Gwenda

Democracy Now! interviews Eduardo Galeano about all sorts of things:

EDUARDO GALEANO: I never decided. It’s something — I’m written by my books. I mean, they write me, so I never decide anything. Well, I was always looking for a language who could integrate everything that has been culturally divorced from, for instance, heart and mind. So I was looking for a feel-thinking language, sentipensante, “feel-thinking.” It’s a word. I didn’t invent the word. It’s a word I heard years ago in the Colombian coast. A fisherman told me, "Hay gigrere en las palabras sentipensantes," when I told him I was a writer. "Ah, you’re a writer." "Yes." "Oh." And he asked me if I was using a sentipensante language, a feel-thinking language. And so, he was a master. I mean, I learned a lot from this sentence forever. I am a sentipensante.

I think one of the divorces that has avoided a full integration of human condition is this divorce between our emotions and our ideas. In other divorces, separating journalists, for instance, literary journalists, saying, well, this is an essay. This is a poem. This is a novel. This is an — I don’t know what. And I don’t believe in frontiers. I think that in no — I don’t believe at all in frontiers. And then, how would I practice the alguanas, I would say, the immigration controls between literary journalists? I believe that —

AMY GOODMAN: You don’t believe in borders.

EDUARDO GALEANO: No. I think that when the world — perhaps one day the world, the world, our world, won’t be upside down, and then any newborn human being will be welcome. Saying, "Welcome. Come. Come in. Enter. The entire earth will be your kingdom. Your legs will be your passport, valid forever." And for me, this is true also for words. I mean, the same thing with words, persons, words. I really believe in the universal dimension of human condition, not globalization, which is the universal dimension of money, but the universal dimension of our human passions.

There’s soccer stuff too, of course. (Via Austin Kleon.)

I want his new book Voices of Time so badly; it sounds very Book of Embraces, which is the best, loveliest book ever. Oh, and he also says this in the interview:

We are all making each day, being as we are, obliged to live life as a duty, but secretly willing to live it as a feast.

And then this:

And these new ways are exploding in the contemporary world and opening, broadening the spaces for independent expressions. I now repentido, because I didn’t believe in it at the beginning. I mean, I mistrusted it, all this internet and so on, the cybernetic new ways of — no, I was against it, because I always had a strong suspicion that machines drink at night. When nobody sees them, they drink.

I love this man.

A remarkable story in the WaPo about a tape of a 1966 Pablo Neruda reading that was missing for 40 years before someone started looking. It’s been found:

But what the poet read at the Library of Congress was quick and almost simple when compared with the rich and long version Neruda presented for the IDB. Holding tight to the IDB tape, Dorn said, "It’s much better than what he read at the library."

In the summer of 1966, she was a 20-year-old who had just come to work at the library. That June day, Neruda did his reading, had lunch with poet Stephen Spender, then returned to Dorn’s office and asked, she said, "Can I see the papers of Walt Whitman?"