Boredom not something I waste much time worrying about. one of The blessings of longevity I suppose.
I translated the Spanish on bable fish could not make much sense out of it.
"Cuanto mas grande es la felicidad, menos se la advierte. Parecera extraño, pero el hecho es que en aquellos dos años a veces hasta crei aburrirme. Y, sin duda, no me percataba de que era feliz".
"Whichever but great it is the happiness, less notices it. Strange Parecera, but the fact is that in those two years sometimes until crei to bore to me. And, without a doubt, it was not aware to me that he was happy ".
I suppose another language interests me cause I am too lazy to learn English. I grew up with Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. I wish I had learned some other language when it was so easy.
I like this bit from the novel that Chiaromonte quotes in the essay:
One day he finds himself beckoning to a girl,
“As she passed under my window, I saw her look up at me, but this time without smiling, I raised my hand to take the cigarette from my mouth, but instead I found myself making an unmistakable sign to her to come back,”
That is how things happen, the writer seems to be saying; that is how we become involved in reality
From this involuntary gesture, at once gratuitous and inevitable, the gist of the tale , the story not of love or eroticism but of the frustrated desire for possession and consciousness takes its impetus. The relationship between the painter and the girl is naked, mechanical and clean as a bone-or, better still, as a skeleton. No one has depicted a series of carnal acts, frenzied yet cold in their automatism-nudity, desire, and its outlet- whith such comple lack of complacence , such immpassive truthfulness . For Moravia does not describe bodies or their acts; he makes us feel their existence and their unreality at the same time...
That sentence from Moravia in blue above must have a million commas in it. Maybe I should learn how to do that instead of trying to learn another language at this late date.
I probably won't ever read the novel, I may see the film if I can find it.
