Nothingness
In his last works, Tiempo en pena and Nada más que…, Brull's poetry takes on a melancholy, somber and reflective tone, that of a journey toward the black hole of existentialism, possibly intensified by personal tragedy (the death of his wife) and the world around him seemingly falling apart (the Spanish Civil War followed by the Second World War).
Throughout the years one can find, beneath the formal and expressive clarity, Brull's increasing concern of what he saw as a world in permanent deterioration. The roots of this desolation are evident in his first poems in which absence and silence—often depicted as quietness—are present yet any discomfort is dispelled by the vision of ideal beauty. By the 1950s, absence is no longer a friendly notion as it veers into nothingness. Brull is consumed by a tragic vision of life in which all things, including beauty, are conceived of as subject to destruction or, a word he often chose, ruin. Once time has done its task, only nothingness remains. “Never had Cuban poetry reached so far into desperation with such discreteness and solitude.”
Read more about this topic: Mariano Brull, Literary Characteristics
Famous quotes containing the word nothingness:
“Once one has kissed a cadaver’s forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertaste of nothingness that nothing can erase.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Perhaps it is nothingness which is real and our dream which is non-existent, but then we feel think that these musical phrases, and the notions related to the dream, are nothing too. We will die, but our hostages are the divine captives who will follow our chance. And death with them is somewhat less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.”
—Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac (1619–1655)