“The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”
— Ken Liu, Translator’s Postface to The Three-Body Problem
Crazy how we are everything that has happened to us but then you meet someone and you don’t see everything that has happened to them you just see them. And you both try to explain everything that has happened to you but your words and memories are so biased and oversimplified.
“EVERY year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight is hung up on its peg beside the door.”
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, tr. by Thomas Teal (Sort Of Books, 2003)
The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie himself to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.
horse laying down looking at camera nose rather close to the lens its face is one of tranquility though a spark of curiosity and life still remains in its eyes
