...or week, or year, or decade... heck, I would consider this a good epitaph:Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografía del siglo XVIII, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson.
or
“My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typeface, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, Borges y Yo (1960)
I’ve never been an enormous Stevenson fan, aside of course from a childhood liking of Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped, but after a recent conversation with a serious student of Scottish literature, I am going to give his work a closer look, and while I don’t think I would say his prose per se is anything special, I definitely like Stevenson’s unique combination of the childish, the abstractly cerebral and the grotesque. As for the hourglasses, maps, etymology and coffee, I think it would be harder to find a four-word summary of the sorts of things I like. Well, not hourglasses in particular, but it gets the idea across of something slightly outdated yet effective, precise and elegant. Just one of the innumerable reasons why I have infinite admiration for Borges and his work.
No comments:
Post a Comment