EGO LECTOR

Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía (p.26):
“The entirety of Walser’s work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty years, served as a commentary on the vanity of every enterprise, and even the vanity of life itself.”

Todo la obra de Walser, incluido su ambiguo silencio de veintiocho años, comenta la vanidad de toda empresa, la vanidad de la vida misma.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (No. 106):
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning, without considering how many hours have been wasted in vain endeavours, how often imagination has anticipated the praises of futurity, how many statues have risen to the eye of vanity, how many ideal converts have elevated zeal, how often wit has exulted in the eternal infamy of his antagonists, and dogmatism has delighted in the gradual advances of his authority, the immutability of his decrees, and the perpetuity of his power?”