#duplication – @nickkahler on Tumblr

Parker’s back is now Christ’s face and the welts, rising redly on one, also disfigure the other. The bond between the two is irrevocable and Parker’s only comfort now is the supreme comfort—that he has a tree, a cross, to lean on, that in his suffering he experiences only what Christ himself felt. The spirit of utter mutuality and unity, what his tattoos have always up to now lacked, descends on him and he realizes the terrible cost. The Word has become flesh on his own flesh.

Jill Baumgaertner on Flannery O’Connor, “Parker’s Back,” 1965

nickkahler

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

John le Carre, “On Espionage,” c. 2000

#john le carre #quote #espionage #spy #shed #mentality #double standard #existence #phenomenology #duplication #mirror #twin

nickkahler

There is a constant in the American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, c. 1986 (via hoekstra)