I read this collection of Julio's nonfiction some years back and just did do a reread of several of the essays. One essay in particular has always stayed with me - On Feeling Not All There. Thus below are selective quotes for your reading pleasure.
Why do I feel a strong kinship with this Julio essay? I likewise was a child-man as a kid and became a man-child as an adult - doing the Julio flip! And I've never felt all there in this three-dimensional shoebox world.
Thanks again Julio for being Julio!
And, by the way, I'm currently learning Spanish and using Julio's Historias de cronopios y de famas as my prime reading text. Talk about motivation! For me, the prospect of reading Julio's novels and tales in the original language is glorious.
ON FEELING NOT ALL THERE
I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del camino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world.
This can be taken metaphorically, but it aptly describes a temperament that has not renounced the child's vision as the price of becoming an adult, and this juxtaposition, which creates the poet and perhaps the criminal, as well as the Cronopio and the humorist (a question of different dosages, of end or penultimate stresses, of choices: now I play, now I kill), shows itself in the feeling of not being completely a part of those structures, those webs, that make up our lives, wherein we are at once both spider and fly.
Much of what I have written falls into the category of eccentricity, because I have never admitted a clear distinction between living and writing; if in my life I have managed to disguise an only partial participation in my circumstances. I still cannot deny that eccentricity in what I write, since I write precisely because I am only half there or not there at all.
But it so happens that the man-child is not a gentleman but a Cronopio who does not understand very well the system of vanishing lines that either creates a satisfactory perspective or circumstances or, like a badly done collage, produces a scale inconsistent with those circumstances, an ant too big for a palace or a number four that contains three or five units. I know this from experience: sometimes I am larger than the horse I ride and sometimes I fall into one of my shoes, which always is alarming, to say nothing of the difficulty of climbing out, the ladders constructed knot by knot from the laces.
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