This blog is mostly meant for fiction and literature lovers. The quotations and thoughts are of Rosa Montero, a Spanish writer and journalist. A special gratefulness to Raquel Ruiz, my teacher, who brings up contemporary Spanish literature to me. And also to Veronika who pointed out the non-existence of the word mourning in the Slovak and the Czech language.
Rosa Montero has written a book that can be loosely translated as The Funny Idea of Never Seeing You Again. Mourning. The period after losing a close person. The transition to acceptance of the loss. There are languages that have a special word for this experience. El duelo in Spanish. In Slovak, one “wears sadness”. In traditional setting, it is shown to the world by wearing black. Do men wear black, too? Or is it only women?
A year that a human being needs to settle into the idea of never seeing the beloved face again; the well-known smile, smell, voice is gone. The book is neither sad nor pessimistic, on the contrary, it is invigorating, uplifting, tickling curiosity about people and their stories.
These are a few ideas that inspire me a lot. Reading the book is having a conversation with an intimate friend. So, I hope Rosa Monterro would give me permission to translate and share them.
Here they are:
“Creativity is an alchemist intention to transform suffering into beauty.
Art in general, and particularly literature, are strong weapons against Bad and Pain.
We need to narrate ourselves to live. Our memory is in fact imagined. A story we rewrite every day.
When I was younger, I wanted to raise myself as a writer and create a great book about the human condition. Now, I modestly aspire at the freedom… And it is not about raising myself, but the contrary, descending, going down to the bottom of my unconsciousness where I hopefully can hear a piece of the collective song. Because deep in me there are we all. Only in total liberty can one really dance, make love, and write well. And those are the most important activities. And therefore, if you are asking me: Are you completely free in the text you are writing? I respond: Well, not. But I am heading there.
Fictional characters are marionettes of the unconsciousness.
I think there is no good fiction that does not strive at universality, that does not try to understand what it means to be a human.
The more you are nearing the essential, the less you can put it in words.
The marrow of the books lies in the corners of words. In good novels, the important is in the eclipse, in the air that circulates between the characters, in little sentences. Therefore, I cannot say more about Pablo: his place is within the silence.”
Finally, the last extract that brings up Carl Gustav Jung and the spirituality of being One:
“I have a raising sensation that there is a continuation of human mind. That, in fact, there is a collective consciousness uniting us, that we dance unison without knowing it. And the coincidences form a part of that dance, of that music, common song that we finally do not hear completely, because the wind brings us only isolated notes.”
The official site of the author:
http://www.rosamontero.es/index.html
