“un hasard n’est jamais qu’un destin qu’on ignore” “… vouée aux gémonies” “la piste de son fantôme” “les solitudes jonchent le sol de prisons sans geôliers”
Sarr, La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. Other Press. Dedicated to Yambo Ouologuem.
“the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote” via Popova.
We must exercise and train in order to continue to progress, stay limber, exceed our limits, grow, reflect, and learn how to be fluid.
“… Now, under surveillance,
he needed to listen for words I couldn’t vocalize, being a shade—to intuit what I could visualize
When you appeared it was as if magnets cleared the air. I had never seen that smile before or your hair, flying silver. Someone waving goodbye, she was silver, too. Of course you didn’t see me. I called softly so you could choose not to answer—then called again. You turned in the light, your eyes seeking your name.
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world
my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph