The Part About The Critics

Finished Part 1 from 2666 this afternoon. Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Liz Norton. Haunting, quietly eerie, and lonely.

Norton felt somehow insulted by Morini's decision not to go with them. They didn't call each other again. Morini might have called Norton, but before his friends set off on their search for Archimboldi, he had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not at the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation, what might be called a new experience, since this wasn't resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it's burning. (107)

'Archimboldi is here,' said Pelletier, 'and we're here, and this is the closest we'll ever be to him.' (159)