Beautiful word, shenanigans.

“I awakened early.  It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged to me.  Ever since the schoolteacher Inés had taught me the alphabet, I had written almost every night, but I felt that today was different, something that could change my life.  I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter.  I took a clean white piece of paper - like a sheet freshly ironed for making love - and rolled it into the carriage.  Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin.  I believed that that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years, that I had lived only for that instant, and I hoped that from that moment my only task would be to capture the stories floating into thin air, to make them mine.  I wrote my name, and immediately the words began to flow, one thing linked to another and another.  Characters stepped from the shadows where they had been hidden for years into the light of that Wednesday, each with a face, a voice, passions, and obsessions.  I could see an order to the stories stored in my genetic memory since before my birth, and the many others I had been writing for years in my notebooks.  I began to remember events that had happened long ago; I racalled the tales my mother told me when we were living among the Professor’s idiots, cancer patients, and mummies; a snakebitten Indian appeared, and a tyrant with hands devoured by leprosy; I rescued an old made who had been scalped as if by a spinning machine, a dignitary in a bishop’s plush chair, an Arab with a generous heart, and the many other men and women whose lives were in my hands to dispose of at will.  Little by little, the past was transformed into the present, and the future was also mine; the dead came alive with an illusion of eternity; those who had been separated were reunited, and all that had been lost in oblivion regained precise dimensions.”

- Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

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3. Beyond Time

“Snowflakes falling inside the globe.
       Before memory’s eyes, on Mademoiselle’s desk - she was my teacher until I reached the older children’s class, with Monsieur Servant - is the little glass globe.  When we had been good pupils we were allowed to turn it upside down and hold it in the palm of our hand until the very last snowflake had fallen at the foot of the chromium-plated Eiffel Tower.  I was not yet seven years old, but I already knew that the measured drift of the little cottony particles foreshadowed what the heart would feel in moments of great joy.  Time slowing, expanding, a lingering graceful ballet, and when the last snowflake has come to rest, we know we have experienced a suspension of time that is the sign of a great illumination.  As a child I often wondered whether I would be allowed to live such moments - to inhabit the slow majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time.
       Is this what it means to feel naked?  All one’s clothes are gone, yet one’s mind is overladen with finery.  Monsieur Ozu’s invitation has made me feel completely naked, soul-naked, each glistening snowflake alighting on my heart with a delicious burning tingle.

I look at him.
And throw myself into the deep, dark, icy, exquisite waters beyond time.”

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

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“Every time, it’s a miracle.  Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there’s this life we’re struggling through full of shouting and tears and laughter and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck - it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing.  Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion.  Even the singers’ faces are transformed: it’s no longer Achille Grand-Fernet that I’m looking at (he is a very fine tenor), or Déborah Lemeur or Ségolène Rachet or Charles Saint-Sauveur.  I see human beings, surrendering to music.

Every time, it’s the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing.  So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it’s just too much emotion at once: it’s too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing.  I’m no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir.

When the music stops, everyone applauds, their faces all lit up, the choir radiant.  It is so beautiful.

In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.”

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

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