Under the Volcano

Translation: You can´t live without loving.

What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?

God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light.

Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué.

And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?

How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying.

I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand.

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.

Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.

The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.

Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which.

In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl.

I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes.