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8294dc8
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Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside of What would happen then? I wonder what my sister, who understand books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She's so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she'd say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children - books like that short story by Garcia Marquez, "Light is L..
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children
imagination
reality
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a7e26b3
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Everyone says they're empty. Everyone says - vast and flat. Everyone - mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere - indomitable. But no one had ever told use about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes.
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storms
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Valeria Luiselli |
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fe4fc2c
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Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e219d87
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suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic and military powers.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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47be145
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But I suppose it's always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic ..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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5c72765
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He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they'd been the last Apache leaders--moral, political, military--of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a0aa6aa
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Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ec7865c
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Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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b0f496d
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line of an Ezra Pound poem I've never quite understood or remembered the title of: "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea."
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Valeria Luiselli |
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89dc421
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Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a man of average height. His short, thin legs supported a torso, which was at once solid and svelte. His head was the size of a small coconut, and he had a slender, flexible neck. He was a pantheis..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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f32b931
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However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ec17cac
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In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a4be7ef
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My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d63faed
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Baldy fell for Dakota. She fell for his bathtub. They began a torturous, dangerous, multilateral relationship.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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9d310b8
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En la lista de causas vino primero el planeta Saturno, y un siglo despues se sumaron a la lista el ocio, el exceso de conocimiento, las brujas, los magos y Dios. Para las causas divinas hubo siempre antidotos terrenales.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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c81942a
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Escritor es el que borra...Cortar, podar: encontrar una forma que ya estaba ahi" Pero las palabras no son plantas y, en todo caso, los jardines son para los poetas de corazon: los de corazon ajardinado. La prosa es para los que tienen espiritu de albanil."
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d04b6a2
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Algunos han comparado la experiencia de este primer aprendizaje con el extasis de un demiurgo que produce un universo, nombrandolo.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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0b6bf7d
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It's never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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0213f6b
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Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don't know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it's just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And witho..
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modernity
the-world
time
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Valeria Luiselli |