Becoming

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

—Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013; trans. A. Goldstein 2014)

'being content with the spectacle of the world'

In Saramago's novels, the self may cast only a shadow, like Ricardo Reis, but this shadow implies not the nonexistence of the self, but only its difficult visibility, its near invisibility, rather as the shadow cast by the sun warns us that we cannot look directly at it. Ricardo Reis is aloof, ghostly. He does not want to get pulled into real relationships, including the real relationships of politics. Europe is scrambling for war, but Ricardo luxuriously sits around wondering if he exists. He writes a poem that begins "We count for nothing, we are less than futile." Another poem begins: "Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world." Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world's spectacle is horrifying.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works (2012)

'the unfathomed distances in himself'

From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

'all things end by becoming me'

Morning after morning, when I saw her kneel among the communicants waiting for the communion, I, who knelt behind her, wanted to stroke her ankle in her shoe. Her curls under her father's old hat became the curls of all the women in the world; her waist was the waist of a statue; she was losing her identity for me already, merged into myself. But that is the misfortune of my nature, that all things end by becoming me until now, nothing exists that is not me.

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)