World is One Single Scream - Rodriogo Fresán

Pan is one of those two people a week who - statistics say - throw themselves onto the rails with British punctuality just before the train's triumphal entrance.

A woman screams when she sees him jump. A woman screams when she sees a woman screaming. All at once - screams are more contagious than laughter, and there are so many screams in this story - it's the same scream that leaps from woman to woman, from mouth to mouth. The same scream makes the cars brake, and the brakes scream too at the unexpected and futile effort of having to stop all those wheels and all the steel riding on those wheels. Yes, without warning the whole world is one single scream.

interrupted

I have embarked on the study of metaphysics several times, but happiness always interrupted - Macedonio Fernandez

The Bus and the Road - Lu Xun

For more than a year now I have spoken very seldom to young people, because since the revolution there has been very little scope for talking. You are either provocative or reactionary, neither of which does anyone any good. After my return to Peking this time, however, some old friends asked me to come here and say a few words and, not being able to refuse them, here I am. But owing to one thing and another, I never decided what to say - not even what subject to speak on.

I meant to fix on a subject in the bus on the way here, but on the road is so bad that the bus kept bouncing a foot off the ground, making it impossible to concentrate. That is when it struck me that it is no use just adopting one thing from abroad. If you have buses, you need good roads too. Everything is bound to be influenced by its surroundings, and this applies to literature as well - to what in China is called the new literature, or revolutionary literature.

However patriotic we are, we probably have to admit that our civilization is rather backward. Everything new has come to us from abroad, and most of us are quite bewildered by new powers. Peking has not yet been reduced to this, but International Settlement in Shanghai, for example, you have foreigners in the centre, surrounded by a cordon of interpreters, detectives, police, 'boys' and so on, who understand their languages and know the rules of foreign concessions. Out this cordon are the common people...

Some Thoughts on our New Literature - Lu Xun

Never Any End to Paris - Enrique Vila-Matas, New Directions, 2011, p. 30

I also saw Perec himself in real life. It was halfway through 1974, the year he published Species of Spaces. I'd seen lots of photographs of him, but that day, in the bookshop on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I saw him arrive for the launch of a book by Phillippe Sollers and do very strange things I won't go into now. What is certain is that for quite a while, so impressed to be seeing him in real life, I watched him intently, so intently that, at one moment, his face was a hair's breadth from mine. Perec noticed this anomaly - a stranger was a whisker away from his goatee - and reacted by commenting out loud, as if trying to let me know I should take my face elsewhere: "The world's a big place, young man."