“Here I am wanting to tell you I’m sorry again,” she said, smiling a little. “I know I’ve given you a bad afternoon. For ten seconds there I was ready to try and seduce you, I don’t know what it means myself. I”ve never seduced anyone and I’ve never been seduced, but I”ve always liked the word. I thought if I was ever going to find out what it meant it had better be now.”
—Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, Liveright, 2018 (1966)
Tinha gostado imenso do filme e resolvi ler o livro de Larry McMurtry, que como habitualmente nos livros, faz o filme parecer superficial e incompleto. É um daqueles que dificultam a vida ao próximo que decidir ler… (Que na verdade já decidi, “Nada a Temer” de Julian Barnes.)
How can I help you when you all want
different things—sunlight and shadow,
moist darkness, dry heat —
Listen to yourselves, vying with one another—
And you wonder
why I despair of you,
you think something could fuse you into a whole—
the still air of high summer
tangled with a thousand voices
each calling out
some need, some absolute
and in that name continually
strangling each other
in the open field—
For what? For space and air?
The privilege of being
single in the eyes of heaven?
You were not intended
to be unique. You were
my embodiment, all diversity
not what you think you see
searching the bright sky over the field,
your incidental souls
fixed like telescopes on some
enlargement of yourselves—
Why would I make you if I meant
to limit myself
to the ascendant sign,
the star, the fire, the fury?
—Louise Glück, A Íris Selvagem, Relógio D´Água, 2020 (obrigado C.)
Texting does work as a channel for communication, but it is slow and clunky. The person you are texting may have switched their phone off while you were composing your elegantly witty reply. You get no response. You are left emotionally high and dry: did you say something that offended them, or were they just not interested in your declaration of eternal love or your diatribe against the world?
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Old age brings its own peculiar terrors. No longer is it possible to believe, as we all did in our younger days, that we are indestructible and will live for ever. We have seen too many friends and family die. We have begun to experience the inevitable frailty of the human body. We lack the energy and the stamina to do what we once did.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021