Greater than Lukacs

During last evening's reading, Clement was rummaging through his bag for a pen to underline a sentence. In the end, he found two pens instead of one from the right pocket of his baggy bermudas. He looked towards me, then laughed goofily at himself. It reminded me of the pen Georg Lukacs took out from his pocket when the KGB officer arresting him asked if he was carrying any weapon. The intransigent pen of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 he surrendered. For a moment, I thought he is more magnificent, greater than Lukacs, but of course, I did not tell him.

Lu Xun

John Stuart Mill declared that tyranny makes men cynical. He did not know that a Republic makes them silent' (Selected Works (1980), 2, p. 356)

Useless Actions - Ricardo Piglia

Repeating useless actions is a sign of old age. When one reaches ninety, one is already a little mad. Everything is a copy of something that was lived before. Hence, younger people hate the old: we live in what for them will be the future. Old age has the structure of a prophecy. Telling about the future something nobody could recognise clearly

(Prison Perpetua)

Greek Coin - Ricardo Piglia

Greek Coin

The tiny town is like a Greek coin that has sunk into the bottom of the river shining under the last light of the afternoon. It represents nothing, except that it is lost. There is a date, but out of time, and with the condition of art, as worn, not aged, it has been made a beautiful object that governs exchange and wealth.

For the last few days, I remembered the pages that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind about the work of art as miniature. Reality works towards an actual scale, while art works towards a miniature (in French). Art is a synthetic form of the universe, a microcosm that reproduces the specificity of the world. The Greek coin is an entire model of an economy, of an entire civilization, but at times, only a lost object that shines in the late afternoon under the transparent water.



(The Last Reader [El Ultimo Lector], Ricardo Piglia, p.13)