Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015
Hunter of Stories - Eduardo Galeano's last book published in 2017 contains dozens and dozens and dozens of what I term "Flash Truths" - counterpoint to Flash Fiction. Below are a batch of representative examples.
FREE
By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars.
Paying no fare, they travel without passports and without forms for customs or immigration.
Birds are the only free beings in the world inhabited by prisoners. They fly from pole to pole, powered by food alone, on the route they choose and at the hour they wish, without ever asking permission of officials who believe they own the heavens.
RAIN
Among all the world's music and all heaven's too, my favorite is the concerto for solo rain.
Every time it plays on the skylight of my house, I listen as if I were at Mass.
GOD'S LITTLE ANGEL
I was once a child, one of "God's little angels."
At school, the teacher taught us that Balboa, the Spanish conquistador, standing on a hill in Panama, had seen the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Atlantic on the other. He was, the teacher said, the first man to see both oceans at once.
I raised my hand. "Miss, miss."
And I asked, "Were the Indians blind?"
That was the first time I got kicked out.
A FEW THINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I could be the world champion of absentmindedness, if such a championship existed. Frequently I mix up days, times, places. I have trouble telling night from day, and I miss appointments because I sleep in.
My birth's confirmed that God is not infallible. But I'm not always wrong when it comes to choosing the people I love and thee ideas I believe it.
I detest the contrite, hate complainers, admire those who wordlessly roll with the punches. Luckily there is always some friend telling me to keep on writing, telling me that age helps and that baldness comes from thinking too much and is a risk of the profession.
Writing is tiring , but it consoles me.
THE NEWBORN
On the last day of April of the year 2013, Galulú Guagnini was born in Caracus.
Her father, Rodofo, explained: "She came to teach us everything anew."
THOSE EYES
Cesare Pavese wrote" "Death is coming and it will have your eyes."
He met death in a hotel in Turin one summer evening in 1950.
He recognized it by its eyes.
Italian author Cesare Pavese, 1908-1950
BLESS YOUR LAUGHTER, ALWAYS
Darcy Ribeiro went in and out of the jungle as if it were his home, and indeed it was.
He traveled light: a single book was all he carried, an old Spanish edition of Don Quixote.
In his hammock, swaying under the leafy trees of the Amazon, Darcy reveled in his favorite books. On every page he let out a belly laugh, and the local children laughed with him. None of them knew how to read, but they all knew how to laugh.
Brazilian author and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, 1922-1997
BANNED
No one wanted to publish Mark Twain's ringing denunciations of the massacres perpetrated in the Philippines and elsewhere by imperial troops of the United States.
In 1905, he wrote:
"Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead. They can speak their honest minds without offending."
American author Mark Twain, 1835-1910
CLOSED DOORS
In August of the year 2004, a shopping center caught fire in Asunción, Paraguay.
Three hundred ninety-six people died.
The doors were barred so that no one could escape without paying.
HOMAGE
On Santa Lucía Hill, in downtown Santiago de Chile, stands a statue of the indigenous leader Caupolicán.
Caupolicán looks rather like a Hollywood Indian, which makes sense. The work was sculpted in the United States in 1869 for a competition to honor James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans.
The statue lost the contest, and the Mohican had to change countries and pretend he was Chilean.
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