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My Two Worlds QUOTES

My Two Worlds QUOTES

1 " Because sometimes the memory of what one has read tempers the actual experience, and the experience itself becomes, more than something physical, the realization of the reading... "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

2 " In general, I know that when speaking of private and opposing worlds, one tends to refer to divided, sometimes even irreconcilable facets of personality or of the spirit, each with its corresponding secret value and its psychological, metaphysical, political, or simply practical- or even pathological- content. But in my case there was neither a moral nor existential disjunctive, what was more, I saw that my two worlds weren't separated in an equal or reciprocal way; neither did one world linger in the shadows or in private as the flip side of the other, the visible one, who knows which; nor would they seek to impose themselves over the other or to merge as one, but force or not, as tends to occur in these cases. Nothing of the sort; they seemed a nearly abnormal example of coexistence, of adaptive tendency and of absolute absence of contrasts. I took all this into consideration, and it seemed worrisome and insoluble. . . But an instant later I resigned myself, thinking that when all was said and done I ought to bow to these conditions, because just as we cannot choose our moment to be born, we also know nothing of the variable worlds we'll inhabit. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

3 " For me parks are good when first of all, they're not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through a space that's at once alien and familiar. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

4 " … to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

5 " Una de esas ideas, de las primeras en ser asimilada hasta convertirse en propia, consistió en la asimilación, romántica primero, y moderna después, de las caminatas. Algo habrá fallado en mí, ya que cuando debí elegir una vida para el futuro ninguna me convención. Desde un temprano momento me he sentido inepto para albergar cualquier entusiasmo: incapaz de creer en casi nada, o en nada directamente; decepcionado de la política con anticipación; incrédulo ante la cultura juvenilista pese a ser entonces joven; espectador ocioso de la carrera colectiva hacia el dinero y el llamado éxito material; reticente frente a las bondades de la conducta caritativa o de la autosuperación; ajeno también a la idea de procrear y a las posibilidades de continuidad biológica; ajeno también a la idea de estar pendiente de los deportes o de alguna variante del espectáculo; incapaz de entusiasmarme ante alguna impracticable vocación profesional o científica; inepto para las artes o las artesanías; también para el trabajo físico o manual; inútil en síntesis para el trabajo en general; imposibilitado de soñar; descreído de cualquier opción religiosa pero anhelante de pasar por la primera experiencia de este tipo; demasiado tímido o incompetente para una entusiasta vida sexual; en fin, carente de todo esto no me quedó más opción que caminar, lo más parecido a la mente disponible y en blanco. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

6 " By now I'm sufficiently acquainted with the fatal succession of nights—Borges said this, I believe—to understand that no distraction or idea can stop time from being realised and the future from arriving. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

7 " Nonetheless, its future is known, much as one might wish to ignore it: the photo will live briefly in somebody's memory, and then become dormant once again—that is, in no one's active memory—and after that it will hibernate in some electronic corner of the world for a long time before disappearing for good. In the other photo, which I took so as to capture the entire building from the ground up, you can make out, on the eave or cornice above the doorframe, several patches of peeling paint. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds

8 " That's what life boiled down to, I could say as I approached a crucial birthday: not being discovered. All of us have one vital lie, without which routine would collapse; mine consisted of simulacra, in this case of literature. "

― Sergio Chejfec , My Two Worlds