De Canadese schrijver en scenarist Patrick deWitt werd geboren op 6 maart 1975 op Vancouver Island. Zie ook alle tags voor Patrick deWitt op dit blog.

Uit: The Librarianist

“The morning of the day Bob Comet first came to the Gambell Reed Senior Center, lie awoke in his mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon, in a state of disappointment at the fact of a dream interrupted. He had again been dreaming of the Hotel Elba, a long-gone coastal location he’d visited at eleven years of age in the middle 1940s. Bob was not known for his recall, and it was an ongoing curiosity to him that he could maintain so vivid a sense of place after so many years had passed. More surprising still was the emotion that ac-companied the visuals; this dream always flooded his brain with the chemical announcing the onset of profound roman-tic love, though he’d not known that experience during his time at the hotel. He lay in his bed now, lingering over the feeling of love as it ebbed away from him. Bob sat up and held his head at a tilt and looked at nothing. He was a retired librarian, seventy-one years of age, and not unhappy. His health was sound and he spent his days reading, cooking, eating, tidying, and walking. The walks were often miles long, and he set out with no destination in mind, choosing his routes improvisationally and according to any potentially promising sound or visual taking place down any potentially promising street. Once he’d witnessed an apartment fire downtown; the hook-and-ladder brigade had saved a baby from an uppermost window and the crowd on the sidewalk had cheered and cried and this was highly exciting for Bob. Another time, in the southeast quadrant, he’d watched a de-ranged man determinedly ripping out the flower beds in front of a veterinarian’s clinic while dogs looked on from the windows, craning their necks and barking their sense of offense. Most days there was not so much to report or look upon, but it was always good to be in motion, and good to be out among the population, even if he only rarely interacted with any one person. He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present. On this day, Bob was fed and out the door before nine o’clock in the morning. He had dressed according to the weatherman’s prediction but the weatherman was off, and so Bob had gone into the world unprepared for the cold and wet. He enjoyed being outdoors in poor weather but only if he was properly outfitted; in particular he disliked having cold hands, which he did have now, and so he entered a 7-Eleven, pouring himself a cup of coffee and lingering by the news-paper rack, warming himself while gleaning what news he could by the headlines.”

 

 

De Duitse dichter en schrijver Günter Kunert werd geboren op 6 maart 1929 in Berlijn. Zie ook alle tags voor Günter Kunert op dit blog.

 

Dwaalwegtol

Ik stopte daar
de auto en stapte uit.
Nergens een mens.
Lieflijke rotsen rondom.
Jij bent de oude weg
van Rome naar Niflheim.
Achter de kronkelige bergen echter
ligt het Duitse bos op de loer
en de wereldgeschiedenis, het wereldoordeel,
het vergaan en het vergeten.
Erop uitgetrokken voor imperiums,
naar huis teruggekeerd nooit echt. Alleen
de rots
gedenkt zowel hen als mij
in alle stilte, die was, die is,
die blijft
over afgronden heen
het enige dat leeft.

 

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 6^e maart ook mijn blog van 6 maart 2023 en ook mijn blog van 6 maart 2022 en ook mijn blog van 6 maart 2020 en ook mijn blog van 6 maart 2019 en ook mijn blog van 6 maart 2016 deel 2 en eveneens deel 3.