I.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude situates itself in the impossible middle between what is inside and outside, between life and death, between history and imagination. This means that the reader, ultimately, gets to choose. He or she can stay inside the text, like the last Aureliano for whom it is already too late. He must die as the closing act of a tale of love and extinction because his whole contradictory reality, like Remedios la Bella herself, "stagnated" in a magnificent adolescence." Or the reader can leap outside that ambiguous relationship with death and, deciphering the repression, reading its causes and its loneliness, manage to take the fiction back to reality, make it historical, try to make sure that the next hundred years will not end in the same way.

The second path is not meant to turn away from the past but to surpass it by looking it in the face. If the readers - as well as the author and its characters - are urged to take this path, it does not require an epic commitment on their part but rather the need to relive the sources of their present circumstances."

Ariel Dorfman, "Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in Garcia Marquez"


II.

"(Kublai Khan) said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Italo Calvino, "Invisible Cities"


III.

"Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits (to leaf through a magazine at the hairdresser's, the dentist's); mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing, and which I shall call, in conclusion, the photographic ecstasy.

Such are the two ways of the Photograph. The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality."


Roland Barthes, "Camera Lucida"