The other book that accompanied me to Istanbul was Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. Fans of Anne Carson will no doubt admit her prose has a spare beauty, a density of thought, and focused beams of bright light.
As we rolled across Hungary my eyes were mostly filled with a hunger to see the country, to fight to see beneath the surface of what I was seeing, the see the centuries of history and to see the current reality of the people.
To force a break in the intense work of seeing I would read a few pages of Anne Carson and I made a note of the following three quotes:
(P 54/5) "Gorgias tells us that reality, if it exists at all, is incommunicable and that the function of words is to create an autonomous reality serving the rhetorical needs of the moment."
(P 55) Whereas Simonides "is painting a picture of things that brings visible and invisible together in the mind’s eye as one coherent fact."
(P 59) Then she brings in Heraklitos, "idiot thinking is a matter of mistaking the visible surface of things, the world of appearance and seeming, for the true, underlying, nonapparent . . . invisible harmony."
All this imprints walkingtalkingwriting with an intensity of purpose that knows full well the shame of idiot thinking and the impotence of sight.
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