#bolano

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion - so vague, so malleable, so warped - of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can only manage a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

For a long time I stopped existing.

"Just as love moves according to a mechanism like the sea's . . . so too do writers move, and one day they appear and then they disappear and then maybe they appear again. And if they don't, it doesn't really matter so much, because in some secret way, they're us now."

Rimasero impassibili e mi domandarono se scrivevo lettere d'amore. Di tutto, ragazzi, dissi posando l'incartamento per terra e riempendomi di nuovo il bicchiere di mezcal Los Suicidas, lettere di madri a figli, lettere di donne a mariti in carcere, lettere di fidanzati, è chiaro, che sono le migliori, per la loro innocenza voglio dire, o per l' ardore, di tutto e di più mescolato insieme, e a volte anche lo scrivano ci mette del suo. Ah, che bel mestiere, dissero.

When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and—the crowning touch—a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor.