El maravilloso mundo de las... citas!

Os traigo una cita, que mas que una cita es un copypaste de la primera página del libro, y en inglés porque yo soy un moderno.

Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

 Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction.  It seemed to be saying something with all that.  So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal,  Mangala,  Auqakuh, Harmakhis— they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before.  Yes,  for thou sands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

 Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed.   No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off  the final deadly encroachment of the desert.  

 It was a great story.  But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed.   Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before.  And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.
  
 It seemed, however, to be a world without life.  People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors.  As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found.  And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell's time, or in Homer's, or in the caves or on the savannah—stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.  And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life.  Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories.  And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.[/i]

#586 Si, ya voy por la mitad del primero. Yo mientras tenga un lenguaje tecnico me desenvuelvo en ingles, los libros que me joden son los de tematica medieval que muchas palabras no las entiendo. Y luego está Moby Dick que despues de cojer (sin coñas) 23 veces el diccionario en 4 paginas me lo baje en castellano.

"Mi niño, estoy tumbada y te observo,
me olvido de todo lo demás;
pasan en sueños las cosas de la tierra,
pero despierta no les hago caso.
Oigo cómo va y viene la suave respiración,
esta respiración que llegó tan tarde,
y observo esos ojos azules inocentes,
cuya luz pura procede del cielo"

Y aunque Narniana no se lo crea no la he escrito yo,
es un anónimo de 1860 citado por Vimala Schneider en su libro.

#594 Puedes leerlo cien o MIL veces, siempre es magnífico y siempre sorprende por lo certero que es.

#596 Muelle fue un pionero, pero la legión de seguidores mediocres que dejó ensuciando España con sus garabatos todavía hace sangrar paredes.