Home > Work > Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age
1 " a form of waiting that, depending on the circumstances, can resemble fascination, terror, curiosity, or hope. "
― Marc Augé , Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age
2 " Thus what strikes me today is less the partly illusory, subjective nature of the impression of general euphoria that I felt in that period than the certainty that it is gone forever. "
3 " talent, in both cases, is greatest when it coincides with a taste for truth—which, in short, is comforting. "
4 " So on my fiftieth birthday, deep within myself I had but one wicked wish—for something would tear me away from all these guarantees and comforts, that would necessitate my not merely continuing, but my starting anew.” When he wrote those lines in 1941, Zweig had already decided to kill himself, "
5 " giving life back to an adolescent who would otherwise disappear forever: "
6 " Nor did I ever forget the distress signals which my adolescent self sent out to the older woman who was afterward to absorb me, body and soul. Nothing, I feared, would survive of that girl, not so much as a pinch of ashes. I begged her successor to recall my youthful ghost, one day, from the limbo to which it had been consigned. "
7 " Maybe it is this discrepancy between the aging of the body and the longevity of subjective psychology that prompted the establishment of a distinction between body and soul, which seems obvious and natural to many and makes them believe, more or less vaguely, in the immortality of a spiritual principle. "
8 " the mention of age is only a reference point in the observation of the self. "
9 " The old” corresponded to a social class, a bit like “the young” does today. "
10 " It is hard for them to condemn the gerontocratic ideal advocated by Cicero and Cato because that denouncement itself, coming from them, could easily pass, in the guise of preserved or rediscovered youth, as a claim to authority, as a coy claim to wisdom, experience, and power, at the very least the power of influence. "
11 " The writing of autobiography or memoir is comparable to the effect of time on ruins: it works by means of subtraction and selection. "
12 " a relationship with time that removes all relevance from the distinction between memory and forgetting, something like a rediscovery or, as in the case of the ritual when it is successful, a renewal. "
13 " Writing plays the role of ritual when ritual is effective and manages to give those participating or attending the feeling that it reopens time. "
14 " Could I but end my days in this charming isle, without evermore stirring from it, or seeing a single inhabitant of the continent, who could remind me of all those calamities which have for so many years united to overwhelm me!… "
15 " it enhances the mixture of presence and escape that constitutes his “ecstasies, "
16 " despite the wounds from which he still suffers, the author of Reveries displays a remarkable serenity here; it is the calm after the storm, the evening glow, the feeling perhaps that despite everything, something was accomplished. "
17 " thus frame the evocation of a nonlinear time in which the after can be richer and more precise than the before, a time that remains in the face of time that passes, a time that provides pleasure and happiness. "
18 " Over the course of time, their successive readings will question and enrich it. Thus the work will no longer belong to the author; he will be dispossessed of it. "
19 " Over the course of time, their successive readings will question and enrich it. Thus the work will no longer belong to the author; he will be dispossessed of it. We could even say that the author will no longer belong to himself either—which corresponds to the most modest and ambitious of dreams he is able to formulate and to the wisest and wildest illusion he can maintain: to ignore age and let time run its course. To write is to die a little, but a little less alone. "
20 " A symbolic way of coming full circle in a world where representations of heredity express a substantial form of continuity between generations in other respects as well. "
