Carlos Fuentes

"When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more."

-- Carlos Fuentes at The Paris Review (1981)

Living Dead Girl

“The thing is, you can get used to anything. You think you can’t, you want to die, but you don’t. You won’t. You just are.”

~

Finished rereading Elizabeth Scott's "Living Dead Girl". I somehow forgot about this little gem of a novella. I was reminded that I have a number of books and stories buried deep in my Kindle collection when I went digging and searching for Thomas Mann's "Joker", when I was looking for material to adapt into poetry, when I was lost anew in delusions of grandeur. I should make a list of these rereadables that I cannot simply store in a special section of my bookshelves, that is, my real, physical bookshelves for my real, pre-Internet books. Actually, I need to do a better job of managing my shelves. For instance, it has been too long since I last read "Candide".