June 18, 2020
It hurts, but I’ve done it: written the day sans date. (At some point, A. nicknamed me Details Donkey).
When we discuss Don Quixote, we discuss the discussion. We engage with the exegesis first, and if we engage at all with the text, we do so second.
Or so it seems.
(I tried reading it once. I do enjoy criticism presented as the way to read it.)
I think this is so, because the analysis so often lacks details, except a passing acquaintance with the structure and those details found in the first and final 25 pages.
Piglia/Renzi’s comments on p. 84 (2nd volume).
In short, he speaks and acts in accordance with the novels he has read (which is to define his madness), and at the same time he aspires to become a writer who would write things in the future according to how he has experienced them (which will define his sanity).
Form: A story which occurs only online. Pure words. They stand only for themselves and then for something else, perhaps the world . . . This should remind people of the same relationship the world and words have.
Now I’ll drink the tea that I let cool while the crisp morning air brushes by my face and a woman sweeps the sidewalks below, a familiar sound that carries me off to childhood.
82, The Happy Years, Piglia
It is the sweeping, the sound of it, which is eternity. Even before Renzi said the sound reminded him of a childhood memory, I had arrived in his apartment in Buenos Aries watching him watch his childhood.
I was short-tempered with Bubs today. Nothing happened. I was just impatient and bored and she knew I wanted to leave. Fatherhood suits a part of me. Now, I could have been a writer and will not be.
The sun has granulated. The shadows are long. The day ends into words. The effect of light; how to describe it? I lose the eternity when I go for those details, I think because I lack the power to capture the moment and so describe everything as an effort to capture it. In this case, it is the quality of light, but really it is the circumstances, a certain freedom of thought, of spirit, a peace or openness that is rare when a person has a child.
There is youth everywhere on the street and I’m not it. Not part of the game of glances. The flirtation with future, an omnipresent chance or choice or possibility (which is false but like a drug, perfect, and not a lie).
