César Aira

Soon enough you realize that you are no longer twenty years old, because right away you are no longer young ... and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was also changing. And then, just as suddenly, you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth--a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead--and yet that birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. This book consists of a series of short chapters in which Aira searches for and meditates on the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes, and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and wonders about literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, about ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible.

Birthday

Rebecca Lum

In fact, the most obvious individualizers are almost always defects: tics, bad habits, vices, transgressions. […] To accentuate the positive, it might be supposed that the bad exists for a good reason and without it things would be worse overall. The inexistence of anything, even crime, is an impoverishment. […] Actually, I believe that the bad is more fertile than the good, because the good tends to produce satisfaction and complacency, while the bad generates uneasiness, which leads to the renewal of action. Action produces further errors, and the spiral of particularity spins off into the infinite. We all aspire to goodness, but because of the very conditions under which judgments of goodness are made, good people tend to resemble one another, and going too far in that direction would transform humanity into an undifferentiated and inert mass.

To become unique and distinct is to prepare a testimony, for which our civilization has invented an ideal vehicle: art. Artists tend to be eccentric people, but I don't think it's because art has made them strange; rather their strangeness has led them to art. Orperhaps there is a reciprocal effect. […] Searching for the new and the strange in art is not the narcissistic task it might at first appear to be, becase, for a start, it's not a matter of searching but of having found.

Birthday quotes

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