Thursday, November 02, 2017

Seasonal note



Feliz día de las mangostas.
None of us recalls the text of the law that obliges us to collect the dead leaves, but we are convinced that it would not occur to anyone to leave them uncollected; it's one of those things that go way back, to the first lessons of childhood, and now there is no great difference between the elementary acts of lacing your shoes or opening your umbrella and what we do in collecting the dead leaves on the second of November at nine in the morning.
Julio Cortázar's "With Justifiable Pride" can be found, in Thomas Christensen's translation, in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (North Point Press, 1986). I have slightly modified his version in the excerpt above.

Image: Bioenciclopedia.

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