Reviews
▪️ "The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected." ▪️ "What was painful to me was not his suffering (for I did not believe he was suffering); it was that for the first time it came on me that when a man dies, an unknown world passes away[...] The hard bone of his skull was in a sense an old treasure chest; and I could not know what colored stuffs, what images of festivities, what vestiges, obsolete, and vain in this desert, had escaped the shipwreck." ▪️ "Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
"One thing that I had loved in Paraguay was the ironic grass that showed the tip of its nose between the pavements of the capital, that slipped in on behalf of the invisible but ever-present virgin forest to see if man still held the town, if the hour had not come to send all these stones tumbling." So beautifully written.
Ce n'est qu'en survolant l'aride désert, que les richesses secrètes de la terre se sont offertes, j'y reviendrai quand je perdrai de nouveau la carte au trésor qu'est cette vie ou cette mort, des deux on ne sait la plus heureuse, naître ou mourir ?
New favourite book ever.. Life-changing and now i want to be an aviator lol Prose is beautiful, philosophical ideas are beautiful, descriptions and scenery and vibes are beautiful Please do yourself a favour and read this book
3.5
Highlights
« La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que tous les livres. Parce qu'elle nous résiste. L'homme se découvre quand il se mesure avec l'obstacle. »
Flying is not the point. The aeroplane is a means, not an end. It is not for the plane that we risk our lives. Nor is it for the sake of his plough that the farmer ploughs. But through the plane we can leave the cities and their accountants, and find a truth that farmers know… We wait for dawn as a gardener waits for spring. We wait for the next port of call as a promised land, and we seek our truth in the stars.
And so the joy of being alive was gathered in that aromatic and burning first taste, in that blend of milk, coffee and wheat which brings communion with peaceful pastures, with exotic plantations and with harvests, communion with all the earth.
And with that we knew ourselves to be lost in interplanetary space among a thousand inaccessible planets. we who sought only the one veritable planet, our own, that planet on which alone we should find our familiar countryside, the houses of our friends, our treasures.
Flying, in general, seemed to us easy. When the skies are filled with black vapors, when fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacher- ously in these skyey swamps, the pilot purges himselt of the phantoms at a single stroke. He lights his lamps. He brings sanity into his house as into a lonely cottage on a fearsome heath. And the crew travel a sort of submarine route in a lighted chamber.
I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think—not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me.
This book appears on the shelf Read in 2020
This book appears on the shelf Portuguese literature
