They set out the next morning just at sunrise. The vultures that top the taller, deader trees are spreading their black wings so the dew on them will evaporate; they’re waiting for the thermals to help them lift and spiral. Crows are passing the rumors, one rough syllable at a time. The smaller birds are stirring, beginning to cheep and trill; pink cloud filaments float above the eastern horizon, brightening to gold at the lower edges

Jeg har en mørk og skrekkelig hemmelighet. Jeg skriver dikt. Det er pinlig for et voksent menneske å bekjenne noe sånt. Winston Churchill og Noel Coward malte i sine ledige stunder. Når Albert Einstein skulle more seg og slappe av, spilte han fiolin. Hemingway gikk på jakt, Agatha Christie stelte i hagen, James Joyce sang arier og Nabokov fanget sommerfugler. Men dikt? Jeg har en venn som trommer på loftet, en annen har holdt på i årevis med å bygge en båt. Jeg kjenner en skuespiller som er mer stolt av sine attenhundretalls duellpistolkopier som han lager i et lite verksted, enn av sin ridderverdighet. Storbritannia er en nasjon av hobbyister – eksentriske ama- tører, deltidstalenter, selvhøytidelige keramikere og dedikerte autodidakte innenfor hele det menneskelige felt. Men dikt?"

Tenk om det var en annen forfatter
Tenk om det var Tomas Espedal
som var prinsessegemal

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!
(Fra Herman Hesses Wanderings - Notes and Sketches - historien heter Rainy Weathers)

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past. 'In time,' he said to me, 'every poem becomes an elegy.' He had no patience with faddish literary theories and blamed French literature in particular for concentrating not on books but on school and coteries….He was a haphazard reader who felt content, at times, with plot summaries and articles in encylopaedias, and who confessed that, even though he had never finished Finnegan's Wake, he happily lectured on Joyce's linguistic monument. His library (which like that of every other reader was also his autobiography) reflected his belief in chance and the rules of anarchy.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.