Pequeña bitácora bibliográfica I (08.2024 - 03.2025)

Around the same time we first began to build Comma Directory, I acquired a little notebook which I wrote about for my very first post: "The Small Bibliographic Log" from the independent Colombian press, Rey Naranjo. Almost eight months later now, the log is filled to the brim with the readings and thoughts that have accompanied me from Colombia to Cyprus to Sweden to France and finally, England. Readings that I have often shared with others close to me, whether physically or virtually.

To commemorate the completion of my first pequeña bitácora bibliográfica, I have picked out a selection of quotes, some of them dug out of the tight corners I had stuffed them into as I ran out of space. And so, ...

"Recuerdo que [...] escribía sobre toda la superficie del papel, sin respetar ningún margen. Eso me daba la sensación de llenar completamente un vacío". – Mario Bellatin, El libro uruguayo de los muertos

"At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books." – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

« Nous voyons ces filets, leur beauté, leur appartenance tout à la fois à la liberté et à la capacité de capturer, oui capturer. » – Franklin Arellano & Julia Bejarano López, Entretierras

"Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long." – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air." – Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

« Est-il aucun moment Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement ? »
– Jean de La Fontaine, Fables Choisies

"Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier de bâtisseurs d'avenir. Surtout quand pour bâtir l'avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir les hommes vivants. L'homme n'est la matière première que de sa propre vie". – Jean Gino, Refus d'obéissance

"Whatever he did allowed him to be told [...] that he indeed existed, that he was not, as he had always dreaded, a figment of his own imagination, or of God's imagination, who disappeared when the lights went out." – Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

"¡Morir, Dios mío, morir así tísica a los veintitrés años, al comenzar a vivir, sin haber conocido el amor [...] morir sin haber realizado la obra soñada, que salvará el nombre del olvido; morir dejando al mundo sin haber satisfecho las millones de curiosidades, de deseos, de ambiciones [...]" – José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa

« Elle rêvait aux palmiers droits et flexibles, et à la jeune fille qu'elle avait été. » – Albert Camus, L'exile et le royaume

"Pienso, antes de ponerme polvos que aún no he comenzado y ya estoy por terminar". – María Mercedes Carranza, El oficio de vivir

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem there is no perfect ending. Indeed, there are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once on begins, there are only endings." – Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

"I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union. And in this sinking, all equality and all inequality shall be lost [...] I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity, where there is no work and no image." – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say; In the midst of his laughter and glee, He had softly and suddenly vanished away— For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." – Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

- Andrea