-------- Original Message --------
In his novel "Quincas Borba" , Machado de Assis deals with a recurrent
theme
in our List ( Tom Rymour's and Stan's "peut-êtres") when he returns to
Borba's philosophy about "Humanitism".
To him, "potatoes" mean the conquest of a prize and sufficient time to
enjoy
it ( the oft-quoted sentence runs "Ao vencedor, as batatas"*).
Borba's ideas, in many aspects, resemble some of Nabokov's musings
concerning the abyssal nothingness that antecedes and succedes our
rocking
sliver of life, Van's musings about death and the voice from the
hereafter**.
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* "There is no death. The meeting of two expansions, or the expansion
of two
forms, may determine the suppression of one of these; but, rigorously,
there
is no death, there is life, because the suppression of one is the
condition
for the survival of the other, and its destruction doesn't encompass
the
common and universal principle. Therefrom derives the conservative and
beneficial aspect of war. Imagine a field with potatoes and two hungry
tribes. The potatoes are just enough for one of the tribes, so that it
will
gain enough strength to cross the mountain and reach its opposite field
with
its abundant potatoes; if the two tribes peacefully share the scarce
potatoes in their fields, they won't get enough nourishment and they'll
all
die of hunger. In this case peace is destruction; war is conservation.
One
of the tribes annihilates the other and obtains the plunder [...] To
the
vanquished, hate or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes"
** - an excerpt: "I hesitated for a while if I should start these
memoirs
from the beginning or from the end, if I should first describe my birth
or
my demise (.)Properly speaking, I am not a deceased author (.) my tomb
was
my second cradle. Moses, who also wrote about his death, did not
commence
with it (.): a radical distinction between this book and the
Pentateuch."
("Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" Chapter One, 1881).