Sunshine on the grass/ Émile Zola
Soon, Trompette lay sprawled on the cast-iron floor, motionless, like a heap. He still didn’t move, lost in the nightmare of that dark, endless hole, that deep room echoing with uproar. They were beginning to untie him when Bataille, unhitched a moment earlier, approached and stretched out his neck to sniff this companion who had fallen from the earth like this. Perhaps he breathed in the sweet scent of open air, the long-forgotten smell of sunshine on the grass. And suddenly, he broke into a loud neigh, a melody of joy, carrying the tenderness of a sob. It was a welcome, the joy of those old things, of which a puff reached him—a melancholy for one more prisoner who would only ascend again in death.
I knew all about death/ Jeroen Brouwers
Before I could read, I knew all about death. It was so much a part of my early years to be bluntly confronted with it that, as far as I knew, there was no emotion attached to it—no fear, no sorrow, no revulsion.
A person who died would be rolled into a rush mat and taken away on a handcart. Her possessions, especially if they included a crumb or a grain of food, were fought over, and the place she vacated would be “tchooped” even before the corpse was removed. (To tchoop was a camp word meaning to take possession or “claim.”)
