‘...the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’
- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever p.17
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The best thing would be to write down everything that happens from day to day.
Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
I am a sick man… I am an angry man.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we” – not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one – participate in its coming into being.
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.- The Trial, Franz Kafka
This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening.
I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Enough.
