Page by page, this book has shown me just how important poets are in opening our eyes to things, to beings we pass by. And, in fact, we don’t just pass by—we float. Both we and they. Until the poet makes us aware of their existence.
More than ever, I can’t write about what I’ve read, because I felt
it more than anything. Yet feelings are so hard to put into words—perhaps even
impossible. So I’ll stop here, I’ve used too many words already.
But I’ll share below the few that carried me far, all the way up, and even now
I don’t know if I’m writing from there or from here.
“The angel came and said to me: ‘I’ve been watching over you for so
very long, hoping you’d become a scientist, and yet you haven’t invented a
single thing!’
‘Of course I have; I have invented something—it’s just that the
science I’ve created is so subtle that it’s sometimes mistaken for the natural
order of things. It’s called hemography—that is, writing with yourself.’ ”
About the 1977 Earthquake
“My lifelong friend, the poet Grigore Hagiu, told me: ‘I had gone
out barefoot onto the ground and held onto a tree. The tree was holding onto
me, and I was holding onto it. We were both scared.’”
The Great Survival
“The realization of one’s own nothingness produces fear. Fear is the
most powerful emotion. Fear is the only living emotion. Fear, in its primitive
forms, is encased in an eggshell. Real fear transforms into words.”
“Like the eye, the word perceives light,
but, unlike the eye, the word retains it within itself.”
