I recently purchased Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf from a library book sale. The book seemed a bit older. As it turns out, it probably hasn’t been opened since the mid to late sixties.
As I was paging through it before packing the book for a trip, two pieces of paper fell out. One was a tag for “M. Lowenstein” fabrics. The other was a set of labels for attaching to bundles of letters. You would bundle the local mail and the out of town mail separately and then use these labels to distinguish the two. The date on these is 1965.
Do these have any real value? No, but it’s cool to hold random pieces of life from 40 years ago that probably haven’t been touched since then.
IMG00081 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00082 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00083 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
A couple years ago I ordered the english-language version of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions used from the Amazon Marketplace. I found this when I got to the “Garden of Forking Paths” (which is one of my favorite Borges stories):
IMG00084 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
It was cool to have that commentary that was more than just notes, but directed to the reader. It adds dimension to the book besides the text on the pages.
Filed under: life, literature | Tags: gabriel garcia marquez, one hundred years of solitude, journals
A while ago, my brother gave me this small journal. It’s very simple with a nice recycled paper cover of sorts. I really didn’t appreciate it at first, but I started using it when I got to college. It’s been about two years since I wrote in it and, for whatever reason, I decided to pick it up and read through the other night. I wouldn’t mind sharing this one from a day in November, 2006.
This is why Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a genius:
One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything that he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
From: One Hundred Years of Solitude
That has to be one of my favorite passages in a book, ever. It’s those paragraphs of insight strewn throughout the book in the most beautiful language that also make it one of my favorites.
I’m currently reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” for a class on Russian texts. We’ve had to read about 100pgs for each class period. Our professor asked us: “Is it worth losing sleep and meals over?” So far I haven’t done either, well maybe a bit of sleep, but it isn’t anywhere near as painful as imagined and I quite enjoy it. The other day, I just sat on a stationary cycle for an hour and read.
