Truman Capote - Music for Chameleons

Truman Capote - Summer Crossing

Other voices, other rooms - Truman Capote IV

"But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated from each other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart."

-- Capote is brilliant in this book.
Metaphors, hyperboles, innuendos, irony, come around in every paragraph. The exotic scent of a luxuriant, decrepit and maddening hot South is everywhere to be found.
The speaker here reminds me of Marcel Proust in his room, dreamily writing about the Marquis de Quercy and "a race accursed".

Other voices, Other rooms - Truman Capote III

"Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory."

"Deixe-me começar dizendo que eu estava apaixonado. Uma declaração ordinária, é verdade, mas não um fato ordinário, já que tão poucos entre nós aprendem que amor é ternura e ternura não é, como uma grande parte suspeita, pena; e ainda menos dentre nós sabem que felicidade no amor não consiste na concentração absoluta de uma emoção em outra: é preciso sempre amar muitas coisas que a pessoa amada chega apenas a simbolizar; nesse mundo, aqueles verdadeiramente amados são, aos olhos de quem os ama, liláses se abrindo, as luzes de um navio, sinos da escola, uma paisagem, conversas relembradas, amigos, o Domingo de uma criança, vozes perdidas, o terno favorito, outono e todas as estações, memória, sim, essa sendo terra e água da existência, memória."
- Tradução: Iran Rodrigues

Other voices, other rooms - Truman Capote II

"Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers (...), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still."

Other voices, other rooms - Truman Capote

"The Brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries"