Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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Glimpses

“Yesterday I was in the Museum of the Delta [in Tulcea], and today I am on the delta [of Danube] with its odours, colours, reflections, changing shadows on the current, wings flashing in the sun. The liquid life runs through the fingers and forces one - even in the joy of today as one stands on the deck of the vessel like a Homeric king on his chariot - to be aware of all the inadequacies of our perceptions, our senses atrophied by millennia, our sense of smell and of hearing unequal to the messages that come from every waving tuft of grass, our antique severance from the flow of life, our lost and rejected brotherwood. We are like a Ulysses who no longer needs to be tied to the mast, like silors who no longer have to stop their ears, because the sing of the Syrens is entrusted to ultrasonic waves which His Majesty the Ego cannot discern.” –– Claudio Magris, Danube (1986)

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