There’s not too fine a distinction between humor and tragedy; even tragedy is in a way walking a tightrope between the ridiculous, between the bizarre and the terrible. Possibly the writer uses humor as a tool; he’s still trying to write about people, to write about man, about the human heart in some moving way, and so he uses whatever tool that he thinks will do most to finish the picture which at the moment he is trying to paint, of man. He will use humor, tragedy, just as he uses violence.
—William Faulkner, from his lectures at the University of Virginia
“I’ll kill him though,†he said. “In all his greatness and his glory.â€
Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.
“I told the boy I was a strange old man,†he said. “Now is when I must prove it.â€
The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.
—Kelly Link, Travels with the Snow Queen, from her first collection, Stranger Things Happen
No, there’s no record [that Chickasaws were known to be cannibals], but then who’s to say whether at some time one of them might not have tried what it tasted like? Quite often young boys will try things that they are horrified to remember later just to see what it was like, what the sensation was like. Maybe as children they may have found a dead man and cooked some of him to see what he tasted like. But they were not cannibals as far as I know.
—William Faulkner
source similar
Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path—that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.
—John Crowley, Engine Summer
Entonces comprendà que su cobardÃa era irreparable. Le rogué torpemente que se cuidara y me despedÃ. Me abochornaba ese hombre con miedo, como si yo fuera el cobarde, no Vincent Moon. Lo que hace un hombre es como si lo hicieran todos los hombres. Por eso no es injusto que una desobediencia en un jardÃn contamine al género humano; por eso rÃo es injusto que la crucifixión de un solo judÃo baste para salvarlo. Acaso Schopenhauer tiene razón: yo soy los otros, cualquier hombre es todos los hombres, Shakespeare es de algún modo el miserable John Vincent Moon.
—Jorge Luis Borges, La Forma de la Espada
and in english, though i regret i don’t know who translated it:
Then I realized that his cowardice was incurable. I begged him, rather awkwardly, to take care of himself, and left. I was ashamed of this frightened man, as if I were the coward, and not Vincent Moon. One man’s deeds are like the deeds of all mankind. This is why it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate the human race; this is why the crucifixion of a single Jew should suffice to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am others, any man is all men. Shakespeare is, in some way, the miserable John Vincent Moon.
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Shape of the Sword
… the Castelreynaldian fantastic does through indirection, unsettling symbol, or calm account of the impossible the very thing literature is meant to: lend voice to solitary experience or singular witness. How many of us, back from a foreign land, then face the difficulty of describing our time there? How often, over the breakfast table or even a lover’s pillow, have we found it hard to articulate a particularly compelling dream? How do we negotiate our return from the unrepeatable and unprovable; how do we import, intact, what only we have seen back into a social world—a world of consensual meanings—and make it matter to others?
— Edward Gauvin, Châteaureynaud’s translator. Full post here.