Saturday, August 25, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NXUJ2LNLFs
Spirited Away
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v20824315s6ck5FcH
Howl's Moving Castle
Spirited Away
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v20824315s6ck5FcH
Howl's Moving Castle
"But the tears are necessary. Don't you
remember what Othello said? 'If after every tempest came such calms, may the
winds blow till they have wakened death.' There's a story one of the old
Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mataski. The young men who wanted to
marry her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there
were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn't
stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could–he got the girl."
"Charming! But in civilized countries," said the
Controller, "you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't
any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries
ago."
The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes,
that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning
to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by
opposing end them … But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You
just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy."
(Brave New World)
(Brave New World)
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
-Loše stoje vaše stvari! Očigledno se kod vas formirala duša.
Duša? Ta čudna, drevna, odavno zaboravljena reč. Mi smo ponekad govorili "kao jedna duša", "ravnodušno", "dušegub", ali duša...
-To je... vrlo opasno- promrmljao sam.
-Neizlečivo- odsekle su makaze.
-Ali... pravo reći, u čemu je suština? Ja nekako... nemam predstavu.
-Vidite... kako da vam to... Pa vi ste matematičar?
-Da.
-Evo ovako - ravan, površina, eto to je ogledalo. A na površini smo vi i ja, eto - vidite, i žmirkamo očima zbog sunca, i ova modra električna iskra u cevi, a to je promakla senka aera. Samo na površini, samo za trenutak. Ali zamislite - od nekakve vatre ta se neprirodna površina odjednom razmekšala, i više ništa ne klizi po njoj - sve prodire unutra, onamo, u taj ogledalski svet, u koji mi sa radoznalošću zavirujemo, kao deca... Površina je postala zapremina, postala telo, svet, a ono u ogledalu - u vama - to je sunce, i vihor propelera od aera, i vaše uzdrhtale usne, i još nečije. I shvatate li: hladno ogledalo odražava odbija; a ovo - upija, i od svega je trag - zauvek. Jednom jedva primetna borica na nečijem licu - i vi je već imate zauvek: jednom ste čuli: pala je u tišini pak - i vi čujete sad...
-Da, da, baš...- uhvatio sam ga za ruku. Ja sad čujem: iz - slavine na umivaoniku - lagano kaplju kapi u tišinu. I ja sam znao da je to - zauvek. Ali ipak, zašto odjednom duša?
(J. Zamjatin, Mi)
Duša? Ta čudna, drevna, odavno zaboravljena reč. Mi smo ponekad govorili "kao jedna duša", "ravnodušno", "dušegub", ali duša...
-To je... vrlo opasno- promrmljao sam.
-Neizlečivo- odsekle su makaze.
-Ali... pravo reći, u čemu je suština? Ja nekako... nemam predstavu.
-Vidite... kako da vam to... Pa vi ste matematičar?
-Da.
-Evo ovako - ravan, površina, eto to je ogledalo. A na površini smo vi i ja, eto - vidite, i žmirkamo očima zbog sunca, i ova modra električna iskra u cevi, a to je promakla senka aera. Samo na površini, samo za trenutak. Ali zamislite - od nekakve vatre ta se neprirodna površina odjednom razmekšala, i više ništa ne klizi po njoj - sve prodire unutra, onamo, u taj ogledalski svet, u koji mi sa radoznalošću zavirujemo, kao deca... Površina je postala zapremina, postala telo, svet, a ono u ogledalu - u vama - to je sunce, i vihor propelera od aera, i vaše uzdrhtale usne, i još nečije. I shvatate li: hladno ogledalo odražava odbija; a ovo - upija, i od svega je trag - zauvek. Jednom jedva primetna borica na nečijem licu - i vi je već imate zauvek: jednom ste čuli: pala je u tišini pak - i vi čujete sad...
-Da, da, baš...- uhvatio sam ga za ruku. Ja sad čujem: iz - slavine na umivaoniku - lagano kaplju kapi u tišinu. I ja sam znao da je to - zauvek. Ali ipak, zašto odjednom duša?
(J. Zamjatin, Mi)
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
The cab left him at number four thousand four on that street in
the northwest part of Buenos Aires. It was not yet nine in the morning;
the man noted with approval the spotted plane trees, the square plot of
earth at the foot of each, the respectable houses with their little
balconies, the pharmacy alongside, the dull lozenges of the paint and
hardware store. A long window-less hospital wall backed the sidewalk
on the other side of the street; the sun reverberated, farther down, from
some greenhouses. The man thought that these things (now arbitrary
and accidental and in no special order, like the things one sees in
dreams) would in time, if God willed, become invariable, necessary
and familiar. In the pharmacy window porcelain letters spelled out the
name "Breslauer"; the Jews were displacing the Italians, who had
displaced the Creoles. It was better that way; the man prefered not to
mingle with people of his kind.
The cabman helped him take down his trunk; a woman with a distracted or tired air finally opened the door. From his seat, the cabman returned one of the coins to him, a Uruguayan twenty-centavo piece which had been in his pocket since that night in the hotel at Melo. The man gave him forty centavos and immediately felt: "I must act so that everyone will forgive me. I have made two errors: I have used a foreign coin and I have shown that the mistake matters to me."
Led by the woman, he crossed the entrance hall and the first patio. The room they had reserved for him opened, happily, onto the second patio. The bed was of iron, deformed by the craftsman into fantastic curves representing branches and tendrils; there was also a tall pine wardrobe, a bedside table, a shelf with books at floor level, two odd chairs and a washstand with its basin, jar, soap dish and bottle of turbid glass. A map of the province of Buenos Aires and a crucifix adorned the walls; the wallpaper was crimson, with a pattern of huge spread-tailed peacocks. The only door opened onto the patio. It was necessary to change the placement of the chairs in order to get the trunk in. The roomer approved of everything; when the woman asked him his name, he said Villari, not as a secret challenge, not to mitigate the humiliation which actually he did not feel, but because that name troubled him, because it was impossible for him to think of any other. Certainly he was not seduced by the literary error of thinking that assumption of the enemy's name might be an astute maneuver.
Mr. Villari, at first, did not leave the house; after a few weeks, he took to going out for a while at sundown. One night he went into the movie theater three blocks away. He never went beyond the last row of seats; he always got up a little before the end of the feature. He would see tragic stories of the underworld; these stories, no doubt, contained errors; these stories, no doubt, contained images which were also those of his former life; Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. He would submissively try to like the things; he wanted to anticipate the intention with which they were shown. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.
No letters nor even a circular ever arrived for him, but with vague hope he would always read one of the sections of the newspaper. In the afternoons, he would put one of the chairs by the door and gravely make and drink his maté, his eyes fixed on the vine covering the wall of the several-storied building next door. Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises. In other confinements, he had given in to the temptation of counting the days and the hours, but this confinement was different, for it had no end -- unless one morning the newspaper brought news of Alejandro Villari's death. It was also possible that Villari had already died and in that case this life was a dream. This possibility disturbed him, because he could never quite understand whether it seemed a relief or a misfortune; he told himself it was absurd and discounted it. In distant days, less distant because of the passage of time than because of two or three irrevocable acts, he had desired many things with an unscrupulous passion; this powerful will, which had moved the hatred of men and the love of some women, no longer wanted any particular thing: it only wanted to endure, not to come to an end. The taste of the maté, the taste of black tobacco, the growing line of shadows gradually covering the patio -- these were sufficient incentives.
In the house there was a wolf-dog, now old. Villari made friends with him. He spoke to him in Spanish, in Italian, in the few words he still retained of the rustic dialect of his childhood. Villari tried to live in the simple present, with no memories or anticipation; the former mattered less to him than the latter. In an obscure way, he thought he could see that the past is the stuff time is made of; for that reason, time immediately turns into the past. His weariness, one day, was like a feeling of contentment; in moments like this, he was not much more complex than the dog.
One night he was left astonished and trembling by an intimate discharge of pain in the back of his mouth. This horrible miracle recurred in a few minutes and again towards dawn. Villari, the next day, sent for a cab which left him at a dentist's office in the Once section. There he had the tooth pulled. In this ordeal he was neither more cowardly nor more tranquil than other people.
Another night, returning from the movies, he felt that he was being pushed. With anger, with indignation, with secret relief, he faced the insolent person. He spat out a coarse insult; the other man, astonished, stammered an excuse. He was tall, young, with dark hair, accompanied by a German-looking woman; that night, Villari repeated to himself that he did not know them. Nevertheless, four or five days went by before he went out into the street.
Amongst the books on the shelf there was a copy of the Divine Comedy, with the old commentary by Andreoli. Prompted less by curiosity than by a feeling of duty, Villari undertook the reading of this capital work; before dinner, he would read a canto and then, in rigorous order, the notes. He did not judge the punishments of hell to be unbelievable or excessive and did not think Dante would have condemned him to the last circle, where Ugolino's teeth endlessly gnaw Ruggieri's neck.
The peacocks on the crimson wallpaper seemed destined to be food for tenacious nightmares, but Mr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous arbor inextricably woven of living birds. At dawn he would dream a dream whose substance was the same, with varying circumstances. Two men and Villari would enter the room with revolvers or they would attack him as he left the movie house or all three of them at once would be the stranger who had pushed him or they would sadly wait for him in the patio and seem not to recognize him. At the end of the dream, he would take his revolver from the drawer of the bedside table (and it was true he kept a revolver in that drawer) and open fire on the men. The noise of the weapon would wake him, but it was always a dream and in another dream the attack would be repeated and in another dream he would have to kill them again.
One murky morning in the month of July, the presence of strange people (not the noise of the door when they opened it) woke him. Tall in the shadows of the room, curiously simplified by those shadows (in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer), vigilant, motionless and patient, their eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had overtaken him at last. With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it, or -- and this is perhaps most likely -- so that the murderers would be a dream, as they had already been so many times, in the same place, at the same hour?
He was in this act of magic when the blast obliterated him.
(The Waiting , J.L.Borges)
The cabman helped him take down his trunk; a woman with a distracted or tired air finally opened the door. From his seat, the cabman returned one of the coins to him, a Uruguayan twenty-centavo piece which had been in his pocket since that night in the hotel at Melo. The man gave him forty centavos and immediately felt: "I must act so that everyone will forgive me. I have made two errors: I have used a foreign coin and I have shown that the mistake matters to me."
Led by the woman, he crossed the entrance hall and the first patio. The room they had reserved for him opened, happily, onto the second patio. The bed was of iron, deformed by the craftsman into fantastic curves representing branches and tendrils; there was also a tall pine wardrobe, a bedside table, a shelf with books at floor level, two odd chairs and a washstand with its basin, jar, soap dish and bottle of turbid glass. A map of the province of Buenos Aires and a crucifix adorned the walls; the wallpaper was crimson, with a pattern of huge spread-tailed peacocks. The only door opened onto the patio. It was necessary to change the placement of the chairs in order to get the trunk in. The roomer approved of everything; when the woman asked him his name, he said Villari, not as a secret challenge, not to mitigate the humiliation which actually he did not feel, but because that name troubled him, because it was impossible for him to think of any other. Certainly he was not seduced by the literary error of thinking that assumption of the enemy's name might be an astute maneuver.
Mr. Villari, at first, did not leave the house; after a few weeks, he took to going out for a while at sundown. One night he went into the movie theater three blocks away. He never went beyond the last row of seats; he always got up a little before the end of the feature. He would see tragic stories of the underworld; these stories, no doubt, contained errors; these stories, no doubt, contained images which were also those of his former life; Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. He would submissively try to like the things; he wanted to anticipate the intention with which they were shown. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.
No letters nor even a circular ever arrived for him, but with vague hope he would always read one of the sections of the newspaper. In the afternoons, he would put one of the chairs by the door and gravely make and drink his maté, his eyes fixed on the vine covering the wall of the several-storied building next door. Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises. In other confinements, he had given in to the temptation of counting the days and the hours, but this confinement was different, for it had no end -- unless one morning the newspaper brought news of Alejandro Villari's death. It was also possible that Villari had already died and in that case this life was a dream. This possibility disturbed him, because he could never quite understand whether it seemed a relief or a misfortune; he told himself it was absurd and discounted it. In distant days, less distant because of the passage of time than because of two or three irrevocable acts, he had desired many things with an unscrupulous passion; this powerful will, which had moved the hatred of men and the love of some women, no longer wanted any particular thing: it only wanted to endure, not to come to an end. The taste of the maté, the taste of black tobacco, the growing line of shadows gradually covering the patio -- these were sufficient incentives.
In the house there was a wolf-dog, now old. Villari made friends with him. He spoke to him in Spanish, in Italian, in the few words he still retained of the rustic dialect of his childhood. Villari tried to live in the simple present, with no memories or anticipation; the former mattered less to him than the latter. In an obscure way, he thought he could see that the past is the stuff time is made of; for that reason, time immediately turns into the past. His weariness, one day, was like a feeling of contentment; in moments like this, he was not much more complex than the dog.
One night he was left astonished and trembling by an intimate discharge of pain in the back of his mouth. This horrible miracle recurred in a few minutes and again towards dawn. Villari, the next day, sent for a cab which left him at a dentist's office in the Once section. There he had the tooth pulled. In this ordeal he was neither more cowardly nor more tranquil than other people.
Another night, returning from the movies, he felt that he was being pushed. With anger, with indignation, with secret relief, he faced the insolent person. He spat out a coarse insult; the other man, astonished, stammered an excuse. He was tall, young, with dark hair, accompanied by a German-looking woman; that night, Villari repeated to himself that he did not know them. Nevertheless, four or five days went by before he went out into the street.
Amongst the books on the shelf there was a copy of the Divine Comedy, with the old commentary by Andreoli. Prompted less by curiosity than by a feeling of duty, Villari undertook the reading of this capital work; before dinner, he would read a canto and then, in rigorous order, the notes. He did not judge the punishments of hell to be unbelievable or excessive and did not think Dante would have condemned him to the last circle, where Ugolino's teeth endlessly gnaw Ruggieri's neck.
The peacocks on the crimson wallpaper seemed destined to be food for tenacious nightmares, but Mr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous arbor inextricably woven of living birds. At dawn he would dream a dream whose substance was the same, with varying circumstances. Two men and Villari would enter the room with revolvers or they would attack him as he left the movie house or all three of them at once would be the stranger who had pushed him or they would sadly wait for him in the patio and seem not to recognize him. At the end of the dream, he would take his revolver from the drawer of the bedside table (and it was true he kept a revolver in that drawer) and open fire on the men. The noise of the weapon would wake him, but it was always a dream and in another dream the attack would be repeated and in another dream he would have to kill them again.
One murky morning in the month of July, the presence of strange people (not the noise of the door when they opened it) woke him. Tall in the shadows of the room, curiously simplified by those shadows (in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer), vigilant, motionless and patient, their eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had overtaken him at last. With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it, or -- and this is perhaps most likely -- so that the murderers would be a dream, as they had already been so many times, in the same place, at the same hour?
He was in this act of magic when the blast obliterated him.
(The Waiting , J.L.Borges)
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