Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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During

“Indeed even Goethe in his late, more enigmatical work, did not overlook that fear: in the Second Part of Faust he not only tells the story of Homunculus, the man created in laboratory but he conjures up the vision of a total triumph of the unnatural and the defeat and disappearance of the ancient Mother, mimicked and replaced by fashion., artificial products, and false appearances. In the transition to the modern and post-modern, that is the Second Part of Faust, the taps are already more living and tangible than are the rivers, and their system of pipes can at any moment cut off the supply of the waters of life, as threatened in the Book of Revelation. The anguished protests against the power station planned near Hainburg speak of desiccation both of land and of life, of a maternal amnion drained and sterilized, of the muddy, primordial jungle of the Auen that would vanish for ever.” – Claudio Magris, Danube (1986)

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