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)
“Were we positive, eager, real—alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.”
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)