Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 05/13/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Poem of the Day: Vernon Watkins

Waterfalls

Always in that valley in Wales I hear the noise
   Of waters falling.
There is a clump of trees
We climbed for nuts; and high in the trees the boys
   Lost in the rookery's cries
Would cross, and branches cracking under their knees

Would break, and make in the winter wood new gaps.
The leafmould covering the ground was almost black,
But speckled and striped were the nuts we threw in our caps,
   Milked from split shells and cups,
Secret as chestnuts when they are tipped from a sack,

Glossy and new.
                         Always in that valley in Wales
     I hear that sound, those voices. They keep fresh
          What ripens, falls, drops into darkness, fails,
               Gone when dawn shines on scales,
                    And glides from village memory, slips through the mesh,

And is not, when we come again.
                                                  I look:
     Voices are under the bridge, and that voice calls,
          Now late, and answers,
                                              then, as the light twigs break
               Back, there is only the brook
                    Reminding the stones where, under a breath, it falls.
--Vernon Watkins