DXLI. McEwan.

My affair with Tony Canning lasted a few months. At first I was also seeing Jeremy, but in late June, straight after finals, he moved to Edinburgh, to work on a Ph.D. My life became less fraught, though it still troubled me that I hadn’t cracked his secret by the time he left and couldn’t give him satisfaction. Some weeks later, he wrote a tender, regretful letter to say that he had fallen in love with a violinist he’d heard playing a Bruch concerto one evening at the Usher Hall, a young German from Düsseldorf with an exquisite tone, especially in the slow movement. His name was Manfred. Of course. If I’d been a little more old-fashioned in my thinking, I would have guessed it, for there had been a time when every man’s sexual problem had only one cause.

Ian McEwan - "Hand on the Shoulder".

DXL. Perrault.

No hay regla. Donde empieza la Gestapo concluye lo humano, es decir, lo lógico. Setenta kilos de carne sangrando bajo el látigo de los torturadores no son del todo un hombre ni del todo una bestia. Es algo en camino de convertirse en un héroe o en un traidor. La metamorfosis final es imprevisible y sorprendente, a menudo incomprensible. No juzgaremos porque para tener el derecho de juzgar habría que haber entrado presonalmente en la jaula donde los hombres de Giering aguaradaban con sus cachiporas. A los que no hablaron, nuestra admiración y nuestro reconocimiento. A los otros, que sus camarados caídos por su causa los juzguen si así lo quieren...

Gilles Perrault - La Orquesta Roja.

DXL.Kees.

ROBINSON AT HOME

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening
Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street
Conspire and combine toward one community.

These are the rooms of Robinson.
Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though
All the blurred daybreaks of the spring
Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,

Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors
And moonlight of a different kind,
He might awake to hear the news at ten,
Which will be shocking, moderately.

This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire
To die like this has known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear.
But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,

Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave,
A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades,
A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,
A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—

All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,
“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—
This city—nightmare—black—”
He wakes in sweat
To the terrible moonlight and what might be
Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,
And the long curtains blow into the room.

Weldon Kees - Collected Poems of Weldon Kees.

DXXXIX. Wilcock.

Como sucede con frecuencia, hasta las dudas del Maestro se convierten en dogma para los discípulos.

J. Rodolfo Wilcock - La Sinagoga de los Iconoclastas.

DXXXVIII. Bolaño.

Una mujer para soñar despierto, pero también para vivir y para compartir apuros y malos ratos. 

Roberto Bolaño - Estrella Distante.

DXXXVII. Owen.

FUTILITY

     Move him into the sun—
     Gently its touch awoke him once,
     At home, whispering of fields unsown.
     Always it woke him, even in France,
     Until this morning and this snow.
     If anything might rouse him now
     The kind old sun will know.

     Think how it wakes the seeds—
     Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
     Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
     Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?
     Was it for this the clay grew tall?
    —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
     To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen - Poems.