone had approached him also with a knife in his hand, approached him who was lying face up, face up with his eyes closed between the bonfires on the steps."