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" Tutti erano indifferenti, qui, quelli che desideravano salvarsi. Commuoversi, era come addormentarsi sulla neve. Avvertita dal suo istinto più sottile, la borghesia non smetteva di sorridere, e urtata continuamente dalla plebe, dai suoi dolori sanguinosi, dalla sua follìa, resisteva pazientemente, come un muro leccato dal mare. Non si poteva prevedere quanto questa resistenza sarebbe durata. Infine, anche la borghesia aveva dei pesi, ed erano l'impossibilità di credere che l'uomo fosse altra cosa dalla natura, e dovesse accettare la natura in tutta la sua estensione: erano l'antica abitudine di rispettare gli ordinamenti della natura, accettare da essa le illuminazioni come l'orrore. Dove nel popolo scoppiava di tanto in tanto la rivolta, e dalle alte mura della prigione uscivano bestemmie e rumore di pianti, qui la ragione taceva in un silenzio assoluto, temendo di rompere con una benché minima osservazione l'equilibrio in cui ancora la borghesia si reggeva, e vedere i suoi giorni sciogliersi al sole, come mai stati. La paura, una paura più forte di qualsiasi sentimento, legava tutti, e impediva di proclamare alcune verità semplici, alcuni diritti dell'uomo e, anzi, di pronunciare nel suo vero significato la parola uomo. Tollerato era l'uomo, in questi paesi, dall'invadente natura, e salvo solo a patto di riconoscersi, come la lava, le onde, parte di essa. "

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Brano tratto da Il silenzio della ragione, dalla raccolta di racconti:

Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, Adelphi (collana Gli Adelphi n. 329), 2024¹⁷; p. 156.

[Prima edizione: Einaudi (collana I gettoni n. 18), 1953]

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Eugen Poppel: Street in the suburbs, Naples, Italy, 1927

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Engine Summer by John Crowley

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Engine Summer by John Crowley

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Le Vourdalak | Adrien Beau | 2023

Gabriel Pavie, Claire Duburcq, Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Vassili Schneider

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Bhederin and a Rhivi

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Engine Summer, John Crowley

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A recent fave. 🥺😳✨ Shot with my Pentax K-1 II and Pentax FA* 80-200mm f2.8 lens. ✨ Really love how fresh even the shore looks at this time of year. 🥺✨

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Doubleday Science Fiction cover by Gary Friedman

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Toc searched his memory for the name of this undead warrior. ‘Onos T’oolan,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘Of the Tarad Clan—’ ‘I am now named Tool. Clanless. Free.’ Free? Free to do precisely what, you sack of bones? Lie around in wastelands? ‘What’s happened to the Adjunct? Where are we?’ ‘Lost.’ ‘Which question is that an answer to, Tool?’ ‘Both.’ Toc gritted his teeth, resisting the temptation to kick the T’lan Imass. ‘Can you be more specific?’ ‘Perhaps.’

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“The sounds of fighting had stopped. Toc heard iron bars snap, one after another, metal clang on the flagstones.

Then someone was crouching down beside him. A hand that was little more than rough bone and tendon settled on Toc’s forehead.

The Malazan could not see. There was no light. But the hand was cool, it’s weight gentle.

‘Hood? Have you come for us, then?’ The words were clearly spoken in his mind, but came out incomprehensibly—and he realized that his tongue was gone.

‘Ah, my friend,’ the figure replied in a rasp. ‘It is I, Onos T’oolan, once of the Tarad Clan, of the Logrod T’lan Imass, now kin to Aral Fayle, to Toc the Younger.’

Kin.

Withered arms gathered him up.

‘We are leaving now, young brother.’”

—832 pg, Memories of Ice, Malazan: Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson

This book has been an emotional rollercoaster for the passed thirty pages or so. I love it so much!

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Wolves and fire

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Aral Fayle and Onos T'oolan

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Before the Storm (Blink to Rush)

Oh, the world was full in those days; it seemed so much more alive than these quiet times when a new thing could take many lifetimes to finish its long birth labors and the world stay the same for generations. In those days a thousand things began and ended in a single lifetime, great forces clashed and were swallowed up in other forces riding over them. It was like some monstrous race between destruction and perfection; as soon as some piece of world was conquered, after vast effort by millions, as when they built Road, the conquest would turn on the conquerors, as Road killed thousands in their cars; and in the same way, the mechanical dreams the angels made with great labor and inconceivable ingenuity, dreams broadcast on the air like milkweed seeds, all day long, passing invisibly through the air, through walls, through stone walls, through the very bodies of the angels themselves as they sat to await them, and appearing before every angel simultaneously to warn or to instruct, one dream dreamed by all so that all could act in concert, until it was discovered that the dreams passing through their bodies were poisonous to them somehow, don’t ask me how, and millions were sickening and dying young and unable to bear children, but unable to stop the dreaming even when the dreams themselves warned them that the dreams were poisoning them, unable or afraid to wake and find themselves alone, until the Long League awakened the women and the women ceased to dream: and all this happening in one man’s lifetime. 

And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever or nearly, that we would leave the earth, the spoiled earth, entirely and float in cities suspended between the earth and the moon forever, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways and all at each other’s throats. And the Long League growing secretly everywhere as the desperate solutions fell to ruins or exploded in the faces of their makers, the Long League in secret struggle with the angels, who hardly knew of its existence in their midst till the League was the only power left and when the Law and the Gummint had exhausted themselves with the Wars and in the struggle to keep the world man’s; and for that matter the truthful speakers beginning the speech over the thousand phones of the Co-op Great Belaire; and while the million lights were going out, and the mechanical dreams fading and leaving the angels alone in the terrible dark, the Planters, thousand-armed and -eyed and wiser than any human being, searched other skies and suns at the angel’s bidding, and brought home the trees of bread and who knows what else now lost; and nobody able to comprehend everything going on all at once, and no wonder either; and then the Storm, as Seven Hands said, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till all those millions were standing in the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been. 

– John Crowley, Engine Summer (1979): II, 5 

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Engine Summer by John Crowley

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Medieval pinewood figure of St. Michael, found in a bog near the Vassfjellet (Norway) in 1932

NTNU University Museum

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Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer