thank God, we're not perfect.

by proust. Sun 23 Nov 2008, 2:28 am

22Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" 23therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

I went shopping today with mom and bought a few books, only three because I couldn't really find much and I'm just saving up money for my Vienna trip. I couldn't find any book by Cecilia Ştefănescu [and you have no idea who she is, but she just pretty much blows, if you feel like ripping a movie of torrent nowadays take LoveSick the movie was made after her first novel and it's about these two girls who fall in love with each other and they're just wrong for each other and there's incest involved and all types of love and it's just a really lovely movie ^-^ watch it] and I found not one but two extremely expensive versions of Borges' The Sand Book and the whole deal almost made me cry, because I am NOT going to pay almost 20 euros just for a 200 pages book, Borges or not. Yes I am cheap.

Anyway, I did get this book on Egyptian mysticism, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [which I've wanted to read since forever, or maybe just since I read Junkie] and A Symbolic History of the Occidental Middle Ages by, uh, Michel Pastoureau. I've only started to read the last one -because I'm already reading a million books and Kafka on the Shore, but that's an other problem that deserves a paragraph of its own and I'm avoiding the subject here i r pleased.

- and I've only got about 60 pages in it. It's really witty, in an intelligent manner. It tells you all these little details and facts about the Dark Age that you don't find in history books. And at one point, it said that the apple is considered an evil tree because its name in latin is similar with the word mal = evil.

With that in mind, we drove back to my aunt's and I got the amazing opportunity to witness a beautiful sunset.
Well, I guess it was beautiful because of the contrast between it and everything around me. The city was really ugly and gray and black and full of election posters and mean people and office buildings and dirty old buildings and there were a thousands and thousands of black crows flying above and I hate cars, but that moment was so beautiful. I started to smile wildly and forget everything. Because it was a november saturday sunset and there was no reason in the whole world not to be smiling. because we're imperfect, we're so faulty and our world is so full of mistakes and our beauty lays in that.

It made me remember Nichita Stanescu's Lecture on the cube

You take a piece of stone,
chisel it with blood,
grind it with Homer’s eye,
burnish it with beams
until the cube comes out perfect.

Next you endlessly kiss the cube
with your mouth, with others’ mouths,
and, most important, with infanta’s mouth. .
Then you take a hammer
and suddenly knock a corner off.

All, indeed absolutely all will say
what a perfect cube this would have been
if not for the broken corner!

Thank God, we're imperfect. We often forget what a blessing that is.
if it weren't for our imperfection we would never have gotten out of Eden, never loved, never known, never created art, and fundamentally, never lived. our lives are a series of carefully devised mistakes. the element of surprise does make it better.
imagine how ugly and dull and empty and dangerous for our health perfection would be.
you have pleased him

AND, it snowed this morning. i r pleased.

but only for a bit.

p.s I have a love - hate relationship with Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, I've only read 160 pages, but there are bits that I really don't like - the whole UFO-murdering of the cats-blood on shirt. the rest is lovely.