BIBLICAL SIESTAS IN LA MOLA

FORMENTERA. It took me nearly 2 weeks to read the 40 page Prelude of Joseph and his brothers. I kept falling in deep sleep to come back and start all over again, not to miss a word. It is worth the effort, but you need to find the right “biblical” place for the deed.

Me llevó casi 2 semanas leer las 40 páginas del Preludio de José y sus hermanos. Me dormía profundamente una y otra vez y volvía a empezar de nuevo para no perderme nada. Merece la pena el esfuerzo, pero hace falta encontrar el lugar "bíblico" adecuado para la hazaña.


"...the element of the past, by which we are customarily carried further, ever further, is a different past from the one into which we now begin our trembling descent: life's past, the world that was, the dead world to which - deeper, ever deeper - our life will one day belong and to which its beginnings are already consigned to considerable depths. Granted, to die means to lose time and be hurled out of it, but in return to gain eternity and a timeless present, and thus, for the first time, real life. For the essence of life is presentness, and only by means of myth does it represent its mystery in past and future tenses. That, as it were, is life's popular method for revealing itself, whereas the mystery belongs to the initiated. Let the people be taught that the soul wanders, but those with the knowledge are aware that this doctrine is but the garment of the mystery by which the soul enjoys a timeless present, with all of life belonging to it once death has released it from its solitary cell. When as adventurous storytellers we plunge into the past, we taste death and the knowledge of it - that is, the source of both our desire and our ashen-faced apprehension. But desire has more life - nor do we deny that it is bound up in the flesh. But the object of desire is the first and last of all our remarks and inquiries, of all our zeal: humanity - for which we shall search in the underworld and in death, just as Ishtar had searched there for Tammuz..."  

Thomas Mann translated from the German by John E. Woods