2666: Picador Classic

According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter.

a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one’s fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums.

“Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”

“The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people’s souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the sa

“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exis

“Not because of the size of his cock,” the baroness explained, to clear up any misunderstandings that Archimboldi, next to her in bed, might entertain, “but because of a kind of shape-shifting quality: he was cleverer than a crow when he talked and in bed he turned into a devil ray.”

In the fifties, for example, he said, a smile opened doors for you. I don’t know if it could get you places, but it could definitely open doors. Now nobody trusts a smile.

Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited.