Sunday 13 January 2008

Things that are not there

If I had time, I would now say something about The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet by Rubem Alves who has a lot to say about this sort of thing, though coming at it from a rather different direction.
OK, I'm never going to have time to write as much as I want, so I'll put something down anyway.

Alves talks a lot about words and silence, about things that are not there. He quotes a story, which he says he read in something written by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez but he suspects is an ancient story, of a dead man washing up on the shore near a village. Arrival of the dead body brings life back to a suffocating community, as everyone tells there own story, transferred to the dead man. It could never have happened, had that man arrived at the village alive. It is his absence that releases their own stories.

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