antīquē

All who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon.

Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.

It had never been too well-established how they had met. The landlady of the bachelors' boardinghouse where Bayardo San Roman lived told of how he'd been napping in a rocking chair in the parlor toward the end of September, when Angela Vicario and her mother crossed the square carrying two baskets of artificial flowers. Bayardo San Roman half-awoke, saw the two women dressed in the unforgiving black worn by the only living creatures in the morass of two o'clock in the afternoon, and asked who the young one was. The landlady answered him that she was the youngest daughter of the woman with her and that her name was Angela Vicario. Bayardo San Roman followed them with his look to the other side of the square. "She's well-named," he said. Then he rested his head on the back of the rocker and closed his eyes again. "When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

I wanted to put ground between my shadow and myself, between my name and me, between the memory of my name and the rest of me, between my flesh and me myself, that me myself who, without shadow and name and memory and flesh would be almost nothing.