"The writer...

...who believes in life dies at his own hands. It must be experimental, in a way, to look life as it is, as it normally blends in, or as it becomes distinguished from the stream in which it flows. The whole of it is a premium whole, a totality to drive a universe in full, swinging motion, the pristine concept of death, the stop of it all. Look at Hemingway, Woolf and the memories of Proust, the melancholia of this world shall never end, like a stream, it will envelop nations and set in motion the whole of writers who love life but hate his own."
---- me, writing it on a piece of paper at Starbucks.

When I wrote this I was thinking about my two main characters, Leonard and Marcus, the space in which they occupy and the issues that Mark, a friend of mine, have raised about situating them in the spirit of time in which they belong. Perhaps, I am a classicist. I am a hard-boiled admirer of the syntax of Woolf, Proust and Joyce and the spirit of time in which my characters move is the culture of the past, the 1920s and their ideologies are partly Marxist and existentialist. What happens today? How, a writer, whose vision of today's spirit of time is lost? Am I lost? Lost in dreams, fantasies? Am I in doubt? And I wanted it all:

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing time, that rusty boots. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his scone against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro de color de sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five finger through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."

---- Telemachus, first part, ULYSSES (1921, James Joyce)
And I moaned a little while because inside i know i must write in the spirit of time, but where is it, the spirit, time?


Ciao!
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