Friday, January 27, 2012

Pyramids & Roberto Bolano

Several times I have passed brick fragment sticking out of the ground like in the picture below.
I imagined and fantasised that this was just the small corner of a giant pyramid. A huge pyramid hiding deep under the ground. Who knows, maybe it goes through the whole earth and some of it's corners are sticking out in other continents.
If you pay attention you will see many of these pyramids in your neighborhood. If they can be found in Rotterdam, they can be found everywhere.

Recently I was reading The savage detectives by Roberto Bolano. I was pleasantly surprised that this great writer had come up with the same idea. And he came up with the idea several years earlier:
Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father's car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking.

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