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EL Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Qvixote de La Mancha (primera parte) II

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote De La Mancha: Edición Conmemorativa IV Centenario Cervantes. Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2015. Print. (First ed. 1605)

 POST TENEBRAS SPERO LVCEM “Tras las tinieblas espero la luz” Job, XVII, 12. (lema en la portada) p. 2

maravedí

Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro.

La libertad no se vende bien ni por todo el oro del mundo. p. 10

Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres.

La pálida muerte visita por igual las chozas del los pobres y las torres de los reyes.  Horacio p. 11

To read Horacio (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)

Donec eris felix, multos numberabis amicos.
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris

Mientras seas dichoso, contarás con muchos amigos, pero si los tiempos se nublan, estarás solo. p. 11

“El río Tajo fue así dicho por un rey de las Españas; tiene su nacimiento en tal lugar y muere en el mar Océano, besando los muros de la famosa ciudad de Lisboa, y es opinión que tiene las arenas de oro.” p. 12

View of Toledo. El Greco. c. 1596–1600. Via Wikimedia.

See Cristóbal de Fonseca

Poetics by Aristotle

Cicero

Ad adolescentes by Basil of Caesarea

campo de Montiel (Comarca de la Mancha, entre Ciudad Real y Albacete donde se incia la acción)” p. 14

Mapa del Campo del Montiel histórico (fragmento de la antigua provincia de La Mancha, por Thomás López Pensionista, año 1765). Via Wikimedia.

décimas de cabo roto

“Si de llegarte a los bue-,
libro, fueres con lectu-,
no te dirá el boquirru-
que no pones bien los de-.” p. 15

“DON Belaianís DE GRECIA
A DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA
… Mas, aunque sobre el cuerno de la luna
siempre se vio encumbrada mi ventura,
tus proezas envidio, ¡oh gran Quijote!” p. 19

DE SOLISDÁN
A DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA
“Personaje desconocido, ya su nombre se deba a una errata o a confusión de Cervantes, ya se trate de un pseudónimo o anagrama.” p. 23

“En resolución, él se enfrascó tanto en su lectura que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio; y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el celebro de manera que vino a perder el juicio.” p. 29-30

To Read La Chanson de Roland Cancion de Roldán

Mort de Roland. Jean Fouquet. 1455-1460. Via Wikimedia.

****”no sólo se había contentado con llamarse “Amadís” a secas, sino que añadió el nombre de su reino y patria, por hacerla famosa, y se llamó “Amadís de Gaula”, así quiso, como buen caballero, añadir el suyo el nombre de la suya y llamarse “don Quijote de la Mancha”” p. 32

alcaide

 

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EL Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Qvixote de La Mancha (primera parte) I

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote De La Mancha: Edición Conmemorativa IV Centenario Cervantes. Madrid: Real Academia Españƒola, 2015. Print. (First ed. 1605)

Siglo de Oro

“Salieron para America cientos de ejemplares de la novela… Lo que no había conseguido Cervantes, lo lograba su criatura asentándose en el Nuevo Mundo.” (México -> Cartagena de Indias -> Portobelo, Panamá -> El Callao) p. xi

To Watch Дон Кихот Don Quixote (1957) Grigori Kozintsev.

 

José Ortega y Gasset Meditaciones del Quijote “su eje central es precisamente el diálogo,” p. xxi  See “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”

“complejidad del sistema novelístico de Cervantes y sus estrategias para casar versímilmente su fábula mentirosa con la inteligencia de sus lectores están poderosamente condicionadas por la encrucijada en la que, como también Shakespeare y todos sus contemporáneos, se encuentra: la del solapamineto de la la galaxia Gutenberg con la pervivencia, muy vívida todavía, de formas de coexistencia y comunicaión arcaicas en las que sigue muy arraigada la oralidad.” p. p xxii

Quijote “Llegado, por el contrario, a Barcelona, ve en una imprenta cómo se corrigen las pruebas de una nueva edición de Quijote de Avellaneda, y ello le da pie para denostarlo.” p. xxiv

Olfato y tacto en Don Quijote p.  xxvii

Primera edición conocida de Amadís de Gaula de Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, impresa en Zaragoza por Jorge Coci, 1508. Via Wikimedia.

Amadís de Gaula

Portada de Los cinco libros del esforzado e invencible caballero Tirante el Blanco, primera traducción al castellano de Tirant lo Blanc, impresa por Diego de Gumiel. Via Wikimedia.

Tirante el Blanco

Tristán de Leonís

“Al final, termina por salirse con la suya. La ficción va contaminando lo vivido y la realidad se va gradualmente plegando a las excentricidades y fantasías de don Quijote. p. XXXV (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

“Los amigos del pueblo de don Quijote, tan adversos a las novelerías literarias que hacen una quema inquisitorial de su biblioteca, con el pretexto de curar a Alonso Quijano de su locura recurren a la ficción: urden y protagonizan representaciones para devolver al Caballero de la Triste Figura a la cordura y al mundo real. Pero, en verdad, consiguen lo contrario: que la ficción comience a devorar la realidad.” p. XXXVI (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

Ruta de Don Quijote

“El Quijote no cree que la justicia, el orden social, el progreso, sean funciones de la autoridad, sino obra del quehacer de individuos que, como sus modelos, los caballeros andantes, y él mismo, se hayan echado sobre los hombros la tarea que hacer menos injusto y más libre  próspero el mundo en el que viven.” p. XL (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

“la Santa Hermandad, cuerpo de justicia en el mundo rural, de la que se tiene anuncios durante las correrías de don Quijote y Sancho, son mencionadas más bien como algo lejano, oscuro y peligroso.” p. XL

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“España aparace como un espacio muchi más vasto, cohesionado en su diversidad geográfica y cultural y de unas inciertas fronteras que parecen definirse en función no de territorios y demarcaciones administrativas, sino religiosas: España termina en aquellos límites vagos, y concretamente marinos, donde comienzan los dominios del moro, el enemigo religioso.” p. XLII

“como ocurre con las obras maestras paradigmáticas… al igual que el Hamlet, o La divina comedia, o la Ilíada y la Odisea, ella evoluciona con el paso del tiempo y se recrea a sí misma en función de las estéticas y los valores que cada cultura privilegia, revelendo que es una verdadera caverna de Alí Babá, cuyos tesoros nunca se extienguen.” p. XLIII-XVLIV

To Read

Rayuela by Cortazar,

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

“Aprovechando lo que era un tópico de la novela de caballerías (muchas de ellas eran supuestos manuscritos encontrados en sitios exóticos y estrafalarios), Cervantes hizo de Cide Hamete Benengeli un dispositivo que introducía la ambigüedad y el juego como rasgos centrales de la estructura narrativa.” p. XLIV

Canto de Calíope en La Galatea

Title page of La Galatea. Via Wikimedia.

“Cervantes, que se vio imposibilitado de hacer efectivas las sumas recogidas, fue internado en la cárcel de Sevilla, donde pasó unos tres meses del año 1597.” p. LXX (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“En 1613 aparecen las Novelas ejemplares; en 1614 el Viaje del Parnaso; en 1615 la Segunda parte del Quijote y las COmedia y entremeses; y en 1617, póstumamente, el Persiles y Sigismunda. O sea que la gran época de aparición de las obras de Cervantes, presciendiendo de la Primera parte del Quijote, corresponder a la etapa que va de los 66 a los 68 años del escritor.” p. LXXI (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Aunque Cervantes ha escrito estos versos en tono humurístico, no deja de haber en ellos cierta amargura de quien, sabiéndose un gran prosista, comprende que no puede compararse con los grandes poetas de su tiempo.” p. LXXIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Fue enterrado en el convento de las Trinitarias Descalzas de la calle de Cantarranas (hoy Lope de Vega), donde sin duda esposan todavía sys restos sin que haya posibilidad de identificarlos.” p. LXXVIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“En el Quijote Cervantes recoge la experiencia de los recuerdos de su vida; en el Persiles recoge el fruto de sis lecturas de libros.” p. LXXIX (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“El “caballero andante” existió, y todavía erraba por los caminos de Europa y de corte en corte en demanda de aventuras (justas, pasos de armas, torneos, batallas a todo trance) un siglo antes de que Cervantes se pusiera a escribir el Quijote. Y alrededor de estos caballeros existió una literatura que puede distribuirse en dos categorías: la biografía del caballero y la novela caballeresca. Como ejemplos de la primera categoría tenemos el Livre des faits du bon messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, el Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing y el Victorial, o biografía de don Pero Niño, y podriamos añadir el Libro del Passo Honroso… A la segunda categoría pertenecen determinadas novelas … Las catalanas Curial e Güelfa y Tirant lo Blanch y las francesas Jean de Saintré y el Roman de Jean de Paris… Basta señalar que la biografía de un caballero perfectamente histórico como fue Jacques de Lalaing, que realizó sus primeras hazañas en Vallodolid, ofrece gran similitud con la novela que tiene por protagonista al ficticio Jean de Saintré.. Este tipo de novelas a las que conviene dar el nombre de “novelas caballescas” en clara oposición a los “libros de caballerías”, fue comprendido por Cervantes, como atestigua su elogio del Tirant lo Blanch” p. LXXXIV (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“El Quijote no es, como creyeron algunos románticos, una burla del heroísmo y del idealismo noble, sino la burla de unos libros que, por sus extremosas exageraciones y su falta de mesura, ridiculizaban lo heroico y lo ideal.” p. LXXXV (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Da la impresión que Certantes escribía sin leer su labor.” p. LXXXVIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Cervantes, cuando escribe la Segunda parte de la novela, tiene ya sesenta y ocho años, está en la miseria, ha padecido desdichas de toda suerte en la guerra y en el cautiverio, el honor de su hogar no ha sido siempre limpio ni ejemplar, ha recibido humillaciones y burlas en el cruel ambiente literario; y a pesar de todo ello, por encima de sus angustias, de sus estrecheces y de sus penas, el buen humor y el agudo donaire inundan las páginas del Quijote. p. XCIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“la más desdichada de tales transposiciones fue que la supresión de unas páginas en que se narraba cómo Sancho Panza perdió a si jumento no llevó aneja la eliminación de la referencias al escudero montado en el asno” p. CII (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“endecasílabo) El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha.” p. CIV (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“Téngase en cuenta que los libros se ponían entonces a la venta “en papel”, es decir, como un conjunto de pliegos sin encuadernar, y así serían los Quijotes que Cervantes tuviera a mano a principios de 1605.” p. CXI (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“Tras un corto período de gran éxito, la novela sufre un eclipse desde 167 hasta que la devuelve al mercado la edición de Madrid, 1636-1637, cuatro o conco veces reimpresa en la Corte en los decenios siguientes,” p. CXII (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“vacilaciones presentes en los escritos de puño y letra de Cervantes.” mesmo~mismo, cuasi~casi, fee~fe, escrebir~escribir invidia~envidia, sospiro~suspiro, asconder~esconder, húmido~húmedo, imágines~imágenes, proprio~propio, recebir~recibir, esaminador~examinador, eceto~exepto, agora~ahora, ansí~así, güésped~huésped, deste~de este, della~de ella.  CXV-CXVI (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

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The Sound and The Fury

 Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print. (1984 correction, first ed. 1929)

Luster “If you don’t hush, you know what I going to do. I going to eat that cake all up. Eat them candles, too. Eat all them thirty three candles. Come on, les go down to the branch. I got to find my quarter.” p. 4

“”Where’d you get a quarter, boy. Find it in white folks’ pocket while they aint looking.”
“Got it at the getting place.” Luster said. “Plenty more where that one come from. Only I got to find that one. Is you all found it yet.”
“I aint studying no quarter. I got my own business to tend to.”” p. 14

“The bones rounded out of the ditch, where the dark vines were in the black ditch, into the moonlight, like some of the shapes had stopped.” p. 33-34

“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.” p. 41

Et ego in arcadia (Et in arcadia ego)p. 44

“And one evening, when they was about a dozen them bluegum chillen running around the place, he never come home. Possum hunters found him in the woods, et clean. And you know who et him. Them bluegum chillen did.” p. 69

“You’ve been running a long time, not to’ve got any further off than mealtime, Jason said.” p. 71

“Then he went to the window and looked out. He came back and took my arm. Here she come, he said. Be quiet, now. We went to the window and looked out. It came out of Quentin’s window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watch it go away across the grass. Then we couldn’t see it.” p. 74

“I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” p. 76

“I passed the jeweler’s window, but I looked away in time. At the corner two bootblacks caught me, one on either side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of them, and the other one a nickel. Then they let me alone. The one with the cigar was trying to sell it to the other for the nickel.” p. 83

“He was going bald. There was a glass in his eye–a metal tube screwed into his face. I went in.
The place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass, and I could hear a big clock on the wall above his head. He looked up, his eye big and blurred and rushing beyong the glass.” p. 83

“There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictiory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradiction one another.” p. 85

“And all that day, while the train wound through rushing gaps and along ledges where movement was only a laboring sound of the exhaust and groaning wheels and the eternal mountains stood fading into the thick sky,” p. 88

“The ship went through the bridge, moving under bare poles like a ghost in broad day, with three gulls hovering above the stern like toys on invisible wires.” p. 89-90

***”It twinkled and glinted, like breathing, the float slow like a breathing too, and debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea.” p. 90

“You can feel noon. I wonder if even miners in the bowels of the earth.” p. 104

“Father said that a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said.” p. 104

“I could still see the smoke stack. That’s where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.” p. 112

“Only our country was not like this country. There was something about just walking through it. A kind of still and violent fecundity that satisfied even bread-hunger like. Flowing around you, not brooding and nursing every niggard stone.” p. 113

“The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky.” p. 115

“The arrow increased without motion, then in a quick swirl the trout lipped a fly beneath the surface with that sort of gigantic delicacy of an elephant picking up a peanut.” p. 116-117

***”Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.” p. 117

“He leaned on the rail, looking down at the trout which he had already spent, and suddenly the acrimony, the conflict, was gone from their voices, as if to them too it was as though he had captured the fish and bought his horse and wagon, they too partaking of that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority.” p. 118

“The street turned again. I could see the white cupola, the round stupid assertion of the clock.” p. 124

“took up the coins and found two coppers in her apron and gave them to me. I handed them to the little girl. Her fingers closed about them, damp and hot, like worms.” p. 126-127

“She looked at me. She chewed quietly and steadily; at regular intervals a small distension passed smoothly down her throat. I opened my package and gave her one of the buns. “Good bye,” I said. p. 129

“Them furriners. I cant tell one from another. You might take her across the tracks where they live, and maybe somebody’ll claim her.” p. 130

“I don’t know
outside the gray light the shadows of things like dead
things in stagnant water” p. 157

“I went to the diningroom. Quentin was sitting with her head bent. She had painted her face again. Her nose looked like a porcelain insulator.” p. 257

“She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.” p. 265-266

“saw the old woman in her quilted dressing gown at the head of the stairs, calling her name with machinelike regularity.” p. 270

“It was not the bottle which Mrs Compson wanted, however, and clutching it by the neck like a dead hen Dilsey went to the foot of the stairs and looked upward.” p. 270

“She made no further move, but though she could not see her save as a blobby shape without depth, Mrs Compson knew that she had lowered her face a little and that she stood now like cows do in the rain, holding the empty water bottle by its neck.” p. 272

“The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house. It was in bloom and the branches scraped and rasped against the house and the myriad air, driving in the window, brought into the room the forlon scent of the blossoms.” p.

“The Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.” p. 288

“Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time.” p. 295

“But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.” p. 316

To read Absalom, Absalom! (1936), A Fable (1954), As I lay Dying (1930)

To re-read The Sound and the Fury.

Read the poem Kubla Khan (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

To read poem The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot

Boy: Tales of Childhood

Dahl, Roald. Boy: Tales of Childhood. Great Britain: Penguin, 1984. Print.

On his dad “He was a tremendous diary-writer. I still have one of his many notebooks from the Great War of 1914-18. Every single day during those five war years he would write several pages of comment and observation about the events of the time.” p. 18

“His theory was that if the eye of a pregnant woman was constantly observing the beauty of nature, this beauty would somehow become transmitted to the mind of the unborn bay within her womb and that baby would grow up to be a lover of beautiful things.” p. 19

“I can remember very clearly the journeys I made to and from the school because they were so tremendously exciting.” p. 23

“‘But how do they turn the rats into liquorice?’ the young Thwaites had asked his father.
‘They wait until they’ve got ten thousand rats,’ the father had answered, ‘then they dump them all into a hude shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours.'” p. 30

“‘There is no cure for ratitis. I ought to know. I’m a doctor.'” p. 31

“Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.” p. 50

Christiania (name for Oslo), Norway

“‘Skaal, Bestemama!’ She will then lift her own glass and hold it up high. At the same time your own eyes meet hers, and you must keep looking deep into her eyes as you sip your drink. After you have both done this, you raise your glasses high up again in a sort of silent final salute, and only then does each person look away and set down his glass.” p. 58

the island of Tjøme in Norway

“There were the wooden skeletons of shipwrecked boats on those islands, and big white bones” p. 65

Dar es Salaam

“In which direction from where I was lying was Llandaff?… Therefore, if I turned towards the window I would be facing home. I wriggled round in my bed and faced my home and my family.” p. 89-90

“‘Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it the better for you.'” p. 98

Captain Hardcastle’s mustache “The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.” p. 109

“His eyes rover the Hall endlessly, searching for mischief. The only noises to be heard were Captain Hardcastle’s little snorting grunts and the soft sound of pen-nibs moving over paper.” p. 113

“‘I have learnt one thing about England,’ my mother went on. ‘It is a country where men love to wear uniforms and eccentric clothes.'” p. 139

Archbishop of Canterbury

“But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes… He would come lumbering into the classroom and sit down at his desk and glare at the class. We would wait expectantly, wondering what was coming next.” p.150

“Another time, he brought a two-foot-long grass-snake into class and insisted that every boy should handle it in order to cure us for ever, as he said, of a fear of snakes.” p. 151-152

Eton-fives

Ctesiphon palace ruin, with the arch in the centre, 1864. Via Wikimedia.

Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq

500 cc Ariel

“The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.” p. 171

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” p. 172

Bay of Biscay

decorticator

Dubliners

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. Print. (First ed. 1914.)

The Sisters

The priest “Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts.” p. 5

“His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room — the flowers.” p. 7

**An Encounter p. 13

“It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House.” p. 18

“- I say! Look what he’s doing!
As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:
-I say …He’s a queer old josser!
-In case he asks us for our names, I said, let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.” p. 21

“A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did do I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.” p. 22

Araby

“I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” p. 32

After the Race

“They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.” p. 42

Two Gallants

“Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand toward the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.” p. 59

A Little Cloud

“A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.” p. 72

“Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas.” p. 73

“The bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that the people were observing him curiously. He glanced quickly to right and left (frowning slightly to make his errand appear serious), but when his sight cleared a little he saw that nobody had turned to look at him:” p. 75-76

Lord Byron

“Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom,
Not e’en a Zephyr wanders through the grove,
Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb
And scatter flowers on the dust I love.”

Counterparts

“The dark damp night was coming and he longed to spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and the clatter of glasses.” p. 92

“His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk. They had five children. A little boy came running down the stairs.” p. 101

Clay

“Then she asked all the children had any of them eaten it — by mistake, of course–but the children all said no and looked as if they did not like to eat cakes if they were to be accused of stealing.” p. 108

I dreamt that I Dwelt (song)

“I had riches too great to count, could boast
of a high ancestral name,
But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you loved me still the same.” p. 110

“But no one tried to show her her mistake” p. 111

A Painful  Case

“He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars, and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.” p. 114

“The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the product of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.” p. 117

“he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.” p. 118

“he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory.” p. 123

No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engines reiterating the syllables of her name.” p. 124

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

“-There’s no tumblers, said the old man.
-O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack, said Mr Henchy. Many’s the good man before now drank out of the bottle.” p. 136

“Then he took up the corkscrew and went out of the door sideways, muttering some form of salutation.
-That’s the way it begins, said the old man.
-The thin edge of the wedge, said Mr Henchy.” p. 137

“Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob. He was silent for two reasons. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions beneath him.” p. 138-139

“Mr Hynes hesitated a little longer. Then amid the silence he took off his hat, laid it on the table and stood up. He seemed to be rehearsing the piece in his mind. After a rather long pause he announced:

The Death of Parnell
6TH OCTOBER 1891″ p. 142

“-Good man, Joe! said Mr O’Connor, taking out his cigarette-papers and pouch the better to hide his emotion.” p. 144

A Mother

Mr O’Madden Burke “His magniloquent western name was the moral umbrella upon which he balanced the fine problem of his finances. He was widely respected.” p. 155

Grace

“She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.” p. 169

Soldiers at Dublin Castle, c.1905. Via Wikimedia.

Dublin Castle (Caisleán Bhaile Átha Cliath)

peloothered (drunk)

 

“The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope.” p. 175

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, first Superior General. Via Wikimedia.

The Prisoner of the Vatican

Orangeman

Pope Leo XIII “union of the Latin and Greek Churches.” p. 179

Lux upon Lux
Lux in Tenebris

Papal infallibility

John of Tuam

*****The Dead p. 189

Mr Browne “He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins…
-The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end.” p. 217

***”Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and righly claim, our strenuous endeavours.” p. 220

“And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue.
Gabriel paced in a circle round the hall in his goloshes amid the laughter of the others.” p. 224

*****”He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light tones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.” p. 226

“O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold…” p. 227

****”A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy.” p. 230-231

“A ghostly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door. Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch and crossed the room towards the window. He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might calm him a little.” p. 233

*******”The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.” p. 240

*******”A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill were Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly though the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” p. 241


Afterword

“The Irish playwright John Millington Synge once said that words should have the crispness of an autumn apple,” p. 244

“Dubliners was accepted for publication in 1904 and, due to the prevailing puritan prudery, it got passed from fearful publisher to fearful publisher and was eventually published nine years later. It was not a book that reverberated like the shot heard around the world; indeed it sold three hundred copies, of which one hundred were purchased by the author himself, a not unfamiliar tactic to gain bestseller status,” p. 247

Ireland “is somewhat a matriarchy, which to me is a society where men look down on their women with reverence.” p. 248

“Some scholars say that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce could not, in his early years, write anything that he had not observed and personally experienced in some way; thus Dubliners follows a path through childhood, through puberty and ts sins of the flesh, a constant torment to Irish teenagers, sometime maturity, and the emerging of the man into public view.” p. 248

To read Anton Chekhov Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов

The Dead (1987 film) John Huston

World War Z

Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War. New York: Broadway, 2006. Print.

Fengdu (city of ghosts) 豐都鬼城
Old Dachang
Monasteries at Meteora, Greece

Rabbi Loew and Golem by Mikoláš Aleš, 1899. Via Wikimedia.

Golem גלמי

Sinai Desert at Taba
Falasha

Ship breaking at AlangGujarat, India
“Pakistan’s south central mountains: the Pab, the Kirthar, the Central Brahui range.” p. 113

List of mountain ranges of Pakistan

thermobaric weapon

Henry J. Kaiser (father of modern American shipbuilding)

Vo Nguyen Giap in 1954. Via Wikimedia.

Vo Nguyen Giap (General in the Vietnam People’s Army)

Bosozoku 暴走族 Japanese motorbike subculture

Haya-ji  Shinto wind god

The Japanese wind god Fūjin, Sōtatsu, 17th century. Via Wikimedia.

Fujin Shinto wind god

Winston Churchill “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

To read: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

The Ossuary and Port-Mahon Quarry

Mere Anarchy

Allen, Woody. Mere Anarchy. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

To Err is Human–to Float, Divine

There is a fervid endorsement by someone named Pleiades MoonStar–a name that would cause no end of consternation for me if I were told at the last minute it belonged to my brain surgeon or pilot.” p. 5

“”What do you do for a living?” she inquired, oddly un-omniscient for a creature of her reputed majesty.
“Night watchman at a wax museum,” I replied, “but it’s not as fulfilling as it sounds.”” p. 9

Veerappan “was a notorious Indian brigand and dacoit. He was active for nearly 30 years in the scrub lands and forests in the states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.” Via Wikimedia.

Veerappan

Sam, You Made The Pants Too Fragrant

“”She’s a very handsome woman,” I quickly said.
“Well, you know, it’s all relative. I might look at the same face and see something you’d find for sale in a live-bait store.”” p. 30

To Read Demons by Dostoyevsky

This Nib for Hire

“Just give me a few sample pages to confirm my faith in your brilliance. Who knows, maybe in your hands novelization will finally come of age as an art form.” p. 40

“”Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself? That way the subtle verbal rhythms can resonate in your mind’s ear.”
“Naw, I’ll get a better feel this way. Plus I lost my reading glasses last night at Hooters. Commence,” ordered Biggs, putting his feet up on the coffee table.” p. 41

Glory Hallelujah, Sold! p. 73

“Integrity is a relative concept, best left to the penetrating minds of Jean-Paul Sartre or Hannah Arendt.” p. 77

Caution, Falling Moguls

UMLAUT Say, boys, have any of you read Gilgamesh?
(They assent enthusiastically.)
NUTMEAT The Babylonian Bible? Sure, several times, why?
UMLAUT I’m going to say one word to you: Musical. p. 86

SHEIGITZ Line changes? The blind violinist is now a Navy SEAL?
UMLAUT It gives more oomph. p. 87

NUTMEG What but? Arvide Mite was only waxing hyperbolic when he said you could make the phone book into a hit. Only an idiot or a megalomaniac would accepted the challenge. Especially the Yellow Pages. p. 89

Attention Geniuses: Cash Only

“One is a sophisticated bauble called “If You’ll Be My Puma in Yuma I’ll Be Your Stork in New York.” p 121

Above The Law, Below The Box Springs

“Before working for the Washburns, Tobias was a horse whisperer at a ranch in Texas, but she suffered a nervous breakdown when a horse whispered back.” p. 133

“Her undertaker husband, Wilbur, liked Stubbs and offered to bury him gratis if he would agree to have it done that day.” p. 136

Surprise Rocks Disney Trial p. 147

Sabon (typeface) by Jan Tschichold

Claude Garamond (French designer/publisher) 1510-1561

Jacques Sabon

Save

The Lawless Roads

Greene, Graham. The Lawless Roads. London: Penguin, 1976. Print. (First Ed. 1939)

“Man’s like the earth, his hair like grasse is grown,
His veins the rivers are, his heart the stone.”
Wit’s Recreations (1640)

“Most priests wear their mufti with a kind of uneasiness, but Pro was a good actor.” p. 19

The execution of Miguel Pro. Via Wikimedia.

“Within two months of Pro’s landing, President Calles had begun the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.” p. 19

President Plutarco Elías Calles.

“For Mexico remained Catholic; it was only the governing class – politicians and pistoleros – which was anti-Catholic.” p. 20

“Over there – one argued to oneself – were Chichen Itza and Mitla and Palenque, the enormous tombstones of history,” p. 24

“For the priest prison, and for the politician a bullet.” p. 24

Quadragesimo Anno (encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931)

“We writers are apt to judge a country by freedom of the Press, and politicians by freedom of speech – it’s the same really.” p. 32

“This was Mexico, that was the United States. The only difference was dirt and darkness: there weren’t so many lights in Mexico. They called this Nuevo Laredo to distinguish it from the town in Texas, but as so often happens the son looked older than the father, more acquainted with the seamy side of life.” p. 33

“A drunken voice sung in Spanish and the rain fell over the dreary  Nuevo León plain,” p. 34

“mud huts and a few factories and then nothing at all until the seal-grey mountains gathered slowly round, little outcrops of rock like sailing-ships on the horizon.” p. 36

“The dry and prickly desert: the cacti sticking up like pins with an effect of untidiness, and the night deepening. Paths went off into the dark gleaming with wet, going to nowhere one knew of at all.” p. 37

“For one can respect an atheist as one cannot respect a deist: once accept a God and reason should carry you further, but to accept nothing at all – that requires some stubbornness, some courage.” p. 37

“The cheers were everywhere, stretching out to the dim mountains: they weren’t cheers at all, but the cocks crowing for miles around, an odd Biblical rhapsody at dawn.” p. 39

“God didn’t cease to exist when men lost their faith in Him; there were always catacombs where the secret rite could be kept alive till the bad times passed” p. 39

“At dinner the old gentleman couldn’t get over the joke of it: here I’d been walking miles about town and he’d gone all round in one hour by street car – for five cents. American money. ‘But I like walking,’ I kept on telling him – uselessly. ‘I’m going to tell them that back home,’ he said, ‘about my English friend who walked all day and saved five cents American.'” p. 41

(San Luis Potosí) “Roads were like the lines on a map; you saw them meandering thinly for an immense distance, dying out at the margin among the rocks and cacti. The cacti had no beauty – they were like some simple shorthand sign for such words as ‘barrenness’ and ‘drought’; you felt they were less the product than the cause of this dryness, that they had absorbed all the water there was in the land and held it as camels do in their green, aged, tubular bellies. ” p. 42

“Everything is repeated there, even the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs; the age of Mexico falls on the spirit like a cloud.” p. 44

“‘If you are a philosopher,’ he rebuked me, ‘every place is the same. Why not Mexico?'” p. 52

“The veranda was crowded with politicians waiting for the General to appear, with guns on their hips, the holsters and the cartridge belts beautifully worked, a decorative death” p. 53

“The General sat in the front seat; the great back and rounded shoulders reminded me of Tommy Brock in Miss Beatrice Potter‘s book – ‘he waddled about by moonlight, digging things up'” p. 56

Illustration of Tommy Brock from The Tale of Mr. Tod (via wikimedia)

“Presently somebody thought of trying a switch and the light went obediently on, a bare globe beating on a cracked mirror, a few hard chairs, a miniature billiard table with a ragged cloth.” p. 57

“He was caught in a maze of friends and enemies with similar faces.” p. 58

“Somewhere far away a thunderstorm shifted cumbrously in the hills… like cargo unloaded in a railway-yard.” p. 60

Rural Rides by William Cobbet

To Mexico City “[Cobbet] judged landscape by its value to human beings… The Romantics would have enjoyed the Mexican scene, describing it as ‘sublime’ and ‘awe-inspiring’; they scented God in the most barren regions, as if He were a poet of escape whom it was necessary to watch tactfully through spy-glasses as He brooded beside a waterfall or on the summit of Helvellyn: as if God, disappointed in His final creation, had fallen back on one of His earlier works. They preferred the kind of Nature which rejects man.” p. 61

Tacuba area in Mexico City. See Tlacopan

Map of “Valley of Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.” Via Wikimedia.

José Clemente Orozco

See mural Entering the Mine by Rivera (Murals by Diego Rivera in the Secretaria de Educacion Publico)

 

“All monuments in Mexico are to violent deaths.” p. 80

“In the great grey courtyard of Teotihuacán, surrounded by the platforms of small pyramidal temples, you do get the sense of a continent over the world’s edge – a flatness, a vacancy, through which peer plumed serpents and faces like gas-masks over over orifices that might be the mouths of Lewis guns or flamethrowers.” p. 82

Virgen de Guadalupe 

“But this shrine of Guadalupe, even at the height of the persecution, remained open – no government dared to rob the Indian of his Virgin, and it helped to break the career of the only man who ever threatened it.” p. 87

“The Virgin of Guadalupe, like St Joan in France, had become identified not only with the faith but with the country, she was a patriotic symbol even to the faithless…” p. 88

“I didn’t like the serious way he took this matter of the insurance; this was graveyard talk. The boat couldn’t be as bad as all that.” p. 101

“We climbed over the rail with the suitcase, and a sailor led the way down a few stairs into the engine-room, where one old greasy engine say like an elephant neglected in its tiny house.” p. 101

“breakfast was handed up through a hatch in the deck from the engine-room – a loaf of bread and a plate of anonymous fish scraps from which the eyeballs stood mournfully out.” p. 105

“Shark fins glided like periscopes at the entrance to the Grijalva River, the scene of the Conquistadores’ first landing in Mexico” 105-106

Villahermosa, Tabasco

“The vultures squatted on the roofs. It was like a place besieged by scavengers – sharks in the river and vultures in the streets.” p. 107

“For twelve hours there had been nothing but trees on either side; one had moved forward only into darkness; and here with an effect of melodrama was a city – lights burning down into the river, a great crown outlined in electricity like a casino. All felt the shock – it was like coming to Venice through an uninhabited jungle – they called, triumphantly, ‘El puerto, el puerto!'” p. 111

Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope

“I went back to the hotel to bed and began to read Dr Thorne… A cockchafer came buzzing and beating through the room and I turned out the light – the light went out all over Barsetshire, the hedges and hte rectories and paddocks dropped into darkness,” p. 114

“It will be a fine journey, the man said, if you can make it – you’ll know what Cortés had to face in heavy armour on his march to Guatemala.” p. 116

“I had won twenty pesos with my first ticket. That sold the lottery to me: I bought at least a small share in a ticket in every town I came to, but never won again.” p. 117

“In the night beetles woke me, thumping against the wall. I killed two – one in the very centre of the great tiles floor, but when I woke there wasn’t a sign of it. It was uncanny.” p. 118

A Victorian Adventurer (p. 118-122)

The frontispiece for the 1638 edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Via Wikimedia.

“In West Africa once I had made the mistake of taking the Anatomy of Melancholy, with the idea that it would, as it were, match the mood. It matched all right, but what one really needs is contrast, and so I surrendered perhaps my only hope of ever reading War and Peace in favour of something overwhelmingly national.” p. 128

“Ortega’s little red plane moved back across the merciless sky, like an insect on a mirror, towards Villahermosa. I had a sense of being marooned… ” p. 132

“The fireflies moved like brilliant pocket torches, and a small boy stood by the track with a flaming brand making mysterious animal noises into the dark.” p. 134

“I dreamed of a Mr Wang, also known as Mr Moon, who was to guide me – somewhere. He was dressed in the most extravagant robes – all silk and gold embroidery and dragons” p. 134

“the two mules swimming beside the canoe, with just their muzzles and their eyes above the water like a pair of alligator heads,” p. 135

***”Then the sound of horses came beating up across the plain – this is the romantic attraction of the Mexican countryside, the armed stranger travelling at night who may be a friend of an enemy. The door of the hut was barred shut. A horse whistled, stirrup irons jangled; when the lightning flared I could see four horses, and a man dismounting. He felt his way across the veranda and knocked at the door – ‘Con amistad.'” p.

“I learned from her for the first time of the rather wild dream that buoys up many people in Chiapas: the hope of a rising which will separate Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo from the rest of Mexico and of an alliance with Catholic Guatemala.” p. 153

“Time passed; I saw the mule climbing briskly up the opposite slope, the size of a toy animal, and fifty yards behind it a toy man. Then they both disappeared altogether, and dusk began to fall. I was alone with the two mules – it seemed to be the end of that journey.
“In the mountains the sun sets early – the horizon is high up the sky. I waited half an hour; the sun dropped out of sight, the forests became black below their gilded tips. The world was all steel and gold, like war. The opposite slope dropped into obscurity, untenanted.” p. 164

“The guide couldn’t put up in their presence that Mexican façade of bonhomie – the embrace, the spar, the joke – with which they hide from themselves the cruelty and treachery of their life.” p. 167

“When we rode up the beds heaved on their piles and rows of eyes peered out of the darkness like a cave of cats: there wasn’t an inch of space to spare in the windswept shelter.” p. 168

“About eleven a fist beating on the barred door woke us all. I switched on my torch and saw the doubtful bearded faces lifted from the beds; somebody felt for his revolver holster, and then the password came, ‘Con amistad.'” p. 168

A Grove of Crosses “The scenery was magnificent: the great pine forests swept down to where we trudge at a mere six thousand feet, great rocky precipices showed like grey castle walls through breaks in the pines.” p. 169

“It was like a scene from the past before the human race had bred its millions – England of the Conquest before the forests had been cut, a herd called Sweyn, the wattle huts, the word of Ivanhoe.”

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

“It was like an adventure of Rider Haggard – coming so unexpectedly out of the forest above this city, once the capital of Chiapas and the home of Las Casas, a place with one rough road, impassable in the rains, running down to Tuxtla and the coast, and only a mule track for the traveller from the north.” p. 171

“I felt my incredulity shaken. Suppose there was a miracle, suppose out of some box a voice did speak… it was horrifying thought that life could never be the same again; one couldn’t go on living as one had been living. What happens afterwards to the people who are present at a genuine miracle?”

Mixtec ruins

“We stopped at a cantina, and had some mescal – the driver told me it was good for dysentery. I don’t think it was, but it was good for our spirits.” p. 198

Puebla’s Hidden Convent “In a glass of case enclosed in a reliquary was the founder’s withered heart, the colour of long-dried blood.” p. 203

“For the first time since I came to Mexico I could see the great volcano Popocatepetl, a cone of ice bobbing between the woods and peaks, over the decaying churches, like the moon outliving everything. It was beautiful, but I was more concerned with the incompetence of the drive.” p. 205

Garci Crespo “I had to ask him several times before I got it, and every time he nodded more winningly, darkly, knowingly – as if I were insisting on the letter of a code. When I was undressing, the glass of the door darkened; somebody scratched, scratched at the pane: it was the waiter. I asked him what he wanted; he merely grinned and said hadn’t I asked for a Garci Crespo? I slammed the door shut nad a little while later he came padding up the passage and scratched again. I shouted to him to go and turned out the light, but for a long while the small vicious shadow waited, with the patience of a snake, on the other side of the glass.” p. 206

Taxco is the showplace of the Mexican tourist belt – old Mexico carefully preserved by a society of business men and American artists known as ‘The Friends of Taxco’. It is the Greenwich Village of Mexico” p. 208

Tempest Over Mexico by Rosa E.King (Zapata rising)

The Escapist (218-222)

“Somewhere I suppose, the Ruiz Cano rolled from Vercruz or Villahermosa and back and the sailors stood about doing up their trousers; the dentists was back at El Frontera; and the Norwegian lady waited with hopeless optimism for her son’s return. It is awful how things go on when you are not there.” p. 223

The Wheel by W. B. Yeats (p. 223)

Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter’s best of all;
And after that there s nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come –
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

To read

Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Journey Without Maps, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man (film treatment), Our Man in Havana.

Beatrice Potter

W. B. Yeats

 See

Caste War of Yucatán

Project Gutenberg (free e-books)

 

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