The Night Porter

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Andrei Tarkovsky, “Nostalghia”. 1983.

“How quickly we exile the truth of love from the love of truth.”

—

Richard Jackson, from “The Rivers,” The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

“Sevginin hakikatini nasıl da çabucak ayırıyoruz hakikatin sevgisinden.”

Yani diyor ki gerçek sevgi hakikatin sevgisinden (doğruluğa bağlılıktan) ayrılamaz. Ama genelde şöyle düşünmeye meyilliyiz: “Doğruyu bildiğim halde ona uygun davranamam. Eğer doğruyu söylersem dışlanırım (dokuz köyden kovulurum), daima doğruya bağlı kalırsam zarar görürüm, yoksa ben iyi biriyim ve gerçek sevgiyi hak ediyorum.” Hayır, etmiyorsun.

Guerrillera de la "Organización del Pueblo en Armas en las montañas." Guatemala. Junio, 1982. Photo: Pedro Valtierra

I fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Please share. DM me if you need direct links to anything. My commissions are also open, I can give a discount on those if needed.

5/24/2022

Roy DeCarava, Woman walking above, New York, 1950

Glass bottle shaped like a date, Greek and Roman Art

Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Glass

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/245683

EVA FERRI: You insist on the centrality of the writing, you called it a chain that pulls up water from the bottom of a well. What are the features of your approach to writing?

ELENA FERRANTE: I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman, like the middle-class women who are our contemporaries. At the beginning I need curtness, terse, clear formulas that are free of affectations and demonstrations of beautiful form. Only when the story begins to emerge with assurance, thanks to that initial tone, do I begin to wait with trepidation for the moment when I will be able to replace the series of well oiled, noiseless links with a rusty, rasping series of links and a pace that is disjointed, agitated, increasing the risk of absolute collapse. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished. I very much enjoy breaking through my character’s armor of good education and good manners, upsetting the image she has of herself, undermining her determination, and revealing another, rougher soul; I make her raucous, perhaps crude. I work hard to make the fracture between the two tonalities surprising and also to make the re-entry into the tranquil narration happen naturally. While the fracture comes easily—I wait for that moment, and slip inside it with satisfaction—I very much fear the moment when the narrative has to compose itself again. I’m afraid that the narrating “I” won’t be able to calm down. But above all, now the readers know her calm is false, that is won’t last, that the narrative orderliness will break up again.

— Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 2016