Susana Soca

Susana Soca

With lingering love she gazed at the dispersed Colors of dusk. It pleased her utterly To lose herself in the complex melody Or in the cunous life to be found in verse. lt was not the primal red but rather grays That spun the fine thread of her destiny, For the nicest distinctions and all spent In waverings, ambiguities, delays. Lacking the nerve to tread this treacherous Labyrinth, she looked in on, whom without, The shapes, the turbulence, the striving rout, (Like the other lady of the looking glass.) The gods that dwell too far away for prayer Abandoned her to the final tiger, Fire.

– Jorge Luis Borges

“[…] the idea of perfection which art pursues, the wisdom accumulated in writing, the dream of satisfying every desire that is expressed in the luxury of ornaments, all these point towards one single meaning, celebrate one foundational principle, entail one single final object. And this is an object which does not exist. Its sole quality is that of not being there. One cannot even give it a name.”

— Italo Calvino, tr. Martin McLaughlin, from “The Mihrab,” Collection of Sand (Mariner Books, 2013; orig. pub. in Italian, 1984)

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil (1960)

“And everything stayed unsaid.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Eavan Boland, from “Departure from England,”