As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, “I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”
- Harper Lee
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one …
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough
- Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
- Jack Kerouac, “October in the Railroad Earth”
by Carlos Fuentes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
In a word, ambitious. Fuentes distills the whole tragedy of Mexican history in a single protagonist: Artemio Cruz, a corrupt newspaper editor. Though the story is framed by death- Cruz on his deathbed, his hollow marriage, the muffled shots of the Revolution of which Cruz was once a member - it is ultimately redeemed by life. The spectacularly rich inner of life of Cruz which drives the narrative, the interior life of a country beset by the weight of a colonial past which it is powerless to discard. Fuentes is no idealist. Cruz dies, a long, horrendously painful death. And the Mexico from which Cruz departs is no less absurd than the plantation onto which he was born or the morally contemptible life which he has led. But there’s perhaps a more subtle, optimistic point within the feint, 300+ page line Fuentes draws between forgiveness and fatalism: that somewhere in the liminal space between darkness and light lies the importance of storytelling, the most basic and redemptive of human instincts.
I don’t really think communities are continuous … I think of them - and I’ve got a lot of proof - as isolated, contingent groups trying to improve on an illusion of permanence, which they fully accept as an illusion. If that makes any sense. Buying power is the instrumentality. But continuity, if I understand it at all, doesn’t really have much to do with it. Maybe realty’s not that commanding a metaphor.
- Richard Ford, Independence Day
