Hopscotch - pg. 458

LIFE as a commentary of something else we cannot reach, which is there within reach of the leap we will not take.

Life, a ballet based upon a historical theme, a story based upon a deed that once had been alive, a deed that had lived based upon a real deed.

Life, a photograph of the noumenon, a possession in the shadows (woman, monster?), life, pimp of death, splendid deck of cards, ring of forgotten keys that a pair of palsied hands degrade into a sad game of solitaire.

Hopscotch - pg. 33

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heacy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, withh lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucing in together of or breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor os ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

Hopscotch - pg. 38

"What is an absolute, Horacio?"

"Look," Oliviera said, "it's just that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting."

Hopscotch - pg. 34

An absurd joy would take us by the waist and you would sing, dragging me across the street to enter the world of fish hanging in the air.

Hopscotch - pg. 401

THE business of the sophist, according to Aristophanes, is to invent new reasons.

Let us try to invent new passions, or to reproduce the old ones with a like intensity.

I shall analyze this conclusion once more, from a Pascalian point of view : true belief is somewhere in between superstition and libertinism.

José Lezama Lima, Tratados en La Habana

Hopscotch - pg. 380

Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as desideratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one's self about whether the world most likely is finite, whether history is coming to its optimum, whether the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages andentering the era of cybernetics. Tout va tres bien, madame la Marquise, tout va tres bien, tout va tres bien.

Hopscotch - pg. 379

Escapes are planned, they become technologized, they are furnished with the Modulor or with the Nylon Law. There are imbeciles who still believe that drunken-ness is a way, or mescaline, or homosexuality, anything magnificent and inane per se but stupidly elevated into a system, into a key to the kingdom. Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting out its silhouette from either atrophy or hypertrophy. The world does not exist, one has to create it like the phoneix.

Hopscotch - pg. 377

71

MORELLIANA

Basically, what is the this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an Eden, another world? Everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia. An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam, le bon sauvage (and so it goes ...), Paradise lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness ... And so much for islands (cf. Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for the Paris-Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing thhat this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalists is assigned to give us a precis of the quanta, Planck and  Heisenberg, knocks himself out in three columns eplaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us all with our feet sticking up in the air. An uncouth way of expressing one's  self,  really.

  

Hopscotch - pg. 406

and in that instant I know what I am because I know exactly what I am not (what I thereupon ignore astutely). But there are no words or a material in between word and pure vision, like a block of evidence. Impossible to objectivize, make precise that defectiveness that I caught during the instant and which was clear absence or clear insufficiency, but 

without knowing of what, what.

Hopscotch - pg. 479

'The irony of history has decreed that in the very moment in which the representation of reality wasbecoming objective, and ultimately photographic and mechanical, a brilliant Parisian who wanted to be realistic should be moved by his formidable genius to return art to its function as the creator of images ...' "

Hopscotch - pg. 479

A penciled note, almost illegible: "Yes, he suffers once in a while, but it is the only decent way out. Enough of hedonistic and prechewed novels, with psychologies. One must aim at the maximum, be a voyant as Rimbaud wanted to be. The hedonistic novelist is nothing but a voyeur. On the other hand, enough of purely descriptive techniques, of 'behaviorist' novels, mere movie scripts with the saving grace of images."

Hopscotch - pg. 384

That is how Paris destroys us slowly, delightfully, tearing us apart among old flowers and paper tablecloths stained with wine, with its colorless fire that comes running out of crumbling doorways at nightfall. An invented fire burns in us, an incandescent ture, a whatsis of the race, a city that is the Great Screw, the horrible needle with its night eye through which the Seine thread runs, a torture machine like a board of nails, agony in a cage crowded with infuritated swallows. We burn within our work, fabulous mortal honor, high challenge of the phoenix. No one will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we select the Great Screw as a rue, we lean towards it, we enter it, we invent it again every day with every wine-stain on the tablecloth, with every kiss of mold in the dawns of the Cour de Rohan, we invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes,  the day without manes, without Ormux or Ariman, once and for all and in peace and enough.

Hopscotch - pg. 147

"I was taking the liberty of using a trite image, Lucia. There is a bird sleeping in all good wines."

Hopscotch - pg. 96

She will never suspect that she has condemned me to read Spinoza. A strange judge, a judge with her hands, with her racing down the street, a judge because she can just look at me and leave me naked, a judge by being silly and unhappy and upset and dull and less than anything. By everything I have known from my bitter knowledge, with my rusty slide rule of a college graduate and enlightened man, by all of that judge. Fall down, swallow, with those sharp scissors with which you cut the sky of Saint-Germain-des Pres, pluck out these eyes that look without seeing, I have quickly been condemned without appeal to those blue gallows to which the hands of the woman caring for her son have raised me,let the execution be quick, quickly back to the false order of being alone and recovering one's self-sufficiency, self-knowledge, self-awareness. And with so much knowledge a useless anxiety to pity something, to have it rain here inside, so that at long last it will start to rain and smell of earth and living things, yes, living things at long last.

Hopscotch - pg. 89

"The only dangers for me are metaphysical." Oliviera said.

Hopscotch - pg. 69

No one seemed diesposed to contradict him because Wong had quietly appeared with the coffee and  Ronald, shrugging his shoulders, had  turned loose Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians and after a terrible scratching they reached the theme that fascinated Oliviera, an anonymous trumpet followed by the piano, all wrapped up in the smoke of an old phonograph and a bad recording, of a corny prejazz band, all in all like those old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies, its Charleston, its Black Bottom, its Shimmy, its Fox Trot, its Stomp, its Blues, to label its forms, this style and the other one, swing, bebop, cool, a counterpint of romanticism and classicism, hot and intellectual jazz, human music, music with a history in contrast to stupid animal dance music, the polka, the waltz, the zamba, a music that could be known andliked in Copenhagen as well as in Mendoza or Capetown, a music that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms, that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely surrounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs, a music that accepts all imaginations and tastes, a colection if instrumental 78's with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Biederbecke, or in the adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection, a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings with false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the moment, and that whole freemasony of Saturday nights in a student's room or in some basement cafe with girls who would rather dance to Stardust or When Your Man Is Going to Put You Down, and have a sweet slow smell of perfume and skin and heat, and let themselves be kissed when the hour is late and somebody has put on The Blues with a Feeling and hardly anybody is really dancing, just standing up together, swaying back and forth, and everything is hazy and dirty and lowdown and every man is in a mood to tear off those warm girdles as his hands go stroking shoulders and the girls have their mouths half-opened and turn themselves over to delightful fear and the night, while a trumpet comes on to possess them in the name of all men, taking them with a single hot phrase that drops them like a cut flower into the arms of their partners, and there comes a motionless race, a jump up into the night air, over the city, until a miniature piano brings them to again, exhausted, reconciled, and stil virgins until next Saturday, all of this from a kind of music that horrifies solid citizens who think that nothing is true unless there are programs and ushers, and that's the way things are and jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in and tonight in Vienna Ella Fitzgerald is singing while in Paris Kenny Clarke is helping open a new cave and in Perpignan Oscar Peterson's fingers are dancing around and Satchmo, everywhere,  with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something completely beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water,  an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into that obscure and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin, he shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or that perhpas there made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way, and that man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a deifnition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.

I set  right here and think

three thousand miles away,

set right here and think

three thousand miles away,

can't remember the night

had the blues this bad any-way...

Hopscotch - pg. 8

As for me, I'm already used to the fact that quietly exceptional things happen to me, and I don't find it too horribe when I go into a dark room looking for a record album and fell in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. That sort of thing. Or finding great gray or green tufts in a pack of cigarettes, or hearing the whistle of a locomotive coincide, ex officio in time and pitch with a passage from a symphony by Ludwig van, or going into a pissotiere on the Rue de Medicis and seeing a man apply himself to his urination and then step back from the urinal towards me as he holds in the palm of his hand as if it were a precious liturgical object a member of incredible colors and dimensions, and my realizing at that moment that this man is the replica of another (although they are not the same one) who twnety-four hours before in the Salle de Geographie had been lecturing on totems and taboos and had held up carefully in the palm of his hand ivory sticks, lyrebird feathers, ritual coins, magic fossils, starfish, dried fish, photographs of royal concubines, offering of hunters, enormous embalmed beetles which made the inevitable ladies present quiver with startled delight. 

Hopscotch - Opening

WOULD I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont de Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water.

Copyright 1966 by Random House, Inc.

Originally pubished in Spanish as Rayuela, by Editorial Suamericana Sociedad Anonima. Copyright 1963, by Editorial Sudamericana Sociedad Anonima.

The selection from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "A Coney Island of the Mind," is reprinted with the permission of the publisher, New Directions. Copyright  1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Spanish Lit. Galaxy. Systems of Prose, Lit. Engineering

Rulfo and Carpentier----> García Márquez, Fuentes, Roa Bastos, Vargas Llosa

Borges----> Arreola, Monterroso, Bioy Casares, Cortázar, Menen Desleal

Arlt (?)------> Bolaño, Aira, Cabrera Infante and all the folletinesque authors

Cela -for his character-(?) or Benet -for his prose-(?)-----> Javier Marías, Andrés Trapiello, Eduardo Lago

mucho gracias senhor Nihilo.