9
" Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas—the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like. "
― Roberto Bolaño , The Insufferable Gaucho
12
" Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be - a book, an expression, a misplaced object - in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the "new," which has been there all along. "
― Roberto Bolaño , The Insufferable Gaucho
13
" En un oasis uno puede beber, comer, curarse las heridas, descansar, pero si el oasis es de horror, si sólo existen oasis de horror, el viajero podrá confirmar, esta vez de forma fehaciente, que la carne es triste, que llega un día en que todos los libros están leídos y que viajar es un espejismo. Hoy, todo parece indicar que sólo existen oasis de horror o que la deriva de todo oasis es hacia el horror. "
― Roberto Bolaño , The Insufferable Gaucho
14
" In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror. "
― Roberto Bolaño , The Insufferable Gaucho
