i have been in the library today, and will here record some things i read


1. 'The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making-- the imagination--is a function of man's inescapable freedom [...] It is by his fiction that we know he is free.'

2. 'Whether he be original or plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. [Among] possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free [...] whether I wish to be or not... to be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was.'

3. 'All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.'

(1 is Frank Kermode. 2, Ortega y Gasset 3 Sartre.)




i think i believe in magic and i think that's the problem