South of the border, west of the sun

I was convinced everyone in the whole world lived in a single family home with a garden and a pet and

commuted to work decked out in a suit. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine a different lifestyle. (4)

I detested the term only child. Every time I heard it, I felt something was missing from me—like I wasn’t quite a complete human being. The phrase only child stood there, pointing an accusatory finger at me. (5)

But what really depressed and hurt me was something else: the fact that everything they thought about me was true. (5)

But I detected something else—something warm and fragile just below the surface. Something very much like a child playing hideandseek, hidden deep within her, yet hoping to be found. (6)

Something about her was unbalanced, and not many people felt she was much to look at. There was an adult part of her and a part that was still a child—and they were out of sync. And this out of sync quality made people uneasy. (7)

But there was one major difference between us—more than I did, Shimamoto consciously wrapped herself inside a protective shell. (8)

This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world. (10)

But that was it. Finally I stopped going. We were both at a delicate age, when the mere fact that we were

attending different schools and living two train stops away was all it took for me to feel our worlds had changed completely. (17)

But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. (20)

It was a strange feeling. I was no longer alone, yet at the same time I felt a deep loneliness I’d never known before. (23)

That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair. (28)

She was basically an honest, pleasant girl, someone people liked. But our interests were worlds apart. She couldn’t understand the books I read or the music I listened to, so we couldn’t talk as equals on these topics. In this sense, my relationship with her differed dramatically from that with Shimamoto. (30)

What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me. (31)

Naked, we had nothing to hide. I felt I knew more about her than ever before, and she must have felt the same. What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities. (33)

I wasn’t used to opening up to others. She was opening up to me, but I couldn’t do the same. I really did like her, yet still something held me back. (38)

I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something

absolute. (42)

But there also are scents that only one or two people will find wildly exciting. And I have the ability, from far away, to sniff out those special scents. When I do, I want to go up to the girl who radiates this aura and say, Hey, I picked it up, you know. No one else gets it, but I do. (42)

At first I thought: Okay, I’ll do my best, try to find something worthwhile in it; and for half a year I worked my butt off. Give it your best shot, and something good’s bound to happen, right? But I gave up. No matter how you sliced it this wasn’t the job for me. (50)

“The way you move your hands, your eyes, the way you’re always tapping something with your fingertips, the way you knit your eyebrows like you’re displeased about something—these haven’t changed a bit. Underneath the Armani suit it’s the same old Hajime.” (91)

“I’m not angry. I don’t get angry at things like that. This is a bar, after all. People come when they want to, leave when they feel like it. My job’s just to wait for them.” (101)

At long last I could understand Izumi’s loneliness when we were going out. Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter. Once, the door to that world had begun to open a crack. But now it was closed. (143)

“Hajime, you can’t tell anything from photographs. They’re just shadow. The real me is far away. That won’t show up in a picture.” (145)

“Hajime,” she began, “the sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.” (147)

“Lovers born under an unlucky star,” she said. “Sounds like it was written for the two of us.” “You mean we’re lovers?” “You think we’re not?” (169)

But something’s missing. I have a family, a job, and no complaints about either. You could say I’m happy. Yet I’ve known ever since I met you again that something is missing. The important question is what is missing. Something’s lacking. In me and my life. And that part of me is always hungry, always thirsting. Neither my wife nor my children can fill that gap. In the whole world, there’s only one person who can do that. You. (179)

I took a deep breath, trying to pull myself back to reality. But that reality was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a reality that didn’t seem to fit. (187)

There is no middle ground. Probably is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun. (196)

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an

alternate reality—to prove the reality of events.(200)

Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain, and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side? (201)

The picture of Dorian Gray

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. (2)

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. (5)

When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?" (5)

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know" (6)

The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. (6)

We would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other. (8)

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one (8)

You don't understand what friendship is, Harry," he murmured" or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one. (8)

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. (8)

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and bodyhow much that is! (9)

"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray." (10)

I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. (11)

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies (11)

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoralimmoral from the scientific point of view." (13)

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. (14)

People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as

thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. (16)

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. (17)

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. (17)

"I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry. "They are the last refuge of the complex. But I don't like scenes, except on the stage. (20)

Sin is the only real colourelement left in modern life. (21)

(He) had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing (22)

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones. (24)

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. (25)

To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intelectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.... (25)

"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?" asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. "I don't feel up to the journey." (27)

And now, my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch?" "I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very bad?" (29)

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. (30)

But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. (33)

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. (33)

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse

their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. (37)

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. (37)

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. (39)

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. (48)

"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me” (48)

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. (55)

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. (57)

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. (64)

To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are. (66)

I have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. I am different, but you must not like me less. I am changed, but you must always be my friend. Of course, I am very fond of Harry. But I know that you are better than he is. You are not stronger, you are too much afraid of life but you are better. And how happy we used to be together! Don't leave me, Basil, and don't quarrel with me. I am what I am. There is nothing more to be said. (70)

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have Little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. (83-84)

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. "It is perfectly monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." (112)

Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." (123)

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of

romance. (135)

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. (136)

Avances en el estudio de la objetología urbana

A la comunidad académica,

El desafío de andar por el mundo sin perder las cosas, es uno de los retos diarios que afronta el hombre. A mi juicio, el más difícil aunque nadie recaiga en ello. Y es que esta idea de propiedad, tan instaurado en el consumismo de vereda, nos hace sentir reales idiotas cuando se deja la billetera por allá, el pastillero por aquí y las medias bajo cama ajena.

Decía este autor “y no que esté mal si las cosas no nos encuentran otra vez cada día y son las mismas”. Pero, ¿Qué hay cuando deciden escaparse a tientas para darnos la peor de las lecciones? Así es. Y es que luego de dedicarme a la ciencia de la objetología durante años- porque de algo hay que vivir- he llegado a la conclusión de que estos no se pierden, se esconden. Vaya descubrimiento, me dirá el más testarudo, mientras de sus labios secos crece un ánimo de burla. Pues bueno, que más da. Estoy decidido en que los objetos se escapan por intervalos desesperantes, para desdicha de quienes no podemos cruzar la puerta sin el celular en el bolsillo. El objeto de esta artimaña, apuntan mis primeros hallazgos, recae en un juego que no ha sido hecho para nosotros sino a costa nuestra.

Pongamos un ejemplo práctico. Hace tres semanas, mis audífonos decidieron darme la contra. Desde entonces, me dan pistas de querer escaparse. Sucede de la siguiente forma: los meto en la cartera y aparecen en mi cama, intentan escaparse por los bolsillos del pantalón o de la mochila y de vez en cuando, aparecen en lugares recónditos. Como hace un par de días, que amanecieron boca abajo en el tendedero de ropa.  A veces, sin embargo, se arrepienten en el camino. Y es así es como, de repente, tengo al conductor en el teléfono diciendo: Señor, creo dejó unos audífonos blancos en el carro. ¡Victoria! He intentado seguir sus pasos con vano éxito. Coloco alarmas en la noche para rastrear su paradero. Nada, no se mueven. Pero apenas apago la luz para caer rotundamente dormido, caminan en bolas hacia el mejor escondite.

A los pseudo intelectuales, amantes de moscas, chompas de cuello alto y alpargatas de lona les digo: Estamos frente a un fenómeno real, un complot de gran envergadura. Una tarea científica cuyo menester es ser cumplida con escrutinio y rigor. Así pues, resulta que la simple labor de guardar cosas en su sitio o tener todo bien puesto empieza a tener tintes de una amarga ilusión. Pronto serán mis audífonos, quien sabe después mis zapatos hasta que un día, así como si nada, se me escape el riñón cuesta arriba por la calle a siniestras.

Añadidura. El autor de este discurso, del que no tenemos nombres ni apellido, pidió agregar un par de líneas. La verdad no entendimos mucho lo que quiso decir, así que lo transcribimos de forma literal para el buen entendedor, si es que existiese alguno: Afuera llueve, he decidido permanecer dentro. No es una medida cautelar, sino permanente. Mi primer estudio de caso ha sido exitoso. Siendo las tres de la tarde de un miércoles apabullado, mis audífonos han desaparecido. Los he visto saltar desde la ventana, sortear la pista uno tras otro hasta alcanzar la esquina de al frente. No queda entonces rastro de su existencia, ni aún un eco de alguna canción pegajosa. Menos una carta de despedida. Ahora yazgo en un rincón de este cuarto, en un silencio fortuito que amenaza con llevarse también mi piel a la avenida.