De Schotse schrijver Christopher Brookmyre werd geboren op 6 september 1968 in Glasgow. Zie ook alle tags voor Christopher Brookmyre op dit blog.
Uit: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away
“These fuckers deserved to live forever. The sleepwalking suburban slave classes in their Wimpey mock-Tudor penal colonies. A jail that needed no walls because the inmates had been brainwashed into believing they wanted to be there. Incarceration by aspiration, all the time mindlessly propagating and self-replicating, passing on their submissive DNA to the next generation of glazed-eyed prisoners.
And every day they’d get up and pray that emancipation never came: ‘Dear Lord, protect us from uniqueness. Grant unto us eternal conformity, and deliver us from distinction. Amen.’
There was one up his arse right then, flashing the headlights on his MX3, the bloke’s eyes widening and nostrils flaring in time with the admonitory illuminations. An absolute fanny. Risking his life in an attempt to overtake before the crawler lane ends, so he’ll be one car – one car – up the queue when he reaches the traffic lights. And what did that tell you about the life he was risking?
Exactly.
Suburban Sad Cunts. This was the real reason for road rage. It wasn’t a symptom of growing traffic congestion (though it shared the single car-usage factor), it was that this was the closest they got to defiance, the last ghostly remnant of the will to assert some identity. It was the only time they got to express any sense of self: when they were behind that wheel, on their own, jostling for position with the rest of the faceless. Overtake the guy in the bigger, newer, shinier car, and it made you forget all the other, truer ways in which he was leaving you to eat his dust. Someone gets in your way, holds you back, and you transfer all your frustrations to him because it reminds you of just how many obstacles there are between where you are now and where you want to be. The car in front is your lack of self-confidence, bequest of your over-protective mother. The car in front is your fear of confrontation, inherited from your cowed and broken father. The car in front is the school you didn’t go to, the golf club you didn’t join, the Lodge you don’t belong to. The car in front is your wife and kids and the risks you can’t take because you’ve got responsibilities.
But the most tragic part is that you need the car in front, you need the obstacle, because it prevents you from confronting the fact that you don’t know where you want to be. You’d be lost beyond the penal colony. It’s scary out there.
You wouldn’t fit in.”
De Duitstalige, Iraanse dichter en schrijver Cyrus Atabay werd geboren op 6 september 1929 in Teheran. Zie ook alle tags voor Cyrus Atabay op dit blog.
DE GEHEIMSTE KRISTAL
I
De onherhaalbaarheid van de tijd,
die zich in één zin concentreert ,
waarvoor een heel leven nodig was,
om hem uit te spreken.
Je laat het zand in de Sahara
uit je hand neersijpelen,
jij vertaalt de tijd,
die je rest
in een andere taal.
II
Een solitaire ster
in de steengroeve van het firmament
is een blinde geworden,
die in La Boca zijn weg zoekt.
Maar het is geen duisternis,
die hem omringt,
hij leeft in het centrum
van een lichte nevel,
waakzaam dromend.
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 6e september ook mijn blog van 6 september 2019 en ook mijn blog van 6 september 2017 en ook mijn blog van 6 september 2015 deel 2.