Ständ_Chen

Cedo, tardes e noites depois, a vida está fria lá fora. sem o aconchego da alma e das palavras, com invólucros vazios a arder, saio para a visita de aconselhamento ao novo hamman, folheio as revistas da semana no pátio da agenda e ouvimos as dimensões possíveis para a caixilharia humana em futurologia de pintura e prova absoluta. o irmão está cá e a missa do sétimo dia da senhoria é hoje. acordo com uma crónica estilo pitta na cabeça e inspirado, limpo a água que escorreu da banheira e de mim pelos visores - celebro a centésima que recordo de folhas grossas e design giacomettista com um steiner fácil aqui e ali em rede, talvez um excerto da consoante muda no público, mas fico-me com estes três:

"Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness [...] But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. [...] Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace." (101) "Everything forgets. But not language. When it has been injected with falsehood, only the most drastic truth can cleanse it. Instead, the post-war history of the German language has been one of dissimulation and deliberate forgetting." (109)


Georg Steiner - Language and Silence in 1967 From a essay online Here

North Richmond Street being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.


3rd short_story from Dubliners by James Joyce (1914): continue reading Araby on Project Gutenberg...