magpie nest

'...."you can't battle with the heavens, you can't resist when the angels smile on you! You let yourself be swept away by what is beautiful, lovely, adorable!" It was the first time Emma had heard such things, and like someone lying back in a steam bath, her pride gave itself up gently and completely to the warmth of the words."

"so what had she done (she who was so intelligent!) to misjudge things yet again? More to the point, what appalling compulsion was it that drove her to ruin her life with these unending sacrifices? She reflected on her inclinations for luxury, the hardships her soul endured, the meanness of marriage, family, dreams that fell in the mud like injured swallows, everything she had wanted, everything she had denied herself, everything she could have had! And for what? For what?"

"Because licentious or grasping lips had whispered similar words to him before, the trust he had in their spontaneity was minimal. "We need fewer of these overblown speeches" he thought. "They just conceal commonplace affections" as if the abundance of the soul doesn't sometimes overflow in hollow metaphors, because no one can ever adequately describe what or how much their need, the ideas in their head or the pain they are feeling; human speech is like a cracked pot in which we cook up tunes for bears to dance to, or when we want to call down the moon."

"For as all these women went rushing through his mind they got in each other's way and lost their individual importance, as if all their loves were identical, worth the same. Picking up a handful of letters at random, for a moment he let them tumble from his right hand into the left, smiling. And then, bored and drowsy, he put them back in the armoire and said to himself: "What a lot of nonsense!". It summed up his opinion, because like schoolboys in the playground, pleasure had so trampled down the soil of his heart that nothing green would grow there now, and what did pass through, being more wanton than any child, never thought to carve its name on the wall as they did"

"I was more interested by Bob's theory about corporate psychopaths. He blamed psy- chopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself. that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae. He had written a book about it - Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work - co-authored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak. Human Resources magazines across the world had, on its publication, given it rave reviews. All managers and HR people should read this book,' read a typical one from Health Service Journal, the in- house magazine for the National Health Service. 'Do you work with a snake on the make? These people can be found among those impressive but ruthless types who cut a swathe to the jobs at the top.' All that talk of snakes adopting human form remind- ed me of a story I once did about a conspiracy theorist named David Icke who believed that the secret rulers of the world were giant blood-drinking child-sacrific- ing lizards who had shape-shifted into humans so they could perform their evil on an unsuspecting population. I suddenly realized how similar the two stories were, ex- cept in this one the people who spoke of snakes in suits were eminent and utterly sane psychologists, respected around the world. Was this a conspiracy theory that was actually true?"

"a big study he'd co-authored, 'Corporate Psychopathy', had just been published. In it two hundred and three "corporate professionals' were assessed with his checklist = 'including CEOs, direc- tors, supervisors', Bob said - and the results showed that whilst the majority weren't at all psychopathic, 3.9% had a score of at least thirty, which is extremely high, even for a prison population, at least four or five times the prevalence in the general population. Bob clarified that we don't have a lot of empirical data for how many psychopaths are walking around in the general population, but the assumption is that it's a little less than one per cent. And so, his study showed, it is four or five times more likely that some corporate big- wig is a very high-scoring psychopath than someone just trying to earn an OK living for their family."

"As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought, 'If you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don't act like Blofeld - monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring."

"The bear was the sign of the Sixth House, the House of Rain and Death. The old man who sang this song said, "Nobody in this town has killed any bear since Grandmother Mountain erupted last. That is a good hunter's song, though. Even when a child hunts a wood rat he ought to sing that song. The bear is there." According to the theory of the four souls, animals possessed all four kinds, but the system got very vague when extended to plants. All wild birds were considered, essentially, to be souls. The kin-soul of an animal was its generic aspect: deerness, not that deer; cowness, not this cow. The apparent confusions and evasions of the Valley idea of reincarnation or transmigration of souls begin to clarify here: this cow that I now kill for food is cowness giving itself to me as food because it has been properly treated and entreated, and again it will give itself to me as a cow, at my need and entreaty, and I that kill this cow am a name, a word, an instance of humanness and-with the cow--of being in general: a moment in a place: a relationship."

"There was a man spoken of in Chukulmas who was apparently an actual instance of this kind of guilt-haunting. He was not an ordinary "forest-living person" or solitary, but lived without shelter, fled at the sight of human beings, and never spoke. He had been a young man named Young Moon of the Obsidian. What his transgression was, nobody knew for sure, but the assumption in the Hunters Lodge was that he had killed a doe and fawn "without singing," that is without speaking even the essential formula at the death, a brief, worn-down version of the butchers' formula: Beautiful one, for your death my words! This formula was spoken by a hunter shooting, by a trapper opening the rap, by anyone felling a tree, by anyone taking life. That it could be lorgotten was not considered a possibility. Young Moon's omission was deliberate; therefore punishable. Even when a corn-borer was squashed, a mosquito swatted, a branch broken, a flower picked, the formula was muttered in its ultimately Teduced form: arrario, "my word[s]." Although the one-word formula Was spoken as mindlessly as our "bless you" to a sneeze, it was always spoken."

"The stone, as they said, contains the mountain. One- or two-word formulas of this kind were known as pebbles. Another of them was the word ruha, spoken when one added a pebble (a material one) to the cairn or heap at certain places--by certain boulders, at crossroads, at various places along the paths on Ama Kulkun. The word was without other meaning to most people than "the word you say when you add a stone to a heya cairn." Scholars of the heyimas knew it to be an archaic form of the root -hur, to sustain, carry along, take with one. It was the last word of a lost sentence. The present stone contains the absent mountain. Most of the "meaningless" matrix-syllables of songs were pebble-words. The word heya was the word that contained the world, visible and invisible, on this side and on the other side of death"

"Big Man and Little Man

The stars were his semen, they say. He was really big, so big that he filled up the entire world outside the world, everything there was. There wasn't room for anything else. If he looked around from outside the world he saw the world inside, and he wanted to be in it, get it pregnant with himself, or maybe he wanted to eat it, get it inside himself. But he couldn't get there. He could only see it backwards. So he made some people to go there, to go across. He made a Little Man and sent him across, inside the world. But he made him with his head on backwards. Little Man went across, and he didn't stay. He came right back complaining. "I don't like it there," he said. So Big Man put him to sleep and while he was sleeping made a thing like a woman out of dirt, out of red adobe, they say. It looked like a woman, it fooled Little Man when he woke up. Big Man said, "Now you go there and breed." So Little Man took the thing and went back inside the world. He fucked it and it made copies. He kept doing that until there were as many of him as mosquitoes on River of the Marshes -as many as spiders in autumn--more. More than anything except maybe sand. All the same, no matter how many of him there were, he didn't like it there. He was afraid. He didn't belong there inside the world, he had no mother, only a father. So he killed whatever he was afraid of. He cut down every tree he saw, he shot every animal he saw, he made war on all the people. He made guns to shoot flies with, bullets to shoot fleas with. He was afraid of mountains and made mashers to flatten them, he was afraid of valleys and made fillers to fill them up, he was afraid of grass and burned it and put stones where it was. He was really afraid of water, because of the way water is. He tried to use it all up, burying springs, damming rivers, making wells. But if you drink, you piss. Water will come back down. As the desert grows so does the sea. So Little Man poisoned the sea. The fish all died. Everything was dying then, everybody was poisoned. The clouds were poison."

""I mean human people." It is very hard for me to keep in mind that "people" in this language includes animals, plants, dreams, rocks, etc. "What human people lived here before your people?" "Just our people--like you- "But of a different way of life--foreigners--like me." I don't know how to translate "culture" into his language more exactly, and the word "civilisation." of course, won't do at all. "Well, ways always change. They never stay the same, even when they're very good ways, very beautiful, like that house, you know. They stopped building like that, but then maybe somebody else does it, in another time, another place. It's hopeless. He doesn't perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere. He spatialises time; it is not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in. One may go from room to room, and come back; to go outside, all you have to do is open the door."

"We rode the Amaranth Train sleeping-car all the way down the line to Sed, and stayed at the inn there again, eating like ducks in a slug patch, while we asked around about ships and boats."

"Thirty years ago, I am told, an illness that had been in me for a long time grew stronger, taking consciousness from me, causing convulsions, and finally making my heart rate and breathing stop. Of this I remember nothing, but I remember what happened: I was inside a dark house, strangely shaped, without rooms. The walls of the house were thin, and wind and rain beat against them. stood in the middle of this house. High up in the walls were some narrow, small, dim windows. I could not see through them. I wanted to see out, to know what part of town this house was in, and said angrily, "Where is the doorway? Where is the door?" Groping along the walls then I found the door and opened it. At once the wind blew it wide open with a rush and bang, and the house shrivelled up behind me like an empty bladder. I stood in a tremendous place of light and wind. Under my feet was only light and wind, the force of the wind bearing me up. As soon as I saw that, I thought I must fall unless I found something to stand on: and I began falling. I sought for any place to set my foot or hold with my hand in the wind. There was nothing. I fell, and was terrified. I closed my eyes in fear, but it made no difference: there was no darkness there. I fell, and there was nothing I could do. I fell, like a feather falling from a bird in flight. The wind bore me, and I fell drifting. I was like a feather. There was no need to fear. As I began to feel this and understand it, I began to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light, and joy. But along with that knowledge I felt a pulling, which grew stronger. The brightness shook, dimmed, and darkened; the wind grew smaller and weaker, becoming sounds, breaths, and voices. Then I was back breathing through my nose and mouth, hearing in my ears, feeling in my skin, living in my heartbeat. For a while I could not yet see with my earthly eyes, and so was able to see with my minds eyes that all my senses could perceive was themselves, that they were making the world by casting shadows on the bright void of the wind saw that living was catching at shadows with hands of light. I did not want to come back to that. But the doctors' art made me come back pulling at me, and their singing drew me back, calling me home. opened my eyes and saw an old man, Blackfern of the Black Adobe Lodge, sitting beside me singing. His voice was thin and husky. He looked into my eyes with his eyes, singing: "Walk here now, walk here. It is time to walk here now!" I understood that it was time that I go on walking on the earth, and not time that I return to the shining. So with regret and pain, with difficulty and labor, even as the fire-covering song of Going Westward to the Sunrise says, It is hard, it is hard. It is not easy. You must go out- even so, I became my ashes. I became my dark body and its illness once again. For many nights and days I was helpless, but when at last I recovered health I was stronger than I had ever been, and by careful diet and learning I have remained well. I had lain many days in the doctors' care before I asked why I did not see Blackfern, and, saying his name aloud, remembered that he had died, an old man, when I was still a child."

"To learn with an uncle and trees implies that learning is not a transfer of something by someone to someone, but is a relationship. Moreover, the relationship is considered to be reciprocal. Such a point of view seems at hopeless odds with the distinction of subject and object considered essential to science. Yet it appears that White Tree's genetic experiments or manipulations were technically skilful, and that he was not ignorant of the theories involved, and it is certain that he achieved precisely what he set out to achieve. And the resulting strain of tree was given his name: a type case, in our vocabulary, of Man's control over Nature. This phrase, however, could not be translated into Kesh, which had no word meaning Nature except she, being; and anyhow the Kesh saw the Fairweather pear as the result of a collaboration between a man and some pear trees. The difference of attitude is interesting and the absence of capital letters perhaps not entirely trivial."

"It stood there. Alter a while I saw the hands moving slowly. They moved up slowly and came together at the navel, at the middle of the stone. There they pulled back and apart. They pulled open a long, wide rent or opening in the stone, like the doorway of a room, into which I knew I was to enter. i got up crouching and shaking and took a step forward into the stone It was not like a room. It was stone, and I was in it. There was no light or breath or room. I think the rest of the vision all took place in the stone; that is where it all happened and was; but because of the human way human people have to see things, it seemed to change, and to be other places, things, and beings. As if the serpentine rock had crumbled and decayed into the red earth, after a while I was in the earth, part of the dirt. I could feel how the dirt felt. Presently I could feel rain coming into the dirt, coming down. I could feel it in a way that was like seeing, falling down on and into me, out of a sky that was all rain. I would go to sleep and then be partly awake again, perceiving. I began feeling stones and roots, and along my left side I began to feel and hear cold water running, a creek in the rainy season. Veins of water underground went down and around through me to that creek, seeping in the dark through the dirt and stones. Near the creek I began to feel the big, deep roots of trees, and in the dirt everywhere the fine, many roots of the grasses, the bulbs of brodiaea and blue-eyed grass, the ground squirrel's heart beating, the mole asleep. I began to come up one of the great roots of a buckeye, up inside the trunk and out the leafless branches to the ends of the small outmost branches. From there perceived the ladders of rain. "

"Bless me as I bless you, help me in my weakness!" Whom do we greet? Whom do we bless? Who helps? Maybe in all things there is one person, one spirit whom we greet in the rock and the sun and trust in all things to bless and help. Maybe the oneness of the universe manifests that one spirit and the oneness of each being of the many kinds is a sign or symbol of that one person. Maybe so. People who say it is so call that person the self of all selves or the other of all others, the one eternal, the god. The lazyminded may say that inside the rock a spirit lives, inside the sun a fiery person lives, but these say that in the universe the god lives as a human lives in a house or a coyote in the wilderness, having made it, keeping it in order. These people believe. They are not lazyminded. Some other people are better at thinking than at believing, and they wonder and ask who it is that we greet, that we bless, that we ask for blessing. Is it the rock itself, the sun itself, all things in themselves? Maybe so. After all. we live in this house which makes itself and keeps itself. Why should a soul be afraid in its own house? There are no strangers. The walls are life, the doors are death; we go in and out at our work. I think it is one another whom we greet, and bless, and help. It is one another whom we eat. We are gatherer and gathered. Building and unbuilding, we make and are unmade; giving birth and killing, we take hands and let go. Thinking human people and other animals, the plants, the rocks and stars, all the beings that think or are thought, that are seen Or see, that hold or are held, all of us are beings of the Nine Houses of Being, dancing the same dance. It is with my voice that the blue rock speaks, and the word I speak is the name of the blue rock. It is with my voice that the universe speaks, and the word I hear it speak when I listen is myself. Being is praise. I do not know what there is to believe. So I think that, frightened, I will trust; weak, I will bless; suffering, I will live. I think it is this way: having asked for help, I will be silent, listening. I will serve no person, and lock no door. So I think I will live in the Valley as best I can, and so die here, coming in the open door."

"Not all rocks are equally sensitive. Most basalt doesn't pay attention. It isn't listening. It's still thinking about the fire in the dark, perhaps. Serpentine rock is always sensitive. It's from both the water and the fire, it moved and flowed through other rocks to come to the air, and it's always on the point of breaking up, coming apart, turning into dirt. Serpentine listens, and speaks. Flint is a strange rock. It stays locked up. Sandstone is a rock for the hands, they understand one another. We don't have limestone here in the Valley; the Finders bring pieces of it in. What 1 have seen of it is mortal and intellectual-it is a rock made out of lives. They say that where the land is made of limestone the rivers run through it in caves underground and don't come out into the shining. That would be strange. I'd like to see such caves. Granite from the Range of Light is a community of rocks, very beautiful and powerful. When the mica is in it, glittering, like light on the sea, that is a wonderful thing. Obsidian is glass, of course, and so are pumice and the ashrock from around Ama Kulkun. They have the character of glass, the edge and flow, and they hold light. They are dangerous rocks. In general, rocks aren't living in the same way or at the same pace that we are. But you can find a rock, maybe a big boulder, maybe a little agate in a streambed, and by looking carefully at it, touching it or holding it, listening to it, or by a little talking and singing, a small ceremony, or being still and quiet with it, you can enter into the rock's soul to some extent and the rock can enter into yours, if it's disposed to. Most tocks live a long time. They've lived a long time before we pass them, and they'll live a long time after. Some of them are very old, grandchildren of the coming to be of the earth and sun. If there were nothing else to be known from them that wroud be enough, their long age of beins. But Were is much other knowledge in frocks, there are things that can he Indestood only with the heif of tocks. They will help people who handle and study and work with them with pleasure and respect, with mindfulness."

"All the mountains in a little stone.

Owning is owing, having is hoarding.

Like and different are quickening words, brooding and hatching. Better and worse are eggsucking words, they leave only the shell.

Care may be questioned with care, joy with joy.

Read what the worms write on the madrone leaf, and walk sideways."

"PAN: You destroy valuable books? ARC: Oh, yes. Who wants to be buried under them? PAN: But you could keep important documents and valuable literary works in electronic storage, at the Exchange, where they don't take up any room- ARC: The City of Mind does that. They want a copy of everything. We give them some. What is "room" -is it only a piece of space? PAN: But intangibles--information- ARC: Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it. PAN: But that's the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on--the central act of human culture. ARC: "Keeping grows; giving flows." Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence than keeping, perhaps. Disciplined people come here, Oak Lodge people, historians, learned people, scribes and reciters and writers, they're always here, like those four, you see, going through the books, copying out what they want, annotating. Books no one reads go; books people read go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation. PAN: This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that! ARC: Well, I don't know, aunt. What if I asked the questions? What if I asked you if you had considered my peculiar use of the word "safe," and if you had considered the danger of storing up information as you do in your society? PAN: Well. I- ARC: Who controls the storage and the retrieval? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it "there" only for those who have the information that it is there. the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate? How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems? How much real information is available to ordinary, non- government, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does "classified" mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy? In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful--another piston in the great machine? PAN: Niece, you're a damned Luddite. ARC: No, I'm not. I like machines. My washing machine is an old friend. The printing press here is rather more than a friend. Look: when Mines died last year I printed this poem of his, thirty copies, for people to take home and to give to the heyimas, here, this is the last copy. PAN: It's a nice job. But you cheated. You didn't ask a question, you asked a rhetorical question. ARC: Well, you know, people who live in cultures that have an oral literature as well as a written literature get a good deal of practice in rhetoric.

"Some very superstitious men blew at us whenever we passed them, so that they could not breathe in our outbreath. They believed their heads would turn backwards on their necks if they caught the Sickness of Man from us. Sinshan is indeed a small town. People in small towns have beliefs the way caves have bats."

"Again, we may ask: since the Condor had access to the principal iron, copper, zinc, and gold mines of the Inland Sea area, and did not scruple to take what they wanted by force, why did they not use their superiority in metals not in a misguided effort to build anachronistic tanks and bombers, but in building up a good arsenal of guns, grenades, and other "conventional" weapons until they were invincible among the almost defenseless and poorly armed peoples about them? Then they might truly have made history! To this I think the people of the Valley might have an answer, along the lines of "Very sick people tend to die of their sickness, or "Destruction destroys itself." This answer, however, involves a reversal from our point of view. What we call strength it calls sickness; what we call success it calls death. Is it possible that the genetic changes worked by the residues of the Industrial Era upon the human race, which I saw as disastrous--low birth rate, short life expectancy, high incidence of crippling congenital disease- had a reverse side also? Is it possible that natural selection had had time to work in social, as well as physical and intellectual terms? Were the people of the Na Valley and Rekwit and Fennen and the Amaranth Coast and the Cotton Islands and Cloud River and Dark River and the Marshes and the Range of Light in fact healthier than I realised-_-healthier than I am capable of fully understanding, so long as I must look at them from outside their world?"

"It is hard for us to conceive, harder to approve, of a serious adult person not in a hurry. Not being in a hurry is for infants, people over eishly, bun, aid the Third Word. Hurry is the essence of cily. the very soul. There is I evilisation without hurry, without keeping ahead. The hurry may lurk invisibl contradicted by the indolent pose of the lounger at the bar or the lazy pai of the stroller along the hotel walkway, but it is there, in the terrific engines of the TWA or BSA supersonic planes that brought her from Rio, him from Rome, here to NY, NY for the IGPSA conference on implementation of OERS and will rush them back tomorrow, hurrying across the world of cities where there is no tense left but the present tense, every second and tenth of a second and milisecond and nanosecond clocked, the readout moving always a little faster, and the A rising. Mozart's A was a hundred and forty cycles a second, so Mozart's piano is out of tune with all our orchestras and singers, Our A is a hundred and sixty, because the instruments sound more brilliant tuned up higher, as they all rise like sirens towards the final scream. There is nothing to be done. There is no way to heighten the pitch of the instruments of the Valley, no way to abbreviate their institutions and addresses and names to capital letters, no way to get them to move ahead."

"No doubt the etymologies could have been traced from data in the Memory Banks of the City of Mind, with a few weeks or months of work at the Exchange. But what for? Need every word be translated? Sometimes the untranslated word might serve to remind us that language is not meaning, that intelligibility is an element of it only, a function. The untranslated word or name is not functional. It sits there. Written, it is a row of letters, which spoken with a more or less wild guess at the pronunciation produces a complex of phonemes, a more or less musical and interesting sound, a noise, a thing. The untranslated word is like a rock, a piece of wood. Its use, its meaning, is not rational, definite, and limited, but con- crete, potential, and infinite. To start with, all the words we say are untrans- lated words."

"THE HOUSE OF OBSIDIAN. As the Kesh saw it, the domestic animals consenied to live and to die wit Auman beings in the First House of Life, The mysteries of animal- human iterdependence and cooperation and the mystery of sacrifice were b. central preoccupation of the animal rituals of the House of Obsidian. Sle fires and teachings were also connected with those of the Blood Lodge. Th lodge, into which all girls were initiated at puberty and to which all women belonged, was under Obsidian auspices: "All women live in the First House" The identification of woman and animal went deep throughout the sexual and intellectual teaching of the Blood Lodge (and where in our man. dominant culture that identification is used to devalue, this must not be assumed to hold for the Kesh: rather the opposite). Blood Lodge ritual and learning was passed on by the breath, not written down; but many of the women's songs of the Moon and Grass Dances grew out of it, and a whole body of mystical, satirical, erotic poetry-_unfortunately, like most metaphysical poetry, very hard to translate-used its symbols and themes: the ewe, milk. blood sacrifice, orgasm as death spasm, impregnation as rebirth, and the mystery of consent. I. Animals of the Blue Clay In the world-view of the Valley people, all wild animals were Sky People, living in the Four Houses of Death, Dream, Wilderness, and Eternity; but those who allowed themselves to be hunted, who responded to the hunter's singing and came to meet the arrow or enter the snare, had consented to come across into the Second of the Earth Houses, the Blue Clay, in order to die. They had taken on mortality sacrificially and sacramentally. By its mortality, the individual deer was related physically, materially, with human beings, and all other beings on earth; while "deerness" or The Deer was related metaphysically with the human soul and the eternal universe of being. This distinction of the individual and the type was fundamental in Valley thought, and even in the syntax of the language. Most wild animals, most of the time, stayed over in the Wilderness: ground squirrel, wood rat, badger, jackrabbit, wildcat, songbird, buzzard, toad, beetle, fly, and all the rest, however familiar, beloved, or pestiferous, did not share a House of Life with human beings. The relationship is based essentially on who eats whom. Those whom we do not eat, or who eat us, are not related to us in the same way as those whom we eat."

"I give you my arrow, my knife, my mind, my hands. You give me your flesh, your blood, your skin, your feet. You are my life. I am your death. We drink from this spring together."

"To call an olive tree grandmother or a sheep sister, to address a hall-acre field of dirt plowed for com as "my brother." is behavior easily dismissed as primitive, or as symbolic. To the Kesh, it was the person who could not understand or admit such relationship whose intelligence was in a primitive condition and whose thinking was unrealistic."

"The people of the Valley drew maps- mostly of the Valley. They evidently enjoved laying out and looking at the spatial relationships of places and objects they knew well. The better they knew them, the better they liked to draw and map them. Children often drew maps of the fields and hills about their home town, often in incredible detail--a dot for every rock, a mark for every tree. Small, schematised, symbolic maps of the Valley or a part of it were often carried by people going on a downriver journey to the ocean or upriver to Wakwaha. As most people knew every feature of the landscape, from mountains to molehills, within four or five miles of their home, and the entire length of the Valley was less than thirty miles, these maps were less guides than talismans. The larger maps were remarkably accurate, considering that their function was mostly aesthetic or poetic; but then, accuracy was considered a fundamental element or quality of poetry. Maps of the Valley were always drawn as charts of the Na and its confluents, and maps of areas within the Valley took the principal creek or creek-system as their axis. The source of the stream is at the top of the map. Compass directions may be noted, but the map is oriented to the flow of water, and "down" is the bottom of the page. There is often an element of perspective in the drawing of hills and mountains, but no foreshortening. Towns and other man-made features are usually marked with a symbol the heyiya-if for towns); and the mapmakers did not like to write on their maps, it seems, for some have no lettering at all, and many have only an initial, or the most cryptic, crabbed indications, for the names of the towns, creeks, mountains, and so on. Since practically every feature of any interest or permanence had a name, the mapmakers may have followed a practical course in refusing to try to crowd them all onto the map."

"Kesh theory of medicine and methods of diagnosis differed profoundly from ours. For example: Though clearly aware of the role played by bacteria and viruses (the latter of which were utterly invisible to their microscopes) as agents of disease, they did not identify disease, or a disease, as an entity in itself. It was not something that happened to a person, but something a person did. The closest I could come to translating our word health into Kesh would be the word oya-ease or grace-_or the word gestanai--living well, doing well, with a combination of inborn talent, luck, and skill. To translate our word disease or illness I would have to use the privative forms, póya-unease (not so far from the original sense of disease) or difficulty or hardness; and gepestanai, living ill, doing badly, unlucky, unskilful. These Kesh words imply that the sick person is not a patient but an agent, not merely suffering an invasion from outside the body, but doing or being ill/ness. Curiously enough I think this view of illness involves less sense of guilt than does our image of a body victimised by malevolent forces from without. Implicit in it is an acceptance that we don't always do what we would like or hope or ought to do, and that living is not always easy. The practices of the Doctors Lodge were not in the service of an ideal of perfect health, permanent youth, and the eradication of disease; they tried only to ensure that living wasn't any harder than it had to be."

""Reading and writing were taken to be elements of human social existence as fundamental as speech itself. From the age of three or four a child learned to read and write at home and in the heyimas, and no Kesh was illiterate, except those with brain or vision dysfunction; the latter often compensated for their inability to read by developing their verbal memory to a fantastic degree. The Kesh were less inclined than we to consider speaking and writing as one activity taking different forms. Anything we speak can be written down, and we seem to feel that it should be written down if it is of any importance: writing authenticates speech, and has taken priority over it. We now read what our speechmakers are going to say before they say it. The current uses of computers enhance and enforce this fitting of the word into the visual mode. The Kesh had a few kinds of writing that were never spoken or read aloud, but since they also had some very important kinds of speech that were never written down, they did not identify speaking and writing as forms or aspects of the same thing; to the Kesh they were two kinds of language, either of which might be translated into the other, it it was useful or appropriate to do so."

"in Telina-na I saw a poem brush-written on a cloudy, filmy, unsized paper which the poet said he had made from dandelion clocks and thistledown, carded. The poem was less memorable than the paper, I thought."

"Much spoken Kesh was in a mode which occurs only once in this book, in a line of dialogue in Dangerous People. The Five-House or Earth Mode was indicated by a final z-sound added to the noun/verbs of the sentence, and was used when one was speaking to and of living persons and local places, in one of the present tenses or with the auxiliaries meaning "can," "be able," "must," in everyday informal conversation. The Four-House or Sky Mode would be used in all discourse concerning Four-House people and places (those unborn, dead, thought, imagined, dreamed, in the wilderness, etc.) and in all past and future tenses, as well as with the auxiliaries of the conditional, optative, subjunctive, etc.; in the negative; in making abstract or general statements; and in all formal discourse and rhetoric and works of literature both written and oral. There was a letter of the alphabet for the [z] phoneme that indicated the Earth Mode, but, evidently, it was very seldom used. People who in real life would use the Earth Mode talking would keep to the Sky Mode in even the most realistic history or novel. So in an actual conversation one would say, "Pandora, are you living in Sinshan now?"'_Pandoraz, Sinshanzan gehóvzes hai ohu-the two proper nouns and the verbal both in the Earth Mode. But the same question in a Play or any narrative would be--Pandora, Sinshanan gehóves hai ohu. The negative, whether colloquial or formal, would be: Pandora Sinshanan pegehov hai, "Pandora is not living in Sinshan now." And the past would always be in the Sky Mode: Pandora Sinshanan yinyegegohóv ayeha, "Pandora did truly live a little while in Sinshan." Though my note on the narrative modes shows that the Kesh did not distinguish factual from fictional literature as we do, the precision of their Use of these basic modes of the language indicates a clear awareness of the difference between the actual and the imagined."

"The principal mode of our thinking is binary: on/off, hard/soft, true/false, etc. Our categories of narrative follow the pattern. Narrative is either factual (nonfiction) or nonfactual (fiction). The distinction is clear, and the feeble forms such as the "novelised biography" or the "nonfiction novel" that attempt to ignore it only demonstrate its firmness. In the Valley the distinction is gradual and messy. The kind of narrative that tells "what happened" is never clearly defined by genre, style, or valuation from the kind that tells a story "like what happened." Some of the Romantic Tales certainly recount real events; some of the sober Historical Accounts concern events which we do not admit into the category of the real, or the possible. Here of course is the difference: where you stop, on what grounds you stop, and say, "Reality goes no further." If fact and fiction are not clearly separated in Kesh literature, truth and falsehood, however, are. A deliberate lie (slander, boast, tall tale) is identified as such and is not considered in the light of literature at all. In this case l find our categories perhaps less clear than theirs. The distinction is one of intent, and we often do not make it at all, since we allow propaganda to be qualified both as journalism and as fiction; while the Kesh dismiss it as a lie. The accompanying chart attempts to show these continuities and dis- continuities."

"Some Valley texts were unwritten in two senses of the word. In the first place they have not, after all, been written yet. In the second place they never were written: they were oral texts. Those of the second kind included in this book have thus been translated twice, from Kesh into English and from breath into print--and, if you like, they can be translated back from print into breath, your breath. The Kesh distinguished writing and speaking, the written and the spoken word, not as two versions of one thing, but as different activities with a large area of overlap, different languages with a large but not total area of translatability. They saw as a primary distinction between the oral and the written text the quality of the relationship established. Undoubtedly one can and will say (formally or informally) what one wouldn't write (or wouldn't say knowing that it was being recorded). The writer's solitude might look like maximum freedom, but the immediate relationship between speaker and hearer(s) may increase freedom by increas- ing trust. (A writer of course may remain anonymous as a speaker cannot, but anonymity or a pen-name, denying the self, denies even the possibility of trust.) Between writer and reader, the text itself mediates. It may be properly seen as a communication rather than a relation. In Kesh terms, the connection between writer and reader is not a present one: it is made in the nonpresent, in the Houses of the Sky--and so all written narration is in the Four-House Mode. But speaking a text, prepared or improvised, and listening to it constitute a relationship in the Five Houses of the Earth, a connection of present contemporaries, "people breathing together." The written word is there, for anyone, at any time. It is general and potentially eternal. The spoken word is here, to you, now. It is ephemeral and irreproducible. (We might question the latter word; but mechanical reproduction, even the moving picture with sound, makes an image of bul does not reconstitute the occasion, the time; the place, or the people there.)"

"The trust or confidence that can be established between writer and reader is real, though entirely mental; on both sides it consists in the willingness to animate, to project one's own thinking and feeling into a harmony with a not-yet-existent reader or a not-present and perhaps long- dead writer. It is a miraculous and entirely symbolical transubstantiation. When the artist and the audience are together, collaboration on the work becomes mundane and actual; the work shapes itself in the speaker's voice and the listeners' response together. This powerful relationship can be, and in politics frequently is, abused: the speaker may appropriate the power to himself, dominating and exploiting the audience. When the power of the relationship is used not abused, when the trust is mutual, as when a parent tells a bedtime story or a teacher shares the treasures of the intellect or a poet speaks both to and for the listeners, real community is achieved; the occasion is sacred. It would confuse things, however, to make a correlation of oral with sacred, written with secular literature, in the Valley: because the binary opposition sacred/secular was one they didn't make. There were indeed certain songs, dramas, instructions, and other oral texts connected with the great festivals and with sacred occasions or places, which they never wrote down or recorded in any way. For instance the Wedding Song, sung every year at the World Dance, known to every adult in the Valley, remained unwritten; it belonged "to the breath," they said. To reproduce such a text would be, in their view, most inappropriate, not because it was sacrosanct but because its oral/occasional/communal character was essential. (When it was indicated to me that to record or transcribe would be inappropriate, honored the request. A particular and valuable exception was made for me in the case of the death songs called Going Westward to the Sunrise, printed in the section called "How to Die in the Valley," and discussed again below. We mostly seem to feel it appropriate and desirable that all spoken words, even office memoranda, recordings of private conversations, grand- mother's tales, be saved on tape, stored in memory banks, transcribed, written, printed, preserved in libraries. Perhaps not many of us could say why we save so many words, why our forests must all be cut to make paper to mark our words on, our rivers dammed to make electricity to power our word processors; we do it obsessively, as if afraid of something, as it compensating for something. Maybe we're afraid of death, afraid to let our words simply be spoken and die, leaving silence for new words to be born in. Maybe we seek community, the lost, the irreproducible"

"The death of the novel has been much discussed for a long time: notably by the Futurists, by the Surrealists, by nearly all the avant-gardes. They saw the novel dropping off the road of progress, yielding to a radi- cally new future and an art bearing no resemblance to what had existed before. The novel was to be buried in the name of historical justice, like poverty, the rul- ing classes, obsolete cars, or top hats. But if Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era, then the end of his legacy ought to signify more than a mere stage in the history of literary forms; it would herald the end of the Modern Era. That is why the blissful smile that accompanies those obituaries of the novel strikes me as frivolous. Frivolous because I have already seen and lived through the death of the novel, a violent death (inflicted by bans, censorship, and ideological pressure), in the world where I spent much of my life and which is usually called totalitar. ian. At that time it became utterly clear that the nove was mortal; as mortal as the West of the Modern Bra. As a model of this Western world, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe. This incompatibility is deeper than the one that separates a dissident from an apparatchik, or a human-rights campaigner from a torturer, because it is not only political or moral but ontological. By which I mean. The world of one single Truth and the relative, am- biguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes rela- tivity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel. But aren't there hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Com- munist Russia? Certainly; but these novels add noth- ing to the conquest of being. They discover no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said; furthermore: in confirming what everyone says (what everyone must say), they fulfill their purpose, their glory, their usefulness to that society. By discovering nothing, they fail to partici- pate in the sequence of discoveries that for me consti- tutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel."

"But hasn't the novel come to the end of the road by its own internal logic? Hasn't it already mined all its possibilities, all its knowledge, and all its forms? I've heard the history of the novel compared to a seam of coal long since exhausted. But isn't it more like a cem- etery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals? There are four appeals to which I am especially responsive. The appeal of play: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste are for me the two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth cen- tury, two novels conceived as grand games. They reach heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since. Afterward, the novel got itself tied to the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to chronological order. It abandoned the possibilities opened up by these two masterpieces, which could have led to a different development of the novel (yes,it's possible to imagine a whole other history of the European novel . . .). The appeal of dream: The slumbering imagination of the nineteenth century was abruptly awakened by Franz Kafka, who achieved what the Surrealists later called for but never themselves really accomplished. the fusion of dream and reality. This enormous con. tribution is less the final step in a historical develop. ment than an unexpected opening that shows that the novel is a place where the imagination can explode as in a dream, and that the novel can break free of the seemingly inescapable imperative of verisimilitude. The appeal of thought: Musil and Broch brought a sovereign and radiant intelligence to bear on the novel. Not to transform the novel into philosophy, but to marshal around the story all the means--rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative--that could illuminate man's being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual synthesis. Is their achievement the completion of the novel's history, or is it instead the invitation to a long journey? The appeal of time: The period of terminal paradoxes incites the novelist to broaden the time issue beyond the Proustian problem of personal memory to the enigma of collective time, the time of Europe, Europe looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man seeing his whole life in a single moment. Whence the desire to overstep the temporal limits of an individual life, to which the novel had hitherto been confined, and to insert in its space sev- eral historical periods (Aragon and Fuentes have already tried this)."

"“But I don't want to predict the future paths of the novel, which I cannot know; all I mean to say is this: If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it.”

"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers. Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of reduction where Hus- serl's "world of life" is fatally obscured and being is forgotten. Now, if the novel's raison d'être is to keep "the world of life" under a permanent light and to protect us from "the forgetting of being, " is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?"

"This common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged by political diversity, is the spirit of our time. And this spirit seems to me contrary to the spirit of the novel. The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless. The novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel. But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow."

"But I don't want to predict the future paths of the novel, which I cannot know; all I mean to say is this: If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it."

"Does this mean that, "in a world grown alien to it," the novel will disappear? That it will leave Europe to founder in "the forgetting of being'? That nothing will be left but the endless babble of graphomaniacs, nothing but novels that come after the history of the novel? I don't know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on "progressing" as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world. The avant-garde saw things differently; it was pos- sessed by an ambition to be in harmony with the future. It is true, avant-garde artists did create works that were courageous, difficult, provocative, ridi- culed, but they did so in the conviction that "the spirit of the time" was with them and would soon prove them right. Once upon a time I too thought that the future was"

"Christian Salmon: I'd like to discuss the aesthetic of your novels. But where shall we begin?

M.K: With this assertion: My novels are not psy- chological. More precisely: They lie outside the aes- thetic of the novel normally termed psychological.

C.S: But aren't all novels necessarily psychologi- cal? That is, concerned with the enigma of the psyche?

M.K.: Let's be more precise: All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. By the various responses to that question, if you wanted, you could distinguish different tendencies, and perhaps different periods, in the history of the novel. The psychological ap- proach wasn't even known to the first European storytellers. Boccaccio simply tells us about actions and adventures. Still, behind all those amusing tales, we can make out this conviction: It is through action that man steps forth from the repetitive universe of the everyday where each person resembles every other person; it is through action that he distinguishes himself from others and becomes an individual. Dante said as much: "In any act, the primary inten- tion of the one who acts is to reveal his own image." At the outset, action is thus seen as the self-portrait"

"He could never recognize himself in his action. Between the act and him self, a chasm opens. Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him. The paradoxical nature of action is one of the novel's great discoveries. But if the self is not to be grasped through action, then where and how are we to grasp it? So the time came when the novel, in its quest for the self, was forced to turn away from the visible world of action and examine instead the invis- ible interior life. In the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury, Richardson discovers the form of the epistolary novel in which the characters confess their thoughts and their feelings. C.S: The birth of the psychological novel? M.K: The term is, of course, inexact and approxi- mate. Let's avoid it and use a periphrasis: Richardson set the novel on its way to the exploration of man's interior life. We know his great successors: the Goethe of Werther, Laclos, Constant, then Stendhal and the other writers of his century. The apogee of that evolu- tion is to be found, it seems to me, in Proust and in Joyce. Joyce analyzes something still more ungrasp- able than Proust's "lost time": the present moment.'

"Now, Joyce's great microscope manages to stop, to seize, that fleeting instant and make us see it. But the quest for the self ends, yet again, in a paradox: The more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness elude us; beneath the great Joycean lens that breaks the soul down into atoms, we are all alike. But if the self and its uniqueness cannot be grasped in man's interior life, then where and how can we grasp it? C.S.: Can it be grasped at all? M.K: Of course not. The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction. I don't say defeat. For the novel can- not breach the limits of its own possibilities, and bringing those limits to light is already an immense discovery, an immense triumph of cognition. None- theless, after reaching the depth involved in the detailed exploration of the self's interior life, the great novelists began, consciously and unconsciously, to seek a new orientation."

"C.S: That's what you say in The Unbearable Light- ness of Being: "The novel is not the author's confes- sion; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." But what does that mean, "trap"? M.K.: That life is a trap we've always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could desert from the army and start another life in a neighboring country. Suddenly, in our century, the world is closing around us. The decisive event in that transformation of the world into a trap was surely the 1914 war, called (and for the first time in history) a world war. Wrongly "world." It involved only Europe, and not all of Europe at that. But the adjective "world" expresses all the more eloquently the sense of horror before the fact that, henceforward, nothing that occurs on the planet will be a merely local matter, that all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external condi- tions, by situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another"

"But understand me: If I locate myself outside the so-called psychological novel, that does not mean that I wish to deprive my characters of an interior life. It means only that there are other enigmas, other ques- tions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean I object to novels that are fascinated by psychol- ogy."

"C.S: In Ulysses, interior monologue pervades the entire novel; it is the ground of its construction, the dominant process. Could we say that in your work, philosophical meditation plays that role? M.K.: I find the word "philosophical" inappropri- ate. Philosophy develops its thought in an abstract realm, without characters, without situations. C.S: You begin The Unbearable Lightness of Being by reflecting on Nietzsche's eternal return. What's that but a philosophical idea developed abstractly, with- out characters, without situations? M.K: Not at all! That reflection introduces directly, from the very first line of the novel, the fundamental situation of a character- -Tomas; it sets out his prob- lem: the lightness of existence in a world where there is no eternal return. You see, we've finally come back to our question: What lies beyond the so-called psy- chological novel? Or, put another way: What is the nonpsychological means to apprehend the self? To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existen- tial code. As I was writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I realized that the code of this or that character is made up of certain key words. For Tereza: body, soul, vertigo, weakness, idyll, Paradise. For Tomas: lightness, weight."

"The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists. What superb "phenomenological nomenologist! descriptions" in Proust, who never even knew a phenomenologist"

"Indeed, the long tradition of psychological realism has created some nearly invio- lable standards: (1) A writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical appearance, his way of speaking and behav- ing; (2) he must let the reader know a character's past, because that is where all the motives for his present behavior are located; and (3) the character must have complete independence; that is to say, the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give himself over to illusion and take fiction for reality. Now, Musil broke that old contract between the novel and the reader. And so did other writers along with him. What do we know about the physical appearance of Esch, Broch's greatest character? Nothing. Except that he has big teeth. What do we know about K.'s childhood, or Schweik's? And neither Musil nor Broch nor Gom browicz felt the least discomfort at being present as a mind in his novels. A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experi mental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being. And yet, in our memory, what charac ter is more alive? Understand me, I don't mean to scorn the reader and his desire, as naive as it is legiti mate, to be carried away by the novel's imaginary world and to confuse it occasionally with reality."

"A novel examines not reality but exis- tence. And existence is not what has occurred, exis- tence is the realm of human possibilities, everything ret that man can become, everything he's capable of. no Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering no this or that human possibility. But again, to exist til means: "being-in-the-world." Thus both the character amt and his world must be understood as possibilities. In 4: Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unre- & alized possibility of the human world. It's true that this possibility shows faintly behind our own real world and seems to prefigure our future. That's why people speak of Kafka's prophetic dimension. But even if his novels had nothing prophetic about them, they would not lose their value, because they grasp one possibil- ity of existence (a possibility for man and for his world) and thereby make us see what we are, what we are capable of."

"When a phenomenon announces in advance its imminent disappearance, many of us hear the news and perhaps even regret it. But when the mortal agony draws to a close, we are already looking elsewhere. The death becomes invisi- ble. It's some time now since the river, the nightin- gale, the paths through the fields have disappeared from man's mind. No one needs them now. When nature disappears from the planet tomorrow, who will notice? Where are the successors to Octavio Paz, to René Char? Where are the great poets now? Have they vanished, or have their voices only grown inau- dible? In any case, an immense change in our Europe, which was hitherto unthinkable without its poets. But if man has lost the need for poetry, will he notice when poetry disappears? The end is not an apocalyp- tic explosion. There may be nothing so quiet as the end."

"On Levin's estate, a man and a woman meet-two melancholy, lonely people. They like each other and secretly hope to join their lives together. All they need is the chance to be alone for a moment and say so. > Finally one day they find themselves unobserved in a " wood where they have come to gather mushrooms. Ill " at ease, they are silent, knowing that the moment is upon them and they must not let it slip by. The silence has already lasted rather a long while when the woman suddenly, "involuntarily, reflexively, " starts to talk about mushrooms. Then silence again, and the man casts about for a way to declare himself, but instead of speaking of love, "on some unexpected impulse" he too talks about mushrooms. On the way " home they go on discussing mushrooms, powerless " and desperate, for never, they know it, never will they * speak of love. Back at the house, the man tells himself that he did " not declare his love because of the memory of his dead mistress, which he cannot betray. But we know perfectly well: It is a false excuse he invokes only to console himself. Console himself? Yes. Because we can resign ourselves to losing a love for a reason. We would never forgive ourselves for losing it for no rea- son at all. This very beautiful little episode is a kind of parable for one of Anna Karenina's great feats: bringing to light the causeless, incalculable, even mysterious aspect of human action. What is action?-the eternal question of the novel, its constitutive question, so to speak. How is a decision born? How is it transformed into an act, and how do acts connect to make an adventure?"

"We need only examine our own lives to see how much this irational system, far more than any reasoned though, directs our attitudes: a certain man who, with his pas sion for aquarium fish, evokes some other who in the past caused me some terrible misery will always excite insurmountable mistrust in me .. The irrational system rules political life no less: along with the last world war Communist Russia won the war of symbols: it succeeded for at least a half. century in providing the symbols of Good and Evil to that great army of Esches who are as avid for values as they are incapable of discriminating among them. This is why the gulag will never supplant Nazism as a symbol of absolute evil in the European conscious- ness. This is why people hold massive demonstra- tions against the war in Vietnam and not against the war in Afghanistan. Vietnam, colonialism, racism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism--all these words corre- spond like the colors and sounds in Baudelaire's poem, while the Afghanistan war is, so to speak, sym- bolically mute, or at any rate beyond the magic circle of absolute Evil, the geyser of symbols. I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actu- ally represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was confused with the Virgin. The death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the execu- toner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Etcetera. Man is a child wandering lost--to cite Baudelaire's poem again--in the "forests of symbols. (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist sym- bols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)"

"Now, this is not the case with Broch. He pursues "what the novel alone can discover." But he knows that the conventional form (grounded exclusively ina character's adventure, and content with a mere narra- tion of that adventure) limits the novel, reduces its cognitive capacities. He also knows that the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and phi- losophy without losing thereby anything of its iden- tity, which is characterized (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge. So in Broch's perspective, the word "polyhistorical" means: marshaling all intellec- tual means and all poetic forms to illuminate the novel alone can discover": man's being. "what This, of course, implies a profound transformation of the novel's form."

"All great works (precisely because they are great) contain something unachieved. Broch is an inspira- tion to us not only because of what he brought off but also because of what he aimed for and missed. The unachieved in his work can show us the need for (1) a new art of radical divestment (which can encompass the complexity of existence in the modern world without losing architectonic clarity); (2) a new art of novelistic counterpoint (which can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music); (3) a new art of the specifically novelistic essay (which does not claim to bear an apodictic message but remains hypothetical, playful, or ironic)."

"M.K: Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation. Otherwise you fall into the trap of end- less length. The Man Without Qualities is one of the two Or three novels I love most, but don't ask me to admire its enormous unfinished size. Imagine a castle So big that it can't all be seen at once. Imagine a string quartet that goes on for nine hours. There are anthro- pological limits- -the limits of memory, for instance- that ought not to be exceeded."

"M.K.: Take the third book of The Sleepwalkers. It is tin made up of five purposely heterogeneous "lines": (1) the novelistic narrative involving the trilogy's three di main characters: Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau; (2) Hanna Wendling's short story; (3) the reportage about a military hospital; (4) the poetic narrative (partly in verse) about a Salvation Army girl; and (5) the philo- sophical essay (written in technical language) on the disintegration of values. Each of the five lines is mag- nificent in itself. Still, though they are handled simul- laneously, in constant alternation (that is, with a clear polyphonic" intention), the lines do not come to- ether, do not make an indivisible whole; in other words, the polyphonic intention remains artistically unfulfilled."

"M.K: There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Chekhov's philosophy, or Kafka's or Mus- il's, and so on. But just try to draw a coherent philoso- phy out of their writings! Even when they express their ideas directly, in their notebooks, the ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisa- tions, rather than statements of thought. C.S: Dostoyevsky is completely affirmative, though, in Diary of a Writer. M.K.: But that is not where we find his best ideas. He is a great thinker only as a novelist. Which is to say that in his characters he is able to create intellectual universes that are extraordinarily rich and original. "

"M.K.: Even if I'm the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his atti- tudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself. Part Two of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with a long medi- tation on the interrelations between the body and the soul. Yes, it is the author speaking, but everything he says is valid only within the magnetic field of a character: Tereza. It is Tereza's way of seeing things (though never formulated by her)."

"The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. C.S: By that broad a definition, we could even call The Decameron a novel! All of its stories are connected by the same theme of love and told by the same ten narrators . . M.K: I won't be so provocative as to call The Decam- eron a novel. Still, that book is one of the first efforts in modern Europe to create a large-scale composition in narrative prose, and as such it has a place in the history of the novel at least as its source and forerun- ner. You know, the novel took the particular historical path it took. It could just as easily have taken a com- pletely different one. The novel form is almost bound- less freedom. Throughout its history, the novel hasn't taken much advantage of that. It has missed out on that freedom. It has left unexplored many formal pos- sibilities."

"C.S: How far does this mathematical system go? M.K: Take The Joke. That novel is narrated by four characters: Ludvik, Jaroslav, Kostka, and Helena. Ludvik's monologue takes up ⅔ of the book; the monologues of the other three together take up ¼ Jaroslav ½, Kostka ½, Helena ½8). That mathematical structure determines what I would call the lighting of the characters. Ludvik stands in full light, illuminated from the inside (by his own monologue) and from the outside (the other monologues all sketch his portrait). Jaroslav fills a sixth of the book with his monologue, and his self-portrait is corrected from the outside by Ludvik's monologue. And so on. Each character is lighted at a different intensity and in a different way. Luce, who is one of the most important characters, has no monologue of her own; she is lighted only from the outside by Ludvik's and Kostka's. The absence of interior lighting gives her a mysterious, elusive quality. She stands, so to speak, behind glass; she cannot be touched CS.: Was the mathematical structure premedi- tated? M.K: No. I discovered all that after The Toke was published in Prague, in an article by a Czech literary critic: "The Geometry of The Joke. " It was a revelation to me. In other words, that "mathematical system" emerges completely naturally as a formal necessity, with no need for any calculation."

"M.K.: Look at Life Is Elsewhere (the French edition) from that viewpoint: Part One: 11 chapters in 71 pages; moderato Part Two: 14 chapters in 31 pages; allegretto Part Three: 28 chapters in 82 pages; allegro Part Four: 25 chapters in 30 pages; prestissimo Part Five: 11 chapters in 96 pages; moderato Part Six: 17 chapters in 26 pages; adagio Part Seven: 23 chapters in 28 pages; presto You see: Part Five has 96 pages and only 11 chap ters; a slow, tranquil pace: moderato. Part Four has 23 chapters in 30 pages! Which gives a feeling of great speed: prestissimo. CS.: Part Six has 17 chapters in only 26 pages. If understand you correctly, that means that it has ? fairly rapid tempo. And yet you call it adagio! M.K: Because the tempo is further determined by something else: the relation between the length of ? part and the "real" time of the event it describes."

"M.K: Up until the age of twenty-five, I was much more strongly drawn to music than to literature. The best thing I did at that time was a composition for four instruments: piano, viola, clarinet, and percus- sion. It was almost a caricature preview of the archi- tecture of my novels, whose future existence I didn't even faintly suspect at the time. That Composition for Four Instruments is divided--imagine!-into seven parts. As in my novels, the piece consists of parts that are very heterogeneous in form (jazz; waltz parody; fugue; chorale; etc.), each with different instrumenta- tion (piano and viola; piano solo; viola, clarinet, and percussion; etc.). That formal diversity is balanced by a very strong thematic unity: from start to finish, only two themes (A and B) are elaborated. The three last parts are based on a kind of polyphony that I consid- ered very original at the time, the simultaneous devel-opment of the two different and emotionally con- tradictory themes. For instance, in the last part a recording repeats the third movement (Theme A set as a solemn chorale for clarinet, viola, and piano) at the same time that a variation (in "barbaro" 'style) of Theme B is performed by percussion and trumpet played by the clarinetist). And another curious paral- lel: In the sixth part, a new theme, C, makes its only appearance, exactly as Kostka does in The Joke, or the man in his forties in Life Is Elsewhere. My point, once again, is that the form of a novel, its "mathematical structure," is not a calculated thing; it is an uncon- scious drive, an obsession. I even used to think that the form that obsessed me was some sort of algebraic definition of my own personality, but one day several dears ago, as I was studying Beethoven's Quartet Opus 131, I had to give up that narcissistic and subjective conception of the form."

"CS.: What does the word "farce" mean to you? M.K: A form that puts enormous stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exagger- ated coincidences. Labiche. There is nothing so dubi- ous in a novel now--so ridiculous, so passé, so much in bad taste-as plot, with its farcical excesses. Ever since Flaubert, novelists have tried to do away with plot devices, with the result that the novel is often duller than the dullest life. Yet the early novelists had no such qualms about the improbable. In the first book of Don Quixote, there is an inn someplace in the middle of Spain where by pure happenstance every- body turns up: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, their friends the barber and the priest, then Cardenio, a young man whose fiancée Lucinda had been carried Off by a certain Don Fernando, and then in comes Don Fernando's own abandoned fiancée, Dorotea, and later Don Fernando himself with Lucinda, then an officer who has escaped from a Moorish prison, and then his brother who has spent years searching for him, then his daughter Clara, and Clara's lover pur. suing her, himself pursued by his father's men … An accumulation of totally improbable coincidences and encounters. But it would be wrong to see this as naive or clumsy in Cervantes. At the time, novels and read. ers had not yet signed the verisimilitude pact. Ther were not looking to simulate reality; they were look- ing to amuse, amaze, astonish, enchant. They were playful, and therein lay their virtuosity. The start of the nineteenth century represents a huge change in the history of the novel. I'd almost say a convulsion. The imperative to imitate reality instantly made Cer- vantes's inn ludicrous. The twentieth century often rebels against the heritage of the nineteenth. None- theless, to simply return to the Cervantean inn is no longer possible. The experience of nineteenth-century realism standing between it and us insures that the game of unlikely coincidences can never again be innocent. It becomes either frankly burlesque, ironic, parodic (Lafcadio's Adventures or Ferdydurke, for in- stance), or else fantastic, oneiric."

"M.K: The great European novel started out as entertainment, and all real novelists are nostalgic for it! And besides, entertainment doesn't preclude seri- ousness. Farewell Waltz asks: Does man deserve to live on this earth, shouldn't the world be freed "from mankind's clutches"? To bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form--that has always been my ambition. And it's not a matter of a purely artistic ambition. The union of a frivolous form and a serious subject lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those we play out on the great stage of history) in all their terrible insignificance. C.S: So there are two archetype-forms in your nov- els: (1) polyphonic composition that brings heteroge- neous elements together within an architecture based on the number seven; (2) farcical, homogeneous, the- atrical composition that verges on the improbable. M.K.: I dream constantly of some great unexpected infidelity. But so far I have not managed to break out of my bigamy with those two forms."

"I asked the mother: "Why get so upset over such a trifle? Is it worth crying about? Aren't you over- doing it?" It was the son who answered for his mother: "No, my mother's not overdoing it. My mother is a splen- did, brave woman. She resisted when everyone else cracked. She wants me to become a real man. It's true, all I did was oversleep, but what my mother reproached me for is something much deeper. It's my attitude. My selfish attitude. I want to become what my mother wants me to be. And with you as witness, I promise her I will." What the Party never managed to do to the mother, the mother had managed to do to her son. She had forced him to identify with an absurd accusation, to "seek his offense," to make a public confession. I looked on, dumbfounded, at this Stalinist mini-trial, and I understood all at once that the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations."

"Thus the question: How has Kafka man- aged to transform such gray, antipoetical material into fascinating novels? The answer can be found in a letter he wrote to Milena: "The office is not a stupid institution; it belongs more to the realm of the fantastic than of the stupid." The sentence contains one of Kafka's greatest secrets. He saw what no one else could see: not only the enormous importance of the bureaucratic phe- nomenon for man, for his condition and for his future, but also (even more surprisingly) the poetic potential contained in the phantasmic nature of offices. But what does it mean to say the office belongs to the realm of the fantastic? The Prague engineer would understand: a mistake in his file projected him to London; so he wandered around Prague, a veritable phantom, seeking his lost body, while the offices he visited seemed to him a boundless labyrinth from some unknown mythology. The quality of the fantastic that he perceived in the bureaucratic world allowed Kafka to do what had seemed unimaginable before: he transformed the pro-foundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucra- tized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who can- not obtain a promised job (which is actually the story of The Castle) into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. By expanding a bureaucratic setting to the gigantic dimensions of a universe, Kafka unwittingly suc- ceded in creating an image that fascinates us by its resemblance to a society he never knew, that of today's Prague."

"If "the poem" is already there, then it would be illogical to impute to the poet the gift of foresight; no he he "only discovers" a human possibility ("the poem that has been there "a long long time") that History will in its turn discover one day."

"The convergence of the real world of totalitarian states with Kafka's "poem" will always be somewhat uncanny, and it will always bear witness that the poet's act, in its very essence, is incalculable; and par- adoxical: the enormous social, political, and "pro- phetic" import of Kafka's novels lies precisely in their "nonengagement, " that is to say, in their total auton- my from all political programs, ideological concepts, and futurological prognoses."

"The writer who determines to supervise the translations of his books finds himself chasing after hordes of words like a shepherd after a flock of wild sheep a sorry figure to himself, a laughable one to others."

"BEAUTy (and KNOWLEDGE). Those who, in the spirit of Broch, declare knowledge to be the novel's sole morality are betrayed by the metallic aura of "knowl edge, " a word too much compromised by its links with the sciences. So we have to add: Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful. The earliest novelists discovered adventure. Thanks to them we find adventure itself beautiful and wish to have it. Kafka described man in a situation of tragic entrapment. Kafkologists used to debate at length whether their author granted us any hope. No, not hope. Something else. Even that life denying situation is revealed by Kafka as a strange, dark beauty. Beauty, the last triumph possible for man who can no longer hope."

"COLLABORATOR. Historical situations, always new, unveil man's constant possibilities and allow us to name them. Thus, in the course of the war against Nazism, the word "collaboration" took on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile power. What a fundamental notion! How did humanity do without it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and more that man's activity is by nature a collaboration. All those Who extol the mass media din, advertising's imbecilic smile, the neglect of the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue--they deserve to be called collaborators with the modern."

"CZECHOSLOVAKIA. I never use the word in my nov- els, even though the action is generally set there. This composite word is too young (born in 1918), with no roots in time, no beauty, and it exposes the very nature of the thing it names: composite and too young (untested by time). It may be possible in a pinch to found a state on so frail a word, but not a novel. That is why, to designate my characters' coun- try, I always use the old word "Bohemia." From the standpoint of political geography, it is incorrect (my, translators often bridle), but from the standpoint of poetry, it is the only possible name."

"DEFINITION. The novel's meditative texture is sup ported by the armature of a few abstract terms. If I hope to avoid falling into the slough where everyone thinks he understands everything without under- standing anything, not only must I select those terms with utter precision, but I must define and redefine them. (See: BETRAYAL, BORDER, FATE, LIGHTNESS, LYRI- CISM.) A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions."

"Joke: "I came to realize that there was no power capa- He of changing the image of my person lodged some- where in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear. And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his des- tiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him."

"INEXPERIENCE. The original title considered for The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The Planet of Inexperi- ence." Inexperience as a quality of the human condi- tion. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience."

"INTERVIEW. Cursed be the writer who first allowed a journalist to reproduce his remarks freely! He started the process that can only lead to the disap- pearance of the writer: he who is responsible for everyone of his words. Yet I do very much like the dialogue (a major literary form), and I've been pleased with several such discussions that were mutually pon- dered, composed, and edited. Alas, the interview as it is generally practiced has nothing to do with a dia- logue: (1) the interviewer asks questions of interest to him, of no interest to you; (2) of your responses, he uses only those that suit him; (3) he translates them into his own vocabulary, his own manner of thought. In imitation of American journalism, he will not even deign to get your approval for what he has you say. The interview appears. You console yourself: people will quickly forget it! Not at all: people will quote it! Even the most scrupulous academics no longer distin- guish between the words a writer has written and signed, and his remarks as reported."

"Only when I reread my books in translation did I see, with consternation, all those recurrences! Then I consoled myself; perhaps all novelists ever do is write a kind of theme (the first novel) and variations."

"MACHO (and MISoGYNIST). The macho adores female- ness and wants to dominate what he adores. By glori- fying the archetypal femaleness of the dominated woman (her motherhood, her fertility, her frailty, her home-loving nature, her sentimentality, etc.), he glo- rifies his own virility. The misogynist, on the other hand, is repelled by femaleness; he flees women who are too womanly. The macho's ideal: the family. The misogynist's ideal: the bachelor with a great many mistresses; or: marriage to a beloved childless woman."

"MEDITATION. Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding), he describes a story (Flaubert), he thinks a story (Musil). "

"MISOMUSIST. To be without a feeling for art is no disaster. A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in peace. He feels humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him, and he hates it. There is a popular misomusy just as there is a popular anti-Semitism. The fascist and Communist regimes made use of it when they declared war on modern art. But there is an intellectual, sophisticated misomusy as well: it takes revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic. The doctrine of engagé art: art as an instrument of politics. The theore- ticians for whom a work of art is merely the pretext for deploying a method (psychoanalytic, semiologi- cal, sociological, etc.). Democratic misomusy: the market as supreme arbiter of aesthetic value."

"NONBEING. death sweetly bluish like nonbeing" (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). We cannot say "bluish like nothingness, " because nothingness is not bluish. Proof that nothingness and nonbeing are two entirely different things."

"NoVEL (European). The novel I term European takes form in Southern Europe at the dawn of the Modern Era and in itself represents a historic entity that will go on to expand its territory beyond geographic Europe (most notably into both Americas). In the richness of its forms, the dizzyingly concentrated intensity of its evolution, and its social role, the Euro- pean novel (like European music) has no equal in any other civilization."

"The novelist makes no great issue of his ideas. He is an explorer feeling his way in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence. He is fascinated not by his voice but by a form he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his dream become part of his work. Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Céline. The writer inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, of his country, on the map of the history of ideas. The only context for grasping a novel's worth is the history of the European novel. The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes."

"NOVELIST (and his life). "The artist must make pos- terity believe he never lived," Flaubert said. Maupas- sant kept his portrait from appearing in a series on famous writers: "A man's private life and his face do not belong to the public." Hermann Broch said about himself, Musil, Kafka: "The three of us have no real biographies." Which does not mean that their lives were meager in event, but that they were not destined to be noteworthy, to be public, to become bio-graphy. Someone asks Karel Capek why he doesn't write poetry. His answer: "Because I loathe talking about myself." The distinctive feature of the true novelist: he does not like to talk about himself. "I hate tamper- ing with the precious lives of great writers, and no biogr-sher will ever catch a glimpse of my private life," said Nabokov. Italo Calvino warned: no one should expect a single true word from him about his own life. And Faulkner wished "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leav- ing it markless, no refuse save the printed books." (Underline: books and printed, meaning no unfinished manuscripts, no letters, no diaries.) According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it fol- lows that a novelist's biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel. The moment Kafka draws more attention than Joseph K., the process of Kafka's posthumous dying begins."

"PSEUDONYM. I dream of a world where writers will be required by law to keep their identities secret and to use pseudonyms. Three advantages: a drastic reduction of graphomania; decreased aggressiveness in literary life; the disappearance of biographical interpretation of works."

"REPETITIONS. Nabokov points out that at the begin- ning of the Russian text of Anna Karenina the word "house" occurs eight times in six sentences and that the repetition is a deliberate tactic on the author's part. Yet the word "house" ' appears only once in the French translation of the passage, and no more than twice in the Czech. In that same book: where Tolstoy repeatedly writes skazal ("said"), the French trans- lation uses "remarked," "retorted," "responded," "cried, "stated," etc. Translators are crazy about syn- onyms. (I reject the very notion of synonym: each word has its own meaning and is semantically irre- placeable.) Pascal: "When words are repeated in a text and in trying to replace them we find them so apt that doing so would spoil the text, they should be left in, they are the benchmark of the piece." Richness of vocabulary is not a value in itself: in Hemingway, it is the limitation of vocabulary, the repetition of the same words in the same paragraph, that makes the melody and the beauty of the style. The playful ele- gance of repetition in the first paragraph of one of the loveliest pieces of French prose, the eighteenth- century novel Point de lendemain ("No Tomorrow") by Vivant Denon: "J'aimais éperdument la Comtesse de .. . : j'avais vingt ans, et j'étais ingénu; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J'étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j'avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna: et comme j'avais vingt ans, que j'étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l'amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes. " ("I was madly in love with the Comtesse de. .; I was twenty, and I was naive; she cuckolded me, I protested, she deserted me. I was naive, I longed for her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, was still cuckolded but no longer deserted, I thought myself the best beloved of her lovers, and thus the happiest man alive.") "

"REWRITING. Interviews. Adaptations, transcriptions for the theater, for film, for television. Rewriting as the spirit of the times. "One day all past culture will be completely rewritten and completely forgotten behind the rewrite" (Introduction to Jacques and His Master)." And: "Death to all who dare rewrite what has been written! Impale them and roast them over a slow fire! Castrate them and cut off their ears!" (The Master in Jacques and His Master)."

"lAxiom: The more opaque the affairs of state, the more transparent an individual's affairs must be; though it represents a public thing, bureaucracy is anonymous, secret, coded, inscrutable, whereas private man is obliged to reveal his health, his finances, his family situation, and if the mass media so decree, he will never again have a sin- gle moment of privacy either in love or in sickness or in death. The urge to violate another's privacy is an age-old form of aggression that in our day is institu- tionalized (bureaucracy with its documents, the press with its reporters), justified morally (the right to know having become first among the rights of man),"

"Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert’s novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. […] But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert’s vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!

"the almost comic paradox of Flaubert's celebrated wish that the author be 'impersonal', God. like, removed, and the high personality of his very style, those exquisite sentences and details, which are nothing less than God's showy signatures on every page: so much for the imper- sonal author. Tolstoy comes closest to a canonical idea of authorial omniscience, and he uses with great naturalness and authority a mode of writing that Roland Barthes called the reference code (or sometimes the cultural code), whereby a writer makes confident appeal to a universal or consensual truth, or a body of shared cultural or scientific knowledge."

"So-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist's omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called free indirect style"

"There is a final refinement of free indirect style - we should now just call it authorial irony - when the gap between an author's voice and a character's voice seems to collapse altogether; when a character's voice does indeed seem rebel- liously to have taken over the narration altogether. The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. What an amazing opening! It is the first sentence of Chekhov's story 'Rothschild's Fiddle'. The next sentences are: 'And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad.'"

"Austen's irony dances over this like the long-legged fly in Yeats's poem: 'where he had made a tolerable fortune. What is, or would be, a tolerable' fortune? Intolerable to whom, tolerated by whom? But the great example of mock-heroic comedy resides in that phrase denominated from that period Lucas Lodge. Lucas Lodge is funny enough; it is like Toad of Toad Hall or Shandy Hall, and we can be sure that the house does not quite measure up to its alliterative grandeur. But the pomposity of 'denominated from that period' is funny because we can imagine Sir William saying to himself 'and I will denominate the house, from this period, Lucas Lodge. Yes, that sounds prodigious.' Mock-heroic is almost identical, at this point, to free indirect style. Austen has handed the language over to Sir William; but she is still tartly in control."

"Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the story is written from a point of view closer to a village chorus than to one man. This village chorus sees life pretty much as brutally as the coffin-maker would There were not many patients, and he did not have to wait long, only about three hours' - but continues to see this world after the coffin- maker has died. The Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga (almost exactly contemporaneous with Chekhov) used this kind of village-chorus narration much more systematically than his Russian counterpart. His stories, though written technically in authorial third person, seem to emanate from a commu- nity of Sicilian peasants; they are thick with proverbial sayings, truisms, and homely similes. We can call this unidentified free indirect style"

"On the one hand, the author wants to have his or her own words, wants to be the master of a personal style; on the other hand, narrative bends towards its characters and their habits of speech. The dilemma is most acute in first-person narration, which is generally a nice hoax: the narrator pretends to speak to us, while in fact the author is writing to us, and we go along with the deception happily enough. Even Faulkner's narrators in As I Lay Dying rarely sound much like children or illiterates. But the same tension is present in third-person narration, too: who really thinks that it is Leopold Bloom, in the midst of his stream-of-consciousness, who notices the flabby gush of porter' as it is poured into a drain, or appreciates the buzzing prongs' of a fork in a restaurant - and in such fine words? These exquisite perceptions and beautifully precise phrases are Joyce's, and the reader has to make a treaty, whereby we accept that Bloom will sometimes sound like Bloom and sometimes sound more like Joyce. This is as old as literature: Shakespeare's characters sound like themselves and always like Shakespeare, too. It is not really Cornwall who wonderfully calls Gloucester's eye a vile jelly before he rips it out - though Cornwall speaks the words - but Shakespeare, who has provided the phrase.

A contemporary writer like David Foster Wallace wants to push this tension to the limit....In Wallace's case, the language of his unidentified narration is fairly ugly, and painful for more than a page or two. No analogous problem arose for Chekhov and Verga, because they were not faced with the saturation of language by mass media. But in America, things are different: Dreiser in Sister Carrie (published in 1900) and Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt (1923) take care to reproduce in full the advertisements and business letters and commercial fliers they want novelistically to report on. The risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to evoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text; and perhaps thoroughly debase your own language. Pynchon, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace are to some extent Lewis's heirs (probably in this respect only), and Wallace pushes to parodic extremes his full-immersion method: he does not flinch at narrating twenty or thirty pages in the style quoted above. His fiction prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposi tion of language in America, and he is not afraid to decom- pose - and discompose - his own style in the interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him."

"So there is a tension basic to stories and novels: can we recon- cile the author's perceptions and language with the char- acter's perception and language? If the author and character are absolutely merged, as in the passage from Wallace above, we get, as it were, the whole of boredom' - the author's corrupted language just mimics an actually existing corrupted language we all know too well, and are in fact quite desperate to escape. But if author and character get too separated, as in the Updike passage, we feel the cold breath of an alien- ation over the text, and begin to resent the over-'literary efforts of the stylist. The Updike is an example of aestheti cism (the author gets in the way); the Wallace is an example of apparent anti-aestheticism (the character is all): but both examples are really species of the same aestheticism, which is at bottom the strenuous display of style."

"So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equip- ment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language,style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world - the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novel- istic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple-writer, and the contemporary novelist now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) the palpable present-intimate."

"Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental compo- sure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert."

"The reason that we don't, at first, notice how carefully Flaubert is selecting his details, is because Flaubert is working very hard to obscure this labour from us, and is keen to hide the question of who is doing all this noticing: Flaubert or Frédéric? Flaubert was explicit about this. He wanted the reader to be faced with what he called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose, the details simply amassing themselves like life. 'An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere, he famously wrote in one of his letters, in 1852. 'Art being a second nature, the creator of that nature must operate with analogous procedures: let there be felt in every atom, every aspect, a hidden, infinite impassivity. The effect on the spec- tator must be a kind of amazement. How did it all come about!' To this end, Flaubert perfected a technique that is essen- tial to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instant- aneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously."

"Different time-signatures were not Flaubert's invention, of course. There have always been characters doing something while something else is going on. In Book 22 of The lliach, Hector's wife is at home warming his bath though he has in fact died moments before; Auden praised Breughel, in Muste des Beaux Arts', for noticing that, while Icarus fell, a ship was calmly moving on through the waves, unnoticing. In the Dunkirk section of Ian McEwan's Atonement, the protag- onist, a British soldier retreating through chaos and death towards Dunkirk, sees a barge going by. Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps. Flaubert differs a bit from those examples in the way he insists on driving together short-term and long-term occur- rences. Breughel and McEwan are describing two very different things happening at the same time; Flaubert is asserting a temporal impossibility: that the eye - his eye, or Frédéric's eye - can witness, in one visual gulp as it were, sensations and occurrences that must be happening at different speeds and at different times. "

"Flaubert can drive together his time-signatures because French verb-forms allow him to use the imperfect past tense to convey both discrete occurrences ('he was sweeping the road') and recurrent occurrences ('every week he swept the road'). English is clumsier, and we have to resort to 'he was doing something' or he would do something' or 'he used to do something' - 'every week he would sweep the road' - to trans- late recurrent verbs accurately. But as soon as we do that in English, we have given the game away, and are admitting the existence of different temporalities."

'engaged in the classic post-Flaubertian novelistic activity. Flaubert's Frédéric is a forerunner of what would later be called the flâneur - the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting. We know this type from Baudelaire, from the all-seeing narrator of Rilke's autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Lauris Brigge, and from Walter Benjamin's writings about Baudelaire. 34 This figure is essentially a stand-in for the author, is the author's porous scout, helplessly inundated with impressions. He goes out into the world like Noah's dove, to bring a report back. The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, to the fact that huge conglomer- ations of mankind throw at the writer - or the designated perceiver - large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail. Jane Austen is, essentially, a rural novelist, and London, as figured in Emma, is really just the village of Highgate. Her heroines never idly walk along, just thinking and looking: all their thought is intensely directed to the moral problem at hand. But when Wordsworth, at around the time the young Austen was writing, visits London in The Prelude, he imme- diately begins to sound like a flâneur - like a modern novelist"

"So the narrator who promised that he was a mere camera, quite passive, recording, not thinking, is selling us a false- hood? Only in the sense that Robinson Crusoe's claim to be telling a true story is a falsehood: the reader is happy enough to efface the labour of the writer in order to believe two further fictions: that the narrator was somehow 'really there' (as in fact Isherwood, was, living in Berlin in the 1930s), and that the narrator is not really a writer. Or rather, what Flaubert's flâneur tradition tries to establish is that the narrator (or designated authorial scout) is at once a kind of writer and not really a writer. A writer by temperament but not by trade. A writer because he notices so much, so well; not really a writer because he is not expending any labour to put it down on the page, and after all is really noticing no more than you and I would see."

"The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented."

"How lovely the simplicity with which Chekhor, des inside his character's mind, does not say he thought of the deer he had been reading about' or even he saw in his mind the deer he had been reading about, but just calmly asserts that the deer 'ran past him'. "

" On 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, was obsessively punctilious, and had kept a journal every day of his adult life, in which he recorded daily menus and car mileage. Apparently, nothing was different on the day his wife committed suicide: he entered the mileage for his car. But on this day the paper is obscured by a smudge, writes his biographer, Victoria Glendinning, a brownish- yellow stain which has been rubbed or wiped. It could be tea or coffee or tears. The smudge is unique in all his years of neat diary-keeping."

"Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice - to notice the way my mother, say, often wipes her lips just before kissing me; the drilling sound of a London cab when its diesel engine is flabbily idling; the way old leather jackets have white lines in them like the striations of fat in pieces of meat; the way fresh snow 'creaks underfoot; the way a baby's arms are so fat that they seem tied with string (ah, the others are mine but that last example is from Tolstoy!).

( It is from Anna Karenina, and is a nice example of self-plagiarism. In that novel, not one but two babies - Levin's and Annas - are described as looking as if string is tied round their fat little arms. Likewise, in David Copperfield, Dickens likens Uriah Heep's open mouth to a post office, and Wemmicks open mouth, in Great Expectations - to a post office. Stendhal writes, in The Red and the Black, about how polities twins a novel in the way a gunshot would spoil a music concert, and then repeats the image in The Charterhouse of Parma. Henry James wrote that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art was 'a Benedictine of th eactual', a phrase he liked so much he used it later about Flaubert. Cormac McCarthy writes, in Blood Meridian: the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand', and returns to that lovely verb seven years later in All the Pretty Horses. Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.' Why shouldn't he? Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency. And that a kind of Platonic ideal has been reached - these are the best, and there- fore unsurpassable, words for these subjects."

"If the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail. It is hard to recall for how long fictional narrative was in thrall to neo-classical ideals, which favoured the formu- laic and the imitative, rather than the individual and the original. "

"But it is impos- sible to imagine a novelist in 1770 saying what Flaubert said to Maupassant in 1870: There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown "

"But for Flaubert, for Dickens, and for hundreds of novel- ists after them, the minor character is a delicious kind of stylistic challenge: how to make us see him, how to animate him, how to dab him with a little gloss? (Like Doras cousin in David Copperfield, who is 'in the Life-Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of some body else.) "

"Here is Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, being excruciatingly exact about a blind man he has seen in the street: I had undertaken the task of imagining him, and was sweating from the effort. I understood that nothing about him was insignificant… his hat, an old, high-crowned, stiff felt hat, which he wore the way all blind men wear their hats: without any relation to the lines of the face, without the possibility of adding this feature to themselves and forming a new external unity. but merely as an arbitrary, extraneous object. '2 Impossible to imagine a writer before Flaubert indulging in these theatrics (was sweating from the effort')! What Rilke says about the blind man reads like a projection of his own sweaty literary anx- ieties onto the man: when no literary detail is insignificant, then perhaps indeed each will indeed fail to form a new external unity' and will be merely an arbitrary, extraneous object."

"There is a conventional modern fondness for quiet but 'telling detail.: "The detective noticed that Carlas hairband was surprisingly dirty" If there is such a thing as a telling detail, then there must be such a thing as an untelling detail, no? A better distinction might be between what I would call off-duty' and on-duty detail; the off-duty detail is part of the standing army of life, as it were - it is always ready to be activated. Literature is full of such off-duty detail James's red cigar tip would be an example). But maybe off-duty and on-duty just rephrases the problem? Isn't off-duty detail essentially detail that is not as telling as its on-duty comrades? Nineteenth-century realism, from Balzac on, creates such an abundance of detail that the modern reader has come to expect of narrative that it will always contain a certain superfluity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail. Suppose I were to describe a man's head like this: He had very red skin, and his eyes were bloodshot; his brow looked angry. There was a small mole on his upper lip. The red skin and bloodshot eyes and angry skin tell us, perhaps, something about the man's disposition, but the mole seems irrelevant. It's just "there'; it is reality, it is just 'how he looked'"

"But why is the barometer there? The barometer denotes nothing; it is an object 'neither incongruous nor significant'; it is apparently irrelevant'. Its business is to denote reality, it is there to create the effect, the atmosphere of the real. It simply says: I am the real.' (Or if you prefer: I am realism.) An object like the barometer, Barthes continues, is supposed to denote the real, but in fact all it does is signify it. In the Michelet passage, the little filler of the knock at the door is the kind of thing that this writing puts in' to create the realistic 'effect of time passing. Realism in general, it is implied, is just such a business of false denotation. The barometer is interchangeable with a hundred other items; realism is an artificial tissue of mere arbitrary signs. Realism offers the appearance of reality but is in fact utterly fake - what Barthes calls the referential illusion'"

"The barometer, the puddle, the adjustment of the blind- fold, are not 'irrelevant; they are significantly insignificant. In "The Lady with the Little Dog', a man and a woman go to bed. After sex, the man calmly eats a melon: There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence. That is all Chekhov writes. He could have done it like this: 'Thirty minutes passed. Outside, a dog started barking, and some children ran down the street. The hotel manager yelled something. A door slammed. These details would obviously be exchangeable with other, similar details; they are not crucial to anything. They would be there to make us feel that this is lifelike. Their insignificance is precisely their significance."

"There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional char- acter. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood. The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard. When I encounter a prolonged ekphrasis like the parody above, I worry, suspecting that the novelist is clinging to a handrail and is afraid to push out. 60 But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls getting a character in. He says that Conrad himself was never really satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got his characters in; he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books.'"

"We can tell a great deal from a character by how he talks, and whom he talks to - how he bumps up against the world. People, as Edith Wharton said, are like other people's estates: we only know of them what abuts our own."

"In Antonioni's film L'Eclisse, the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiancé, played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it, then goes to a café, where he orders an acqua minerale, which he again barely touches. He is writing something on a piece of paper, and leaves it on the table. We imagine that it must be a set of furious, melancholy figures. Vitti approaches the table, and sees that it is a drawing of a flower Who would not love this little scene?"

"But Ricardo Reis is not a 'real' fictional character, what- ever that means (like David Copperfield or Emma Bovary). He is one of the four pen-names which the actual Pessoa - the poet who worked and lived in Lisbon and died in 1935 - assumed, and in whose persona he wrote poetry. The special flicker of this book, the tint and the delicacy that make it seem hallucinatory, derive from the solidity with which Saramago invests a character who is a fictional character twice over: first Pessoas, then Saramago's. This enables Saramago to tease us with something that we already know, namely that Ricardo Reis is fictional. Saramago makes something deep and moving of this because Ricardo also feels himself to be somewhat fictional, at best a shadowy spectator, a man on the margin of things. And when Ricardo reflects thus, we feel a strange tenderness for him, aware of something that he does not know, that he is not real."

"To argue that we can know Jean Brodie just as deeply as we can know Dorothea Brooke, to argue that lacunae are as deep as solidities, that absence in characterisation can be a form of knowing as profound as presence, that Spark's and Saramago's and Nabokov's characters can move us as much as James's and Eliot's, is to concede nothing to William Gass's scepticism. Not all of these characters have the same amount of realised 'depth', but all of them are objects of perception, to use Gass's words, all of them are more than mere bundles of words (though of course they are bundles of words), and things that can be correctly said of persons can also be said of them. They are all 'real' (they have a reality) but in different ways. That reality-level differs from author to author, and our hunger for the particular depth or reality-level of a character is tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions of each book. This is how we can read W. G. Sebald one day, and Woolf the next, and Philip Roth the next, and not demand that each resemble the other. It would be an obvious category mistake to accuse Sebald of not offering us 'deep' or 'rounded' char- acters, or to accuse Woolf of not offering us plenty of juicy, robust minor characters in the way of Dickens. I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality-level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disap- pointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough - the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough. Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebald or Woolf or Roth - none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth- century sense - of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us."

"One reason that Cervantes needs to have Don Quixote accompanied by Sancho Panza on his travels is that the Knight must have someone to talk to. When Don Quixote sends Sancho off to search for Dulcinea, and is alone for the first extended period in the novel, he does not think, as we would now understand the term. He speaks out aloud, he soliloquises. The novel begins in the theatre, and novelistic charac- terisation begins when the soliloquy goes inward. The solilo- quy, in turn, has its origins in prayer, as we can see from Greek tragedy, or from Book 5 of The Odyssey, or from the Psalms, or from David's songs to the Lord in 1 and 2 Samuel. Shakespeare's heroes and heroines still use soliloquy to invoke the Gods, if not quite to pray to them: 'Come you spirits . . . unsex me here, 'Blow winds and crack your cheeks', and so on. The actor comes to the front of the stage and speaks his mind to an audience, who is both God above and we spectators in the seats. Nineteenth-century novel- ists like Charlotte Bronté and Thomas Hardy continued to describe their characters as 'soliloquising' when speaking to themselves."

"Under the new dispensation of the invisible audience, the novel becomes the great analyst of unconscious motive, since the character is released from having to voice his motives: the reader becomes the hermeneut, looking between the lines for the actual motive."

"In the novel, we can see the self better than any literary form has yet allowed; but it is not going too far to say that the self is driven mad by being so invis- ibly scrutinised."

"The novel has shown a stunning technical progression in its ability to render plot, and in making us attend to psycho- logical motivation. In his essay 'The End of the Novel', Osip Mandelstam claimed that 'the novel was perfected and strengthened over an extremely long period of time as the art form to interest the reader in the fate of the individual", singling out two technical refinements: (1) the transform- ation of biography (the Saint's Life, the moralising Theophrastan sketch and so on) into a meaningful narrative or plot, and (2) 'psychological motivation'."

"As Mandelstam wrote, the novel probably has its origins in a secular response to the religious lives and biographies of saints and holy men, and in the tradition inaugurated by the Greek writer Theophrastus, who offered a series of sketches of types - the miser, the hypocrite, the fond and foolish lover, and so on."

"The Theophrastan and religious tendency remained strong in the novel throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still visible in cinema and in various kinds of pulp fiction: villains are villains, heroes are heroes, and the good and the bad are clearly separated and delineated - think of Fielding, Goldsmith, Scott, Dickens, Waugh. Character is essentially stable, has fixed attributes, in such writers. But at the same time, another kind of novel was devel- oping, in which good and bad wars within a single char- acter, and the self refuses to stay still. What the novel powerfully began to do was to explore characterological rela- tivity. This tradition in turn would influence the English and American novel in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly as Dostoevsky began to be translated into English (Lawrence, Conrad, Ford and Woolf were the chief benefi- caries)."

"Freud's comment on the action of the superego: In many criminals,' writes Freud, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but Its motive.'"

"Am I the only reader addicted to the utterly foolish pastime of amassing instances in which minor characters in books happen to have the names of writers? Thus Camus the chemist in Proust, and another Camus, this time a grocer, in Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest, and the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables, and Horace Updike in Babbitt, and Brecht the dentist in Buddenbrooks, and Heidegger, one of Trotta's witnesses in Joseph Roth's The Emperor's Tomb, and Madame Foucault in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, and Father Larkin in David Jones's In Parenthesis, and Count Tolstoy, a soldier, in War and Peace, and a man named Barthès in Rousseau's Confessions, and come to think of it, a certain Madame Rousseau in Proust ."

"The Russians and the French essentially set the terms of the modernist novel as it flourished in Britain and America between 1920 and 1945. You can trace the excitement of encounter in Virginia Wolf's essays, especially those written in the teens and the twenties of the century, as she discovers the new translations of the Russians into English by Constance Garnett. She put it like this in 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' (1923): After reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, how could any young novelist believe in 'characters' as the Victorians had painted them? For the undeniable vivia. ness of so many of them is the result of their crudiny, The character is rubbed into us indelibly because its features are so few and so prominent. We are given the keyword [e.g. I will never desert Mr Micawber] and then, since the keyword is astonishingly apt, our imagin- ations swiftly supply the rest. But what keyword could be applied to Raskolnikov, Mishkin, Stavrogin, or Alyosha? These are characters without any features at all. We go into them as we descend into an enormous cavern'. Ford Madox Ford agreed (though his master was Flaubert). Other than Richardson, he argued in his book The English Novel, nothing was worthy of adult attention in English fiction until Henry James came along."

"We don't read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on - because it is alive and we are alive. It is amusing to watch evolutionary biology tie itself up in circularities when trying to answer the question why do humans spend so much time reading fiction when this yields no obvious evolutionary benefits?' The answers tend either to be utilitarian - we read in order to find out about our fellow citizens, and this has a Darwinian utility - or circular: we read because fiction pushes certain pleasure buttons."

"McEwan knowingly alludes to a celebrated dilemma in the philosophy of consciousness, most famously raised by Thomas Nagel in his essay What is it like to be a bat?' Nagel concludes that a human cannot change places with a bat, that imaginative transfer on the part of a human is impos- sible: Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far),it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat."

" ' The day waves yellow with all its crops.' That is Woolf, from The Waves. I am consumed by this sentence, partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much. I can see, hear, its beauty, its strangeness. Its music is very simple. Its words are simple. And its meaning is simple, too. Woolf is describing the sun rising and finally filling the day with its yellow fire. The sentence means something like: this is what a field of corn on a summer's day will look like when everything is blazing with sunlight - a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving colour. We know exactly and instantly what Woolf means, and we think: that could not be put any better. The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write the day waves: the effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, appar- ently nonsensical waves yellow (how can anything wave yellow?) conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too - yellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke colour, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness."

"One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. An efficient thriller will often be written in a style that is locked into place: the musical analogue of this might be a tune, proceeding in unison, the melody sepa- rated only by octave intervals, without any harmony in the middle. By contrast, rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. In writing, a 'register is nothing more than a name for a kind of diction, which is nothing more than a name for a certain, distinctive way of saying something - so we talk about 'high' and 'low' registers (e.g. the high-ish Father and the lower Pop'), grand and vernacular diction, mock- heroic diction, clichéd registers, and so on. We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one, unvarying register - a solid block, like everyone agreeing to wear black at a funeral. But this is a social convention, and eighteenth-century prose, for instance, is especially good at subverting this expectation, wringing comedy out of the jostling together of different registers"

"Actually, there is a way in which mixed metaphor is perfectly logical, and not an aberration at all. After all, metaphor is already a mixing of disparate agents - a brow is not really like a frontier - and so mixed metaphor can be said to be the essence, the hypostasis, of metaphor: if a brow can be like a frontier, it follows that a frontier can be moody. In contemporary parlance, what people dislike about mixed metaphor is that it tends to combine two different clichés, as in, say, 'out of a sea of despair, he has pulled forth a plum'. The metaphorical aspect is actually dimmed, almost to non-existence, by the presence of two or more mixed clichés (which by definition are themselves dim or dead metaphors). But Shakespeare's meraphors more often inhabit a speculative realm rather than a mechanical one, in which readers and audience have already been asked to abandon a customary world of familiar corre- spondence (as, for instance, when Macbeth likens pity to a new-born babe)."

"Here, for instance, are four metaphorical descrip- tons of fire, all of them tremendously successful. Lawrence, seeing a fure in a grate, writes of it as that rushing bouquet of new flames in the grate' (Sea and Sardinia). Hardy describes a scarlet handful of fire' in Gabriel Oaks cottage in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bellow has this sentence about a fire in his story 'A Silver Dish': 'The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire. And Norman Rush, in his novel Mortals, which is set in Botswana, has his hero come upon an abandoned village, where he sees that "cooking fires wagged in some of the lalwapas' (a lalwapa is a kind of simple African courtyard). So: a rushing bouquet (DHI); a handful of scarlet fire (THI); a school of fishes (SB), and a wagging fire (NR). Is one better than the others? Each works slightly differently."

"The reader tends to plump for one reading, while being aware that multiple readings are also possible; we sew ourselves into the text, becoming highly invested in our version of events."

"In a very witty essay written in 1935, Cyril Connolly demanded that a whole family of conventions should be butchered - 'all novels dealing with more than one gener- ation or with any period before 1918 or with brilliant impov- erished children in rectories, all novels set in Hampshire, Sussex, Oxford, Cambridge, the Essex coast, Wiltshire, Cornwall, Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead, Hyde Park and Hammersmith. Many situations should be forbidden, all getting and losing of jobs, proposals of marriage, reception of love- letters by either sex … all allusion to illness or suicide (except insanity), all quotations, all mentions of genius, promise, writing, painting, sculpting, art, poetry, and the phrases I like your stuff,' What's his stuff like?' "Damned good, Let me make you some coffee,' all young men with ambition or young women with emotion, all remarks like Darling, I've found the most wonderful cottage' (flat, castle), 'Ask me any other time, dearest, only please - just this once - not now,' • Love you - of course I love you' (don't love you) - and It's not that, it's only that I feel so terribly tired.' Forbidden names: Hugo, Peter, Sebastian, Adrian, Ivor, Julian, Pamela, Chloe, Enid, Inez, Miranda, Joanna, Jill, Felicity, Phyllis. Forbidden faces: all young men with curly hair or remarkable eyes, all gaunt haggard thinkers' faces, all faunlike characters, anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever, and all women with a nape totheir neck (he loved the way her hair curled in the little hollow at the nape of her neck). Realism, for Moody and Giles, is like Connolly's opinion of a character named Miranda or Julian; it is just another convention reflecting the aspirations of petit bourgeois readers. Barthes argued that there is no 'realistic' way to narrate the world. The nineteenth-century author's naive delusion that a word has a necessary and transparent link to its referent has been nullified. We move merely among different, competing genres of fiction-making, of which realism is just the most confused, and perhaps the most Obtuse because the least self-conscious about its own pro- cedures. Realism does not refer to reality; realism is not real- Istic. Realism, said Barthes, is a system of conventional codes, grammar so ubiquitous that we do not notice the way it structures bourgeois story-telling.? In practice, what Barthes means is that conventional novel-ists have pulled the wool over our eyes: a smooth wall of prose comes towards us, and we rather lazily gasp out loud: How did it all come about?' - just as Flaubert wanted us to. "

"Thomas Hardy argued that art wasn't real- istic because art is 'a disproportioning - (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) - of realities, to show more dearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence "realism" is not art.' Yet Hardy, of course, no less than Flaubert, strove to write novels and poems that show the way things are'. Who has written more beautifully or more truthfully than Hardy about rural communities, or about grief?"

"as George Eliot put it in her essay The Natural History of German Life, that 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot.' The great Victorian realist is being precise here: art is not life itself, art is always an arti- fice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life."

"You pegged your ancestors on the line between the work-socks and the blankets and they bubbled with cleanness and kicked in the breeze and were slapped in the face by the oak leaves that got up one morning to wash their face in death. Oh Dolly Dolly Varden in pleated china with the dust in the cracks and the chipped eyes. I did not have dolls. My sisters had dolls blushed pink with hollow bellies and patent bellybuttons and limbs held by a knot of elastic, and the house was littered with amputa- tions lying in corners by spiders' webs and on ledges with empty bottles and beetles resting between engagements, and under the house near the blocks of Waimaru stone and the lank sleepless potato flowers looking for the light. And I, Toby, travelled a long way in my dream, and when I came to the pond and the patch of babies growing up like little green frogs from the bank, with leaves shelter- ing them as they shelter flower-buds, I, the tramp, the epileptic, drew my bundle of sharp stakes like the manuka my father used as religious instruction to discipline the beans in their search for heaven my father the curate sol pierced the little frog-heads and sat down and cried because my mother with her Blaikie nose and Dunwoody chin was dead."

"he sighed again and fell asleep and at the door of his dreams his dead mother was waiting with her little tray of poisonous apples. The bracelet of decay glitters with diamonds. Tiny worms carry lanterns in the storm. At the edge of the al- phabet there is no safeguard against the dead."

"In Amy Withers' mind, even in the days of fast cars, Buicks, Chevs bigbodied gleaming, the symbol of pros- perity had always remained a coach and fine horses. In her rather muddled dreamy but determined ventures in Time, Amy used to move back and forth from the past to the future, from the days recorded by fossils, temples, Victorian writings, to the Latter Days and Armageddon, avoiding the splash and spatter of the Present Day as if it were an inconvenient puddle in the road."

"The dead return, they mingle, their smell is layered over the living and the present. Do people passing in the street recognize the smell that hangs like a cloud like a shroud, or do only the little dogs know it, jerking and running around corners to catch the tantalizing bitch-smell of death that stings them to life, to uncomplicated slot-ma- chine love where the face is faceless Pardon me, as I passed by did I leave a germ of suffer- ing trapped in your breath, a sealed envelope of love in the lattice-work of your face?"

"Toby gave his Aunt Norma a feeling of untidiness in herself and the world about her, a sense of gaps and holes and torn threadbare linings that made her want to take her needle and thread (she had worked as a tailoress and still took in sewing) and sew day and night to make pock- ets safe once more, clothes warm and buttoned, and even to secure the sky tightly to the edge of the world, with no draughts and flapping fringes."

"It rained, Scotch mist braiding and trembling upon peo- ple and hills. The rain moved through the sky in shapes determined by the wind, now a grey broom sweeping, a ribbed and feathered wing flying, a scarf enveloping the light, preserving dimness and secrecy. The sea heaved and the headlands loomed out of sleep like an extra dream or nightmare, confused in the minds of the ferry passengers with other private seas and voyagings and thus arousing even in daylight and waking, the deepest longings that have exiled in the sleep of night."

"Norma repeated that being anti-social was a sin Murder, suicide, adultery, they were too fierce to be teased, and if one found oneself in the same cage with them it was the end; one lay savaged, bleeding; whereas the little sins, the tiny white mice climbing their ladders and running round on their wheels in the convenient cages, they could be commanded, teased, or ignored, and little harm was done; there was no question of death, of the body or the soul. Being anti-social was wrong. Not wearing the right clothes was wrong. And eating peas with a knife. And gargling with too much vigour in the morning. Dolly sins. It was safe to defy their attraction. It was safe to talk about them. Sins of gauze, worn like a veil over the murdering hearts."

"Singing in the choir, the heavenly choir. Where?' I belong to the League of Mothers,' Norma answered, adding quickly before Bob could examine and ridicule her information, 'Oh anyone my age can belong. You don't have to be a mother. 'Funny, Bob said. Cold current without warning in a mild summer sea. In the early years of her marriage Norma had borne twin dead babies; forever nameless, shelled fast about the impenetrable kernel of their identity; treated as nobody, buried in a hurry, their faces never flamed with the stress of beginning."

"'Tomorrow,' he said to himself; while the rats and bo- gies inhabiting the wall under the wallpaper and the scrim scuffled about tearing up documents and carrying the Great Plague like a peppermint under their tongue. And when Toby woke in the morning the bed was wet and cold. Why didn't you use the chamber?' his mother asked him. All the way down to Mrs Bollidge's he made footprints in the clay. He found three fingernail pieces of snailshell which he planted among the dead leaves under someones hedge; people drew hedges round themselves, like magic chalk rings."

"He was thinking of Minnie Holloway, the girl over the road who lived in a house with red cushions and carpets and the blinds down with the tassels touching the windowsill. Minnie Holloway used to say Basilica, escritoire, chiffonier. And couch instead of sofa. And tallboy instead of wardrobe. Tall boy? Toby was thinking of Minnie now, but not really think- ing of her, for people shift, like panels of lantern-slides or cards mysteriously removed and replaced, and one per- son is another, and people do not stay."

(Foreword:

Writers with such concerns - writers who constantly question the purpose of their writing - writers who intend their sentences to rattle like wind-up toys across the page - writers who want to transfer their exhaustive, existential curiosity to the reader - writers of this sort are often accused of writing plotless books. This might not be an unfair accusation, but it's also more complex than that. Traditionally constructed plots do not serve the goals of such writers, and in fact they frequently get in the way. The energy and forward propulsion of The Edge of the Alphabet, for instance, does not come from the question of how any given plot-knot will loosen itself, but rather from the rapid movement between layers of consciousness and reality. Though, in fact, if plot is what

you're after, someone does die in the end, or, as Frame puts it, a character achieves 'that most dramatic and convenient change in habits which we call Death'. Thora's goldfish - Toby, Zoe and Pat - are three lonely drifters who first intersect taking a boat from New Zealand on its way to London. Though most of the book remains in Thora's omniscient third person, she bends all the customs of such narration, refusing to move clearly from one point of view to another, refusing to strictly observe the boundaries of a mind; she is more like an invisible eel, slipping constantly between present, past and imaginary. The characters' dreams, memories and obsessions are just as often a subject as are their actions in the so-called present' of the novel. The focus shifts quickly and without warning; Frame either trusts you to keep up, or knows it simply doesn't matter if you fall behind. Asifto challenge the quasi-narration from Thora, and to echo the ongoing concerns of Frame, both Zoe and Toby consider writing books of their own. 'Shall! write a book?' Zoe asks herself. Everybody is going to write a book. Memoirs on writing-paper, toilet-paper, café wall, pavement, or stone column in a city cemetery where borders of trees provide a trip-wire into silence. Shall I write? Shall I engage in private research of identity? Meanwhile, Toby is repeatedly convinced that he'll soon begin to write his novel about the Lost Tribe, a concept which seems to be privately held"

"few writers could say writing fiction saved me' with quite the same veracity as Frame. But if that anecdote paints a rosy picture of the re- demptive power of storytelling, don't let it. Redemption arcs are few and far between in Janet Frame's fiction. When doctors told her, years after the original diagnosis of schizophrenia, that there had been a miscarriage of medicine, and she was not schizophrenic at all, she recalled thinking, Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?' However she soon felt a sense of wonder about this newfound freedom: I had only my ordinary or my extraordinary self with which to explain myself, and this was the first such opportunity for me since I had been an adult."

"Frame was able to chisel out an entire planet located in the liminal place between a writer and her fictions, something truer than apparent truth, something clearer than apparent reality.")

"He thought it wise to mention Evelina's favourite col. our. He had read an advertisement where a man and a woman were choosing paint in a shop. In one square they decided upon the paint. In the next square the woman had her arm around the man and was kissing him, stand- ing on tiptoe while a bubble-shape blown from her mouth had captured the words He lets me choose my favourite colour in Hurndell's Paints. No woman can resist a man who lets her choose her favourite Hurndell Paint.' In the next square they were arm in arm outside their new house and an arrow shot into the roof trailed the words Hurndell's Paints. Toby enjoyed reading the advertisements on the screen and in the newspapers. He liked reading little sto- ries about pimples and bad breath and Night Starvation and B.O. and Mr Universe, and although he did not be- lieve what the advertisements claimed, there were times when out of a sense of desperation and a need to simplify the process of living, to break it down into little squares, he tried to follow the commands of the advertisers, to perform the ritual of using their product in the hope that good fortune, love, happiness, would be trapped into showering bounty upon him."

"He remembered that when he was little he had visited a local museum and breathing over the glass cases and rubbing his breath away, he peered at the ornaments pinned to the green baize. Ornaments, tools, weapons. All were named. The names gave them value. His fat suffocating aunty was with him that day. Her husband was a rabbiter, stringing the rabbit skins along the fence that winked with sun and gold and wire; spill- ing the rabbits' giggles over the grass while the hawks teetered down the wind and stayed poised. Why has everything got names, Aunty? Even things for fighting with? Don't touch,' his aunt said. And she pointed to the no- tice - Silence. Toby understood. The things with names were really people and wanted to talk without being interrupted. Or perhaps people were having their say too often and it was the turn of things who could not otherwise get a word in edgeways? Toby listened carefully, but he could not hear what they were saying. "

"The tune swelled and the passengers looked at one another, embarrassed, swamped with wartime memories, angry at the cheap come-hither ap- proach that is always used by national music to waylay and exhibit as public the most private inexplicable loves and loyalties. "

"Now there is in Toby's land (and in my own, I, Thora Pattern writing here on a Saturday morning while the light hammers sheets of roofing-iron in the sky and autumn tries the trick of the watering can as if we were thirsty flowers; a sheen upon my withered petals) there is an affliction of dream called Overseas, a suffering of sleep endured by the prophetic, the bored, the retired, and the living who will not admit that it is easier and cheaper to die, die once and for ever and travel as dust. But being dust how can you return and have your name in the pa- per and your self pointed out in the street as having been 'overseas and your conversation filled with the names of places you have visited, your words received with wonder, as prophecies: I saw a silk mountain where ants lived in palaces; I saw a stone tide flowing; a dislocation of summer, a cajolery of politics sitting sunbathing like pixies while a mushroom cloud grew from their clotted mental dung and darkened the early morning sky; I saw a handout of lucidities, a twist (machine-wrapped, factory-tested) of compromise; I saw a red winter corpuscle, the sun shining before twilight behind the trees on the Common How, if you are not Marco Polo or Herodotus? I, standing in the main street of Waimaru telling the world of my travels, walking majestically up and down between my sandwich board of fantasy."

"An October warned by frost, the children sucking pink slabs of a glacial earth, the running stitch of snow in the sky to mend birthsprout the hamster his cheek lined with fat, wordless. Conferences the rusting resorts this October birched with memory the switch from the green trees where birds were plump and sleek of paradise and ample morning shadows the day served for the light to feed on now October scraps of leaves and light the starved shapes creeping up the evening walls around corners the tall skeleton transparent while sleeps the tortoise his back marked muted mapped with boundaries his underflesh soft for knives ancient spears pen-nibs all objects driving home in lust hate or chance. The council flats, the wardrobes with equal shelves drawers lined with newspaper and mouse-dirt Peer's Son Warned Daughter of Bishop Detained for Questioning Admits Terror of Relative Pronoun. Who bided his time for ever in the human brain as in a nest who brought forth no young who cut through cables of hate with a moonstone, one springtime, whose hibernation is patient and normal whose larder is full. Despite terror of the relative pronoun marching unnamed even in sleep we have gone back to the gap and the birth, the edge, where some leap in, others camp on the edge, incomplete with folding furniture plastic cutlery tea kept hot in polythene towers where bells toll the groove and flies keep their balance; some shout or coo-ee God, God."

"As FROM TODAY, Toby lied to himself, I am free.' He remembered the grocers' bills which included at the end the warnings and frightening finalities of expres- sions like 'as from'. As from… As from Friday…. As from next week we regret that we are unable to supply you. The words themselves seemed to have little meaning why 'as from'? Why not simply from? But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoid one another, and what more successful means of avoid- ance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries of love or peace. As from. Believe me to be. Hoping this finds you as it leaves me. I have to be careful, Toby thought, because I am going to write a book. As from today. Do you want words, Toby, in a wheelchair of italics, words forced to their knees, begging pity? Or whole words standing without support, without floodlight, ar- mour, or trumpet, growing like fruit, the ripe result of their own bush or tree in a harmony of climate, caprice, inspired obedience - like apples, Toby, guavas, pawpaws,and railway-line blackberries grey with travellers' dust?"

"Sometimes Pat offered advice. Many of his sentences began with What you want to do when you get to London is to . And he tried to be helpful. The first day of lifeboat drill he adjusted Toby's lifebelt and showed him where to go, interpreting the notice on the cabin wall as if it were in a language which he alone could understand. He helped other people too, pointing this way and that and advising, explaining, criticizing. The crew thanked him for his co-operation. He stood with them laughing, talk- ing, apart from the passengers. People remarked that he was a born organizer, and that when the time arrived for concerts and Fancy Dress then Pat Keenan would surely come into his own. Come into his own - that was Pat's anxiety, for you see, however confident, informed, he showed himself to be, he never came into his own'. It is a difficult process anyway, rather like entering the parlour of oneself while the spider is waiting. And one's own' can so easily be lost! Sometimes at night Pat was seized by anxiety which set him trembling and wondering. Where was his own'? Why was it not safe like his wallet and his passport and his insurance policies? Then he would think, Well why worry. He would smile to himself, confident again, assured. After all, the author- ities would see to it; they would have to see to it. Ah, the authorities!"

"ONE NIGHT TOBY took a fit. He knew nothing of it un- til he woke in the morning and Pat leaned down from his bunk. What were you doing in the night?' What do you mean what was I doing in the night?' Then Toby knew. His mouth was sore. Packed behind his eyes there was the feel of shredded corned beef, lawn- mowers in his ears, and in the far corner of the cabin a geranium with a stinging velvet smell and scratches on its petals flowered from dry stony soil."

"I'm thirty-five, he said aloud suddenly to his mother who brushed past him, touching his cheek, pretending to be a respectable ghost keeping an eye on him when in reality she was an old witch preparing her brew. Oh no, oh no, Are you all right, Toby, are you managing? Ah, he knew her, how she used to write recipes for the mag- azines, New Ways with Lamb, New Ways with Roast Beef. Economically brewing over the kitchen stove. New ways with Death. I'm a traveller all right, Toby thought. I must go care- fully, tread softly, discovering…. It is time I wrote my Lost Tribe… but what if I suddenly grow in two, like a carrot or parsnip under the earth?"

"How often had the teacher said to Toby when his spelling was despaired of, You carry a picture of the word in your head, Toby. That's how you learn to spell. Look at the word, close your eyes, and you have a picture of it. Spelling is easy, Toby!' b sit But surely she had reckoned without the individuality and caprice of words and the letters that composed them, their reluctance to appear naked, as it were, in people's minds only to be plucked (the letters like passion-fruit along a trellis) and splashed (their seeds and juice flying) upon a sheet of paper! In his mind Toby saw pictures of words - they allowed him that indulgence - yet when he tried to write them they refused to leave him, would not be uprooted, and the picture of their letters (strung now like flimsy spiderwebs between trees) changed to spider-blots, nothing but blots of ink. Plants, fruit, webs, insects, animals, the words were in turn all of these, yet in the end they became blots, fly-specks (like the dead), mouse-dirt, a mess to be cleaned up. Sometimes Toby felt the words moving in his arms, down his arm into his hand, wriggling like silkworms awaiting their third change of skin before their mouth begins to drip golden silk. He could do nothing to help them. The teacher had never told him that words were like this. Look at the word, Toby, close your eyes, and you have a picture of it.' It was certain that Miss Botting had carried all her words framed and imprisoned, like pictures hanging on a wall, pretty pictures of flowers, trees, spaniels, cats in baskets, cherubs; and none of the spattered secretions of death and decay, nothing which demanded a private lonely interpretation."

"Time is the trick, to cast you in moments of intensity from the conveyor-belt to the whirlpool below. You are wet with spray from the discarded moments that nobody desires because they are your own (to each his own time) and you stare up at the people in their little boxes or cra- les or coffins jerking rhythmically along clackety-clack, being attended and processed, wrapped and delivered by Time. And priced. The cost is too high. And there are rainbows in the air, where the water falls."

"Certainly now I will take action against the Shipping Company for fraud. They have issued a leaflet portray- ing me in my dinner suit on a moonlit deck surrounded by beautiful women with bare shoulders and breast gul- lies where the snowberries grow. I will issue a writ for fraud. I am lonely. When my ship comes home. That was my mother's life. 'Some day,' she said, pinning her tarnished only brooch to the lapel of her costume coat, 'some day when my ship comes home.' And her perpetually expectant gaze which some attributed to hope and faith and others took for signs of exhaustion disguised as enthusiasm, kept searching, searching the faces of those around her, that is, the faces of strangers, for signs of news'."

"So as special arrangement for the solitary ones whose shipboard life had not attained the ideals of the Shipping Company's pamphlet or discovered on the cold sea- slopped deck the described enticements, the Social Committee organized a party one evening in a last at- tempt to make passengers get together'. For it is the rule; human beings must live in clusters, hanging like grapes from the scaffold, or in flocks like sheep in a bleating pan- ic from the hawk."

"He was sensitive to weather - snake-heat and paw-frozen snow - but never cared to flirt or negotiate with it. Other people in their approach to outward weather create what is for them perhaps the only satisfying relationship of their lives - the old maid (Zoe Bryce?) in shorts, nibbled chastely by light tentative breezes; the married who can no longer meet each other because they have lost their passport or mistaken the true boundaries on their map of love, now see them gently open to or shafting the sun, melting downstream in the light all the pooled queries crossword clues and plots devised from birth and the first floating onshore gasp."

"You should be dining or dancing with Eurydice, , Zoe told Toby. I can't find her. "You know it's like me to be Minnie Mouse, to have been given that label. Has it occurred to you that such placings of identity, you as Orpheus, myself as Minnie Mouse, could only exist in fiction? It doesn't make you afraid, does it, that you are fiction, that you are not really aboard the Matua sailing to England, that you exist only in someone's mind, some poor writer who cannot do bet- ter than bring forth the conversation of musicians, poets, mice?' But mice listen,' Toby said. 'Mice listen in the wall and scratch with their fingernails on the parchment."

"I'm seasick again,' Zoe said miserably, and hur- ried from the lounge to vomit her loneliness in private. Omelettes and wine, you have paid for it haven't you? And buttercups grow and English cathedrals rise from the stiff-backed menus which passengers hoard between leaflets and lavender, in order to be reminded. For memory is so often a single explosion, like a fire- work in the face. One is blinded. One scrabbles about with damp matches trying to ignite an empty blackened little column of cardboard."

"He was seized by fear then as he said those words. Supposing Zoe Bryce guessed about the Lost Tribe and stole his idea, wrote about it, had it published when she returned to England… How could he prevent her? So many people, Toby knew, were saying, even now, on deck, in their cabins, in the bar, the lounge, TIl write a book about my experiences. Oh I could write a book. One of these days when I get down to it I'll write a book. Supposing they decided to write about the Lost Tribe? Well they'd better not, Toby thought, for I've had that idea in my head for years and years and it hurts like an African thorn that has jagged itself in me and festered to bursting point, and it throbs day and night. Is everybody else that way, with thorns in their head? Zoe Bryce? Will Zoe Bryce write about the Lost Tribe?"

"Your sleep is secret, Pat. You lie, a giant, in the orchard of sleep; at the slightest stir of sensation or thought you are pelted with ripe or rotten dreams where the codling moth hangs her milky white curtains of decay. And now all over the sea the chopped light lay beneath the guillotine of tropical darkness."

"a smell that after a while shudders out of itself, like a conjuror escaping from a locked box, and vanishes."

"The timbers creak, Zoe said to herself, deriving com- fort from the unexpected thought that she lay in a pirate ship where the battered timbers were talking almost ceaselessly, as trees do, even when they are dismembered, mutilated, camouflaged, polished at their knotted knees or sliced in their bone-shafts, still they speak and make one aware of their silence also, their withdrawal on days of frost, and again their voice of complaint in the heat when they seek to burst from the iron hoops of the sun. Have you heard furniture in the night? Why does the sudden speech of table and wall set your heart beating so fast?"

"ZOE THOUGHT, Shall I write a book? Everybody is going to write a book. Memoirs on writing-paper, toilet- paper, café wall, pavement, or stone column in a city cemetery where borders of trees provide a tripwire into silence. Shall I write? Shall I engage in private research of identity? For kisses do not seal - the locks fly open, the bands fall apart, the contents are riddled by a secret ray; as the sun himself knows, prowling like a cat-burglar, safe-breaker, among the futile security measures of en- dowed leaves and mansioned buds."

"We go more often to the Outsize Shop, we buy from ad- vertisements on the back pages of magazines the mail-or- der supports for the fuller figure' and the small round pink hedgehogs called spot-reducers which magic away unwanted flesh'. Or, enticing our resentment inwards to permanent board and lodging in our body, we grow thin, are consumed, our breasts limp upon us and furred inside and stale, like empty water bottles in a desert. I And so it would have been for me. Until then. Duf Until it happened. I no A slight progress away from the shame of being un- loved. A flesh kiss. "

"The used words have their peril. The rust on them (they say) brings tetanus to the wounded life."

"If it fits in with what you want… Usually it fits in… it has to. 'Or you don't find it?' You haven't the time for looking in unlikely places, you have to have some idea. You mean that when you steer your mind like a crane through the packaged possibilities you only capture, in the end, what in the first place you hold in your heart?"

"Zoe went on deck near the swimming pool. Her clothes seemed to disown her. Her bones felt now brassy and hol- low like bells, now flat and massive like the silver head of an axe. She was tired. She could hear people saying as she passed She's a mere shadow.' People pointed to her as the schoolteacher from the Midlands who was so sick that she had to be moved to the ship's hospital'. Hearing these words so often gave Zoe a flash of identity. She felt a pride which was swift to resent stories of sickness other than her own; for was it not now her province, her claim to fame?"

"Under the awnings beside the pool people were being served with drinks. Everyone seemed whole and in pos- session. Even the squeals from the pool were sophisticat- ed and complete, not the ragged sounds of alarm which people make when they are not sure how much of them- selves is within and how much has escaped their desper- ate supervision. As Zoe watched she could see people's lines of behaviour, like wire-netting in the sky, with the sun like a big yellow hen testing its beak on the wire… How strange, Zoe thought. My first kiss has made me see things this way. I never saw people like this before. How completely they are welded, without seams; and goat- bells are ringing wickedly in their eyes!"

"Again how strange; people's memories on the other side of the wall, other people's darknesses and rings of fire; calling out to them, making primitive signals to ask Five yards (say) from your wall in an area three seconds by two seconds have you a small light burning, as I have?' Calling. And dancing with rage and pain when there is no an- swer, when we find that our code of measurement is sin- gular, is not printed in anyone else's heart and cannot ever be shared."

"SOMETIMES in the evening now Zoe would put on her Norton and Stroods dress and her pearls and drink an acorn-cup of coffee in the lounge with Toby. When she was sitting with him she was overcome by a shared feel- ing of heaviness, and had the sensation of trying to thread tiny needles with rope, of wearing gumboots and dancing on thin sheets of glass laid across the sky. The world itself which is ordinarily nimble enough to evade destruction, seemed like one of those toy globes (seas blue, Empires red, countries that long ago before the first kiss of un- derstanding seemed not to 'matter' - a drab grey colour) where the revolving mechanism is broken, and the globe either refuses to move or adopts an irresponsible free- wheeling motion - both annihilations of the dextrous Time whom we rely upon (as the God in the children's hymn) to 'care for us', attaching his ticking emblem to our left wrist to connect with the beating of our heart."

"Oh what are we, when we can be hurt by people after they have gone from our lives, as if we kept touching the railway line and receiving the vibrations, long after the train has passed?"

"Tm always meeting people who come from the other side of the world. Everybody comes from the other side of the world. Haw Haw, it's a good excuse. Toby's voice was growing louder. People were begin- ning to look, and whisper to one another. Zoe blushed, stood up, and moved away, leaving Toby alone in the corner. 'Haw Haw, it's a good excuse,' he was muttering, more quietly. And it is a good excuse, isn't it, to put seas and continents between yourself and someone whose ways are often so strange that they frighten you, make you stop and peer through the cracks in the pavement of your life instead of hurriedly stepping over them and deadening your awareness by a ritual chant of numbers?"

"It Is raining and raining and I will die. The buildings topple, slide with the bruised and broken leaves into the earth, folded deep. The yellow glare in the sky is the striped mantle of tigers, licked cool, healed by the darting tongues of frost. Yet winter, age, loneliness, have come leaping with seventy claws unleashed from summer, youth, and the gentle conditions of love, to stripe our lives with death, to set fire to our cage. How strange! Our ribs blossom. We are muslin and honey. Somewhere the waves touch white foreheads on the sand. The troubled waves try to cope with sewage, oil, orange-peel. It is raining and raining. The umbrellas open like prayers; safe; ribbed like bats that sing. It is nine o'clock now. Here is the news. Pat Keenan is drinking coffee in the lounge with Zoe Bryce."

"Ir ONLy, Zoe thought, attacked again by seasickness. If only this and that. If only I could watch the sea. How it slides and slops like unset jelly against the sky. There is too much of it, breaking through the portholes of my see- ing, flooding behind my eyes, trickling down inside my fleecy-lined skin. What message does the paperchase of white wave tops carry from shore to shore? And Zoe remembered the seaside holidays of her childhood - Blackpool at first, but later the smaller beach- es of the South Coast - Bognor, the tiny Pagham beach where the waves raked tirelessly over the shingle and the dirty brown pebbles, like paupers looking for long-saved hoarded coins, scraping the bottom of the barrel to find them. There the waves did not make you sick, even if you were licking an ice cream cornet with its topknot of swirled chill and sweetness, or burying your face in a cob- web of candyfloss. Crabs and rocks; the polluted wise sea; spotted pebbles rolling like toffees. Rain, a bewitching of rain, and deep sleep as if inside a hazelnut, and waking to surprise lakes fallen telltale from the incontinent sum- mer! Fretful children, and old men in Army shorts, mak- ing demands on the sea, striking the waves. Then, high in the trees, in another world, the tattered crows' nests hung out for the rag-and-bone autumn. And the dead, the strangled-with-seaweed, the toiling dead."

" I never had memories like this before, Zoe thought. Why has everything changed? Why is it that I remember a dead man who said, 'The soil is shut against me, all is strange under the earth, there is nowhere to settle any- more, no time or place. Tell the Ministry of Defence to equip the living not with bombs but with adhesive - not a cellotape-like love where the supply runs out leaving you to hold the little dry wooden wheel; not a chewing-gum- like peace that is parked under conference tables and forgotten after the juice and flavour are extracted; nor a glue-like memory that stops the mouth of the past while it picks the till for easy treasure; but a new adhesive, a secretion like tears-pus-sweat-semen only invisible, im- perishable, for the living to take with them when they die, sticking their final speck of dust, At Home, Received. "But I warn you, said the dead man, the soil is hostile.' Why, Zoe thought, does that memory return to me? Is it my seasickness? Can what happened in the ship's hospi- tal have transferred another world to me? Was the kiss (as all kisses are) a kind of grafting process? How is it that a dead man has confided in me?"

"He was remembering the little girl he met there years ago when the family came south for a holiday. She was Nona, dark and bedraggled with shoulders that sloped like fold- ed wings and head thrust forward like a little penguin's head - an Antarctic penguin with a touch of snow on her wings and a serious expression on her face."

"Sometimes the smell would travel far inland, far ahead of the sea-wind, and slap you sharply in the face and sink again deep in your nose. 'Smell the sea-air?' your mother would say. So that always you arrived at the sea long before you were in sight of it, and always, though you were too small to understand, you paid the penalties of falsely arriving, of robbing moments ahead, hours, tomorrows and stor- ing them side by side with present time. You came, lone- ly and cheated, to the dreamed-of sea. You struck at the sand, paying it out, with a crumbling stick of driftwood."

"I can't give you my collection,' she said. 'But - I'll show you my playhouse. Would you like to see my playhouse?' But just at that moment Aunty Marge put her hand to her mouth and coo-eed Toby, Toby. She sounded fierce. She was a big woman, bunchy, like potatoes, and she filled every room she entered, and now she was beginning to fill the beach although it had no doors or walls or windows. "Toby, Toby. When she strapped she used the thin length of belt taken from round the wheel of the old sewing-machine. 'Toby, Toby. Toby went, running fast, and he never saw Nona again. Though he believed he had read somewhere about her being killed, climbing in the Southern Alps, years later. Feathery-weed, pop-kelp, sea-rimu, tree-daisy,' he said aloud. Were you speaking to me?' Zoe asked. No. I was saying names. To myself: It's the first sign, Pat said, opening his eyes. Whenever there was something to say which other people often said, which was the accepted word or phrase, Pat always felt the compulsion to say it. It's the first sign. Right every time. Least said soonest mended. Never seek to tell thy love. Pat had his eye on Zoe. He was not in love with her, but he wanted to control her. I hope, he thought as he closed his eyes again, that she is fancy-free."

"The child's father sits at the table checking the invoices - the In Voices. Soon he will take his luncheon voucher and try to find a seat in the crowded restaurant. His face is pale… the customary word is city-pale - city-pale, work- pale, television-pale, birth-pale, deterrent-pale beyond the alphabet nothing has meaning, the letters are brace- lets of the dead."

"Do I, Thora Pattern, imagine that I can purchase people out of my fund of loneliness and place them like goldfish in the aquarium of my mind's room and there watch them day and night swimming round and round kept alive by the tidbits which I feed to them? They rise to the surface. Their mouths are open wide. Shall I overfeed them as people do with goldfish? Shall I starve them? Shall I remove their precious element and leave them gasping, stranded? Look, a water-snail clings to the glass like a small sniffly nose against a windowpane."

"It is autumn. The sea will triumph. Toby knows that even at his home two miles away the crashing of the sea is accepted like an undertone of dream in the daily mesmerics of waking life."

"yet it was only another of those frightening perpetual shifting of relationships which bring immeasurable faults and folds into the human landscape, which help to raise plains into mountains, divert the course of rivers, dry up the seas."

"Surprise whitened the world. The shocked violets unfolded, the veined crocuses bloomed, peaked with gold and white. (No statue was built to the snow, Toby. Historians did not come with book and pencil to note the dazzle. I do not think anyone photographed it. There would have been a blank, a scape of nothing. White. Snow. The two words in idiot conjunction, battered against the wall, white snow, white snow, white snow, white snow, as people who are cold, who fear death, flap their hands and arms upon their own body to find warmth.) Now the moments hanging ripe, transparent, like red- currants."

"Toby tries to reach it, to throw a plank across the shallow edges, crawl over it, and rescue the animal, as he has so often done before. But i is too late. The struggling head is now level with the wa- ter, and only the upper part of the treacherous fleece is visible. A few more convulsive movements and the sheep has disappeared. Perhaps in five or ten years' time, when with the whim and privilege peculiar to water, the under- ground creek has changed its course and the area is dry with couch or tussock, the bleached bones of the sheep will be found lying like broken script arranged in cun- ning disarray by the penstrokes of Time and the furtive corrections, blots, and underlinings of the weather. (Are our words thus, falling fleshed and heavily fleeced from our mouths, and only after a length of time can their true meaning, their gaunt uncluttered bones lie exposed upon the slopes of thought?) Everywhere in the paddock you stumble across animal skulls and bones; white, grey, splintered, riddled with tiny holes where the maggots once kept house; clean, faithful, secretive remains."

"But as the ship approaches harbour troubling thoughs rise once more to the surface, float in all their ugliness and vulgarity, like drowned bodies; they demand to be retrieved, identified, labelled, put in cold storage until a suitable top-hatted moment crowned with flowers may bear them to a place of permanent burial. Permanent? Discounting the archaeological zeal of dreams and mem- ories which uncover the deepest graves. Burning then - shall we cremate the recovered bodies of our thoughts and scatter them in a ceremony of solemn faces to what is called the four winds' - the four corners? I know of people who have cremated their thoughts, paying high fees; who have rented a niche in the wall of their minds, as a token resting place, and then scattered the ashes into the four winds'; the same ashes have returned to them, volcanic and burning, like pellets of shot flung in their face and their eyes, blinding them for the rest of their life. So when the ship approaches land and the bright waves become more like choppy grey ruffs on the neck of a worn-out lion, and the drowned ideas loom like dis- carded vegetables upon the surface, be careful how you bury the so-called dead, and where you bury them. Just as well when you disembark to tie your dead with brown paper and string or put them in a polythene bag, and on the corner of the next street (it is always the next street) drop them in the litterbox with its warning notice on the outside - 'Do you care for your city?' Do you care for your city?"

"Oh my Lord Omelette and Parsley but I was kissed scrambled egg I was kissed kissed buttercup and cathedral for the first time in my life."

"We are the derelict people whose only hope of work now is a cleaning job in office or fac- tory or hostel. Some of us have had nervous breakdowns and cannot return to our former occupations. We are the unmarried mothers, the retired prostitutes, the obsessed, the 'mentally backward', the widows, the separated, those who have been kissed once in their life, on board ship, and are now engaged in private research', preparing to create flesh or idea, for the childhood fantasy that kisses make babies is, like many other fantasies, a fly-over, dual- carriageway, to truth."

"They walked past the speakers who were shouting into the bitterly cold foggy air about the urgent need for contraception, licensed brothels, nuclear disarmament, National Health Euthanasia, transistors and Hi-Fi equipment in coffins. A man walked up and down with the placard Prepare to Meet Thy God. The dampness wound itself like a corkscrew into the people; their voices, trapped, looped the loop and fell to the earth. The fog hung like bubbles of perspira- tion in the air. Someone said it was going to snow. Snow before Christmas. There had never been a winter like this one; it was like the year after the War, the queues, the shortages, no electric power. Within living memory it had never been so cold so early, or so dark."

"For these were not the main premises o the Daisye fresh. They were elsewhere at a place referred to as the centre. Toby shivered with excitement when he heard people mention the Centre', Has it not come back from the centre?' someone would ask. It's still at the centre. There's been some delay at the centre.' For although the notice in the window asserted, In By Saturday Out By Tuesday, it was not always so; clothes kept being mislaid, detained at the centre The word ran on and on in Toby's mind, alarming him. What was its mystery? Was there a mystery? He put the fresh neutered clothes against his cheek. They gave him no comfort. Words were running on and on in his head - laundries, lost property, circuses, buses and their destinations - High Wycombe, Peckham Rye, Tooting Bec and Tooting By - did that mean Tooting Body? Tooting Body."

"He could not talk to her about himself, about his trouble and his book, and his mother who seemed to sneak in and stiffen and sharpen his shapes of memory in the way frost invades and makes rigid the clothes that have been hanging all night under the sky. Yet Toby liked to be with Zoe, even if he could not speak to her. He was lonely and incomplete, like a house with one wall torn away. He used people, strangers or friends, to keep out the draught. You'll catch a chill, Toby, his mother used to tell him. With one wall of himself torn away he could feel the wind blowing permanently from the continent of ice. So he needed people - people or stones or woven rushes and flax. Addresses on paper are too flimsy a contact with peo- ple. Words are worse, especially if one lives at the edge of the alphabet; yet words may sometimes act like invisible ink, revealing nothing when they are spoken or written, yet days or years afterwards, when they are breathed on or warmed by a flame or the friction of time, they often emerge stark and black with meaning and message, like telegraph wires against a clear sky."

"It is no surprise to the others when one day a police- woman calls to take Netta into custody. Zoe is grateful to be free of her. She wishes that the device of getting rid of people as soon as one desires it could be used more of. ten and not remain the prerogative of dreams and fiction. And then she realizes that this is just what has happened. The sea of dream is trickling through the hole in the wall and is rising to flood all waking life. Then I will strike, Zoe thinks. I will strike down people and terrors and hawks that keep flying in my eyes; and I will strike into being (for the purpose of my life now is to cre- ate) the crystal tower, and in people's minds the weather- vane at the top of the tower turning, turning to point the direction of love. I have been kissed. So Netta was a shoplifter in secret? I too have shoplifted from Norton and Stroods where I have been made dizzy from seeing the tight circular cheeses snug in their aluminium foil; the looped brace- lets of flecked sausages; among the jewellery the pearls (cultured) and necklaces glittering, but swinging like bi- cycle chains out of delinquent artificiality to raise weals and spurts of oil from my skin… and finger-nail brooches; haberdashery, so many buttons, clips, domes, on cards, in packets…. like worm-casts… and polythene flowers, "fair pledges of a fruitful factory' with which the poet must learn to play games even more forlorn than the pet- al-communion of impermanence; food, flowers, clothes - the attentive, abundant yet excluding world of things where the poet can no longer, in a mood of loneliness, drop in for a cosy cut-price pathetic fallacy."

"The other men in the house? I do not know. Their rooms are dark and quiet in the nightly rehearsal for death now, they say, to death, a few hours at a time and we shall grow accustomed to you and to the void screen where now dreams play cops and robbers with our daily lives. Dear Mr Sands I have here only a small syllable of your warmth - my hot water bottle which I filled from the ket- tle on the gas ring, over the hearth. My bottle is at my feet. Soon I shall move it to my back, or embrace it with my arms, upon my breast, and all night the shape and nature of it will be moulded to the whims of my dreaming which will spring up like jack-in-the-boxes released by the hand of sleep."

"We talked. We had never talked before, not conversa- tionally. Oh how absurd it was that I should have been so overcome! It was simply a trick inclusion of springtime, more or less like one of those cardboard toys which the manufacturers include in their golden breakfast cereals to give pleasure to all, to keep up the price, to dull the sus- picion that one is really getting short measure. Yes, my fantasy love affair was a trick, delivered only to me. He was married. He had no interest in me. How I hated his marriedness! And what was the use of playing Schubert's "Secret Love' over and over to myself in my flat at night? Therefore I adopted the conventional line of action - I went for a journey abroad. The usual fictional escape. If I had been a man and had brought disgrace on my fami- ly I would have emigrated. Or if I had been a promising elder son I should have gone quite naturally to service in India. I fell in love and went abroad to the place which has been in fashion lately - New Zealand. And here I live in Clapham, working on 'private research'. Oh Mr Sands, I am afraid. The wall of dream is punctured like a sieve and the strange other world pours in upon me in a way that never happened before. I am concerned with an intensity of making - yet I make nothing. The kiss is the core of my life. It is my meaning, my tiny precious berry from the one branch of a huge tree in a forest where the trees are numberless. I need to walk in that forest, Mr Sands..."

"WHEN THE advertisements for lung syrup, influenza vaccine, bronchial mixtures began to be printed in small spaces at the back pages of newspapers instead of in half- page centre clamourings; when the first outdoor crocuses and daffodils appeared in the stalls in the markets; when the city business men began to walk the remaining few yards over Waterloo Bridge instead of waiting in the steaming buses; when the dead old trees along the Embankment, in the groves and on the Commons put forth green tongues of leaf to the brash inspection of newly qualified light; when winds that before blew in ar- mies of ice now separated one from the other, some going warm ways, others maintaining a companionship with snow or melting suddenly in death, so that people meet- ing them exclaimed, Why, it's summer before it's spring'; or Well, it's winter still, winter is never finished'; when the children brought into the streets their scooters and roller-skates and bows and arrows and once more en- gaged in gun battles behind parked cars and in the courts of the Council Flats - why, then it was fair to say, as far as one can catch the seasons by the sleeve to identify them, that spring had arrived. Yet as usual the season was more talked of and dreamed of than in evidence. Certainly, leaves fountained from black boles, and park flowers, leaning east, nodded on their sap-filled stems, and men gazed in the windows of the hardware stores, dazzled by axes, spades, shovels, gleaming electric precision tools; and women lingered by the green and yellow-clad shop-models posed (uneasily, vulnerably) on the neon-lit polythene lawns. Yet in the city each clue to the season has to be valued personally. Far away from the comfortingsymbols of lambs, flowering fields, freshly peeled sky, one is inclined to think that many of the clues are bogus, that convenient alterations have been made to identification papers, passports; that the tourist season while openly displaying its gifts of life has failed to declare the pack- ages of death cleverly sewn inside the green and yellow seams of its new overcoat. e Spring is the treacherous season. People dying inexplicably. The suicides in the river, not committed, like the summer suicide, under the claw- hammer of light which twists from their socket, dangling for public inspection, the integrating private forms of love and death; nor like the winter suicide; the sacrificial communion with wasted leaves, and light lying with its cold cheek turned to the earth, remembering Persephone; but after long winter broodings a death accomplished in sudden plunges and passions, as if the tiger had leaned On its paws all night, considering its victim, and made its final leap in the morning when the sun comes to touch and warm the south wall."

"when winds that before blew inal. Ties ofice now separated one from the other, some going warm ways, others maintaining a companionship with snow or melting suddenly in death, so that people meet ing them exclaimed, Why, it's summer before its spring; or Well, it's winter still, winter is never finished'; when the children brought into the streets their scooters and roller-skates and bows and arrows and once more en- gaged in gun battles behind parked cars and in the courts of the Council Flats - why, then it was fair to say, as far as one can catch the seasons by the sleeve to identify them, that spring had arrived. Yet as usual the season was more talked of and dreamed of than in evidence."

"Pat was filled with love, he existed for it as a lighthouse exists for light, yet when he came to train the beams of his love upon that part of the world around him which he desired for himself, he formed, out of some topographical fantasy, a landscape of canals, of deep slits of prejudice where his love could not penetrate; a bizarre land- and seascape which he could not possess. Swans flew there, and lep- rechauns kept their neat clean houses, and Our Lady in a blue silk dress watched over everything; but there were few human beings unless Pat himself could plant them there, digging holes for them in the earth where they lived helpless to fend for themselves, relying (Pat knew and re- joiced) upon his devoted care. He loved the swans."

"What does the swan mean? It is aloof, sour, a snow-convention, an annual pageant of suspicious probing with a little bag of crusts on the Common. It is Elise, Leda, any changeful God. What is the evil dream that wounds it like the snapping teeth, the pitched stone round and smooth from the hands of inno- cence? Explain the white evil."

"Next, Zoe bought some fine white wool and inventing her own pattern she knitted, in great secrecy, a tiny dress in shell-stitch, with loops of ribbon at the waist, to fit a newborn baby. Who would she give it to? she wondered. She had no relatives, except for an uncle up north. It is one of the hardest things to believe, that some people have no relatives, not in law, and are quite alone. But you must have an aunt, a cousin,; they say, making a quick snapshot tally of their own parents, friends, chil- dren, wives, husbands… You must have somebody; they say, who, in fact, if they considered their snapshots more closely, would discover that they too had nobody."

"His arm is bandaged, too - it isn't anything, is it, that we could catch? After all. infection. It is most necessary not to be infected, particularly when one is raging with an ungovernable outbreak of light and life and contamination oflove. Zoe agreed with Ma Crane. I hadn't considered it that way,' she said. 'He's had it a long time now, almost ever since he came to London. We certainly don't want to be exposed to anything. Well,' Ma Crane replied, the men in this house are all doing clean work, clean brain work. Brains, of course, are spotless, polished, snow-white without a trace of thought."

"Now that I think of it he looked like Rupert Brooke, like the photo in the volume of poems that I had years ago and used to prop on the bedside table. Rupert Brooke. His chin was resting in his hands. I think his eyes were grey. He was such a clean poet walking among words. He always wore gumboots and a mackintosh when he crossed the marshes of the drowned, treading carefully on the overgrowth of bitter blossomless words, so that when he arrived at the other side he was clean and unharmed and he always took care to remove the reminding layers of squalor from his smart ebony boots."

"She is a prostitute, Zoe thought. I, Zoe Bryce, who have had no further experience of men than a kiss from a stranger, am sitting drinking coffee, talking, smoking, on a late summer afternoon, with a prostitute who is also a stranger. I could be writing letters - to whom? Doing crossword puzzles. Eating sixpence worth of peanuts and raisins. Knitting. Reading books which beat gongs up and down the tiled bareness of my heart. Listening, looking, and all the time working furiously, uselessly, at my noth- ingness of creation. But I am sitting here with a prostitute. She waits for men. Beat me, tie my hands, they say. She beats them. She ties their hands. Or, say the others, Let me lie down with you in pretence. Let us be empty shapes of people, like those negatives of photographs where the developed prints have been destroyed and all that remain are shadows enclosed in a boundary of frothing light. Her occupation is with boundaries, in a border coun- try where people still carry their worn maps, trying to read them and knowing the directions are useless. Her life is spent with men naked red and panting and her love is grated away and buried, like pebbles on the beach."

"At first her movement was absent-mind- ed, then she began to concentrate on her making. It was absurd, how absurd it was, but it was silver trees and people with hats like silver planets, like priests, lost in the forest. How absurd, how conventional, Zoe thought. I am in a fury of making, among strangers, but it is the loneliest shape I have ever seen, that little dent, this twist at the top of the dead silver branch, the eyes in the silver faces of the dead people, the layers of snow on their faces, their clothes bunched, hiding the loneliness of their body. I am making something at last. And it snows, out of the sun and the hollow sky, and Zara is here = a stranger, and Peter whose life did not keep its promise to core for ever the skipping-ropes of paint while he dodged back and forth dancing, see his movements under yellow ochre chinese white gamboge tint, two little boys in navy blue, these are the actions I can do; and the sad sailor, and Lawrence run- ning running in the outer circle on the cinder-track into the darkness. I create from silver paper but no one sees. Where is Toby, Pat? 'Oh,' Zara was exclaiming, Look what you have made. Look, Peter, what Zoe has made. They admired it. 'How did you do it?' they asked."

"Then Lawrence noticed the silver paper shape. Did ou make it? he asked Zoe. 'How did you think ofit? Everyone admired the shape once again. Zoe was not used to being the centre of admiring attention; not for something she had made- when in her life had she ever made anything? It's only a bit of paper, she said to herself. but she throbbed with warmth. How strange that it had so affected the others, had evoked in them feelings which they could only consider and explore by sitting there, as all three were doing now, silent, staring at the silver sculpture. It reminds me,' Lawrence began. But he could not identify his memory. How extraordinary, Zoe thought, that such feeling should be roused by seeing a conventional paper shape twisted at random, in idleness, among strangers whom I shall never meet again. 'Can I keep it?' Zara said. Td like to keep it.' Zoe wondered, Shall I give it to her or shall I crush it, one twist in my fingers to destroy the silver forest and its meaning? Is this the only word I shall ever speak and do I now retreat into silence? My creation. Not knitting. Not the answers in a crossword puzzle. Not a child given to me in gentleness and despair with the open sky flowing over two bodies voyaging hooked and coupled on their cof fin-narrow gauge of love. The communication of my life - a kiss in mid-ocean between myself and a half-drunken seaman. The creation of my life - oh my God! - a silver paper shape fashioned from the remains of an empty cig- arette packet! Surely now it is time for my death? Here by the Serpentine - a smear of water - on a hot crowded af- ternoon in late summer, with the sweat running down in- side the arms of my imitation suede jacket, and the veins bulging on my feet; here among the striped innocence, and the children's toys circling in the air"

"Here among the lonely people searching to appease their loneliness which blooms in its hunger like an insectiv- orous plant and the more it feeds the more powerful its blooms become; with the bitter prostitute Zara sitting near me, and Peter, the artist, dreaming of the painting which he will never complete (he also longing to stand for one moment of his life beneath the brilliance of the perfect circle), and the young sailor who was nameless. earnest, rueful, sampling the vice of the city which means the back-street hunger of his own skin, and Lawrence pa- thetic prim turning his hands this way and that, like shad- ows, disowned in the dark, trying to lure the substance which will at last claim and shelter them; here, have not I, Zoe Bryce, arrived at the time of my death? Has it not risen with 'deliberate rightness'? Zoe said, Yes, you may keep the silver paper shape. Zara put it in her handbag. And that night after Zoe had shut her window against the intruders and locked the door and made ready her bed, she swallowed the eighty-one tablets, the number which she had calculated from the dread foundation of three, and she lay down, arranged and ordered, to die. And Ma Crane found her dead the next morning. There was no note - as the coroners say. Why need one write a note if one can communicate with a left-over wrapping of silver paper from an empty cigarette packet?"

"The undertakers and the relatives packed into the following limousines tried not to change their expressions from discreet gloom at the thought of death (their death), to exasperation at being delayed by the traffic; while the day's cause and cargo stayed silent, enclosed separately in death like a bean growing alone, lying beside the shrunken remnants of its black-eyed brothers in a vast green pod, a sound-proofed flannel cathedral."

"How STRANGE human beings are - their lamplit eyes, their raspberry peaked and infested skulls with the twist- ed thought impressed beneath leaving a faint print of meaning that soon wears away; the shell is hollow, the creature has departed or died. And the weapons of people - their built-in defence policy of sting, tooth, nail, dream dive-bombing in the night; their brave explosions of love in the house of those dear to them; their secret robberies from themselves, their lives swinging at last like the door of an empty safe where Death, gloved, has forced an entry, leaving no trace. So the definitions return to their lairs, lick the wounds got in human combat, and sleep."

"My daughter Mary, My Johnny, Now my Eric -' Aunt Cora had to provide special anecdotes about Winona and Wally - 'My sister's little girl Winona, Now my nephew Wally…' And sometimes it seemed too much like being excluded from the mystical long division sum, like being the odd number at the bottom or at the side of the col- umn, the mental afterthought, the carrying number put there for mere convenience and erased when the answer to the sum is worked out."

"It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats - an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? Wasn't it the first love of any kind she'd ever known? Even on the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of dis- appointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish attractively through a part-time office job ("just until my husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do") while saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and pictures and the shortcomings of other people's personalities, for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes ("Do you really like the sandals, or are they too Villagey?") and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in their double bed. But even in those days she'd held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ("Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it") or the minute anything went wrong."

"I need a job; okay. Is that any reason why the job I get has to louse me up? Look. All I want is to get enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so, till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I'm most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that's been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they're supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we'll leave each other strictly alone. Get the picture?"

"I think you'll have to agree it isn't very realistic; that's all I meant. "In order to agree with that, " she said, "I'd have to have a very strange and very low opinion of reality. Because you see I happen to think this is unrealistic. I think it's unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can't stand, coming home to a house he can't stand in a place he can't stand either, to a wife who's equally unable to stand the same things, living among a bunch of frightened little - my God, Frank, I don't have to tell you what's wrong with this environment - I'm practically quoting you. Just last night when the Campbells were here, remember what you said about the whole idea of suburbia being to keep reality at bay? You said everybody wanted to bring"

""Might make a certain amount of sense if I had some definite, measurable talent. If I were an artist, say, or a writer, or a- "Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own? Listen: I don't care if it takes you five years of doing nothing at all; I don't care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seaman. Don't you see what I'm saying? It's got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents - it's your very essence that's being stifled here. It's what you are that's being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life." "And what's that?" For the first time he allowed himself to look at her - not only to look but to put down his glass and take hold of her leg, and she covered and pressed his hand with both of her own. "Oh, don't you know? She brought his hand gently up her hip and around to the flat of her abdomen, where she pressed it close again. "Don't you know? You're the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man." And of all the capitulations in his life, this was the one that seemed most like a victory"

"he knew too that the best part of Paris, the part where the people really knew how to live, began around St. Germain des Prés and extended southeast (or was it southwest?) as far as the Café Dome. But this latter knowledge was based more on his reading of The Sun Also Rises in high school than on his real-life venturings into the district, which had mostly been lonely and footsore. He had admired the ancient delicacy of the buildings and the way the street lamps made soft explosions of light green in the trees at night, and the way each long, bright café awning would prove to reveal a sea of intelligently talking faces as he passed; but the white wine gave him a headache and the talking faces all seemed, on closer inspection, to belong either to intimidating men with beards or to women whose eves could sum him up and dismiss him in less than a second. The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he'd walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves, and time after time he had ended up drunk and puking over the tailgate of the truck that bore him jolting back into the army."

""This whole country's rotten with sentimentality," Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. "It's been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it." "Exactly," she said, enraptured with him. "I mean isn't that really what's the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it's the result of those things; maybe it's what happens when all those things start working at once without any real cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it's the result of, it's what's killing the United States. I mean isn't it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food; this optimistic, smiling-through, easy-way-out sentimentality in everybody's view of life?"

"Deep down, what she'd loved and needed was work itself. "Hard work,' " her father had always said, "is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man - and of woman, and she'd always believed it. The press and bustle and glare of the office, the quick lunch sent up on a tray, the crisp handling of papers and telephones, the exhaustion of staying overtime and the final sweet relief of slipping off her shoes at night, which always left her feeling drained and pure and fit for nothing but two aspirins and a hot bath and a light supper and bed - that was the substance of her love; it was all that fortified her against the pressures of marriage and parenthood. Without it, as she often said, she would have gone out of her mind."

"People did change, and change could be a bloom as well as a withering, couldn't it. Because that was what it seemed to be: a final bloom, a long delayed emergence into womanliness."

"As she talked she stared in absent-minded fascination at the way the dying sun shone crimson through her husband's earlobe and made his dandruff into flakes of fire, but her thoughts were hurrying ahead to the evening."

"it was almost as if she were back in her father's house, hurrying to dress for a tea dance. Her blood seemed to race with the emergency of last-minute details (Which kind of perfume? Oh, quick - which kind? and she very nearly ran out to the banister to call, "Wait! I'm coming! I'll be right down!"' It was the sight and the feel of her old flannel shirt and baggy slacks, hanging from their peg in the closet, that steadied her. Silly, silly, she scolded herself; I am getting scatty. But the real shock came when she sat on the bed to take off her stockings, because she had expected her feet to be slim and white with light blue veins and straight, fragile bones. Instead, splayed on the carpet like two toads, they were tough and knuckled with bunions, curling to hide their corneous toenails. She stuffed them quickly into her bright Norwegian slipper-socks (really the nicest things in the world for knocking around the house) and sprang up to pull the rest of her simple, sensible country clothes into place, but it was too late, and for the next five minutes she had to stand there holding on to the bedpost with both hands and keeping her jaws shut very tight because she was crying. She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because- she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane. But soon it was over; all she had to do was go into the bath- room and blow her nose and wash her face and brush her hair. Then, refreshed, she walked jauntily and soundlessly downstairs in her slipper-socks and returned to sit in the ladder-back rocker"

""my first wife passed away in the spring of -" and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and "The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six," he is able to say. "Or no, wait - " and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. "Wait! Nineteen-Ought - Four." Now he is sure of it, and a restorative flood of well-being brings his hand involuntarily up to slap his thigh in satisfaction. He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife's smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death he has imposed coherence on his own life, and on life itself. Now all the other years can fall obediently into place, each with its orderly contribution to the whole. Nineteen-Ten, Nineteen- Twenty - Why, of course he remembers! - Nineteen-Thirty, Nineteen-Forty, right on up to the well-deserved peace of his present and on into the gentle promise of his future. The earth can safely resume its benevolent stillness - Smell that new grass! - and it's the same grand old sun that has hung there smiling on him all these years. "Yes sir, » he can say with authority, *Nineteen-Ought-Four," and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos"

"When she put the receiver back it was as if she were returning a rare and exquisite jewel to its velvet case."

"A bad dream or a shrill bird, or both, woke him much too early in the morning and filled him with a sense of dread - a feeling that his next breath and blink of wakefulness would recall him to the knowledge of a grief, a burden of bad news from yesterday that sleep had only temporarily eased."

"He wanted to say, "Oh God, April, you know why. Because you're lovely; because everyone must have loved you, always, but he lacked the courage. Instead he said, "Well, I mean, hell; didn't you ever have fun on vacations?' "Fun on vacations," she repeated dully. "No. I never did. And now you see you've put your finger on it, Shep. I can't very well blame boarding school for that, can I? No, all I ever did on vacations was read and go to movies by myself and quarrel with whichever aunt or cousin or friend of my mother's it was who happened to be stuck with me that summer, or that Christmas. It all does tend to sound pretty maladjusted, doesn't it? So you're quite right. It wasn't boarding school's fault and it wasn't anyone else's fault, it was my own Emotional Problem. And there's a fairly good rule-of-thumb for you, Shep: take somebody who worries about life passing them by, and the chances are about a hundred-and-eight to one that it's their own Emotional Problem."

""You still felt that life was passing you by?" "Sort of. I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super- people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans." Shep was looking steadily at her profile, hoping the silent force of his love would move her to turn and face him.'

"In other words you don't care what I do or who I go to bed with or anything. Right? "No; I guess that's right; I don't." "But I want you to care!" "I know you do. And I suppose I would, if I loved you; but you see I don't. I don't love you and I never really have, and I never really figured it out until this week, and that's why I'd just as soon not do any talking right now. Do you see?" She picked up a dust cloth and went into the living room, a tired, competent housewife with chores to do. "And listen to this, " said an urgent voice on the radio. "Now, during the big Fall Clearance, you'll find Robert Hall's entire stock of men's walk shorts and sport jeans drastically reduced!" Standing foursquare and staring down at his untouched glass of iced tea on the table, he felt his head fill with such a dense morass of confusion that only one consecutive line of thought came through'

'"OH IT's SUCH A LOVELY luxury just to ride instead of driving," Mrs. Givings said, holding fast to the handle of the passenger's door. Her husband always drove on these trips to the hospital, and she never failed to remark on how relaxing a change it made for her. When one drove a car all day and every day, she would point out, there was no more marvelous vacation in the world than sitting back and letting someone else take over. But the force of habit was strong: she continued to watch the road as attentively as if she were holding the wheel, and her right foot would reach out and press the rubber floor mat at the approach of every turn or stop signal. Sometimes, catching herself at this, she would force her eyes to observe the passing countryside and will the sinews of her back to loosen and subside into the upholstery. As a final demonstration of self-control she might even uncoil her hand from the door handle and put it in her lap.'

'And soon they were sitting companionably across from each other at the bright table, whispering little courtesies over the passing of buttered toast. At first he was too bashful to eat. It was like the first time he'd ever taken a girl out to dinner, at seventeen, when the idea of actually loading food into his mouth and chewing it, right there in front of her, had seemed an unpardonably coarse thing to do; and what saved him now was the same thing that had saved him then: the surprising discovery that he was uncontrollably hungry."

"The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, Was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own. until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear - until he was saying "I love you" and she was saying "Really, I mean it; you're the most interesting person I've ever met." What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right, 2 and "Whatever you think is best," and "You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world," and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hope- lessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums - earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing' when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn't even like Shep Campbell! - and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?"

""Have you thought it through, April? Never undertake to do a thing until you've- But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."

"Out in the parking lot, running at full tilt for his car and pulling on his flapping jacket as he ran, Shep felt his exhilaration returning with the fresh air that whistled in his ears. It was the old combat feeling, the sense of doing exactly the right thing, quickly and well, when all the other elements of the situation were out of control."

"Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn't possibly be dying. People didn't die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn't be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum, and he certainly wouldn't be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn't have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance ("Fun! Refreshments!") and they wouldn't have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. What the hell did they expect you to do? Sit down and cross your legs and flip through a copy of Life while somebody died? Of course not. This was a place where babies were born or where simple, run-of-the-mill miscarriages were cleaned up in a jiffy; it was a place where you waited and worried until you'd made sure everything was all right, and then you walked out and had a drink and went home."

"The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles. A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves - a blurred comedian's shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band. Even when he veered from the pavement, cut across someone's back yard and plunged into the down-sloping woods, intent on a madman's shortcut to Revolutionary Road, even then there was no escape: the house lights beamed and stumbled happily along with him among the twigs that whipped his face, and once when he lost his footing and fell scrabbling down a rocky ravine, he came up with a child's enameled tin beach bucket in his hand."

"And it was even worse than that: he was boring. He must have spent at least an hour talking about his half-assed job, and God only knew how many other hours on his other favorite subject: "my analyst this"; "my analyst that' - he had turned into one of these people that want to tell you about their God damned analyst all the time. "And I mean I think we're really getting down to some basic stuff; things I've never really faced before about my relationship with my father . . ." Christ! And that was what had become of Frank; that was what you'd have to know about, if you wanted to know how things had really worked out. He took a gulp of whiskey, seeing a quick blur of stars and moon through the wet dome of his glass. Then he started back for the house, but he didn't make it; he had to turn around again and head out to the far border of the lawn and walk around out there in little circles; he was crying."

"Ferrier leans into the word Ruh, rest, not dramatically but her voice becomes electric with longing and resignation; there's such intensity and restraint that the note as- sets itself, so that as Mahler extends the dissonance your sense of harmony is unsettled, or mine is, anyway: the A-flat creates an alternative harmony, just for a moment one can hear a major chord against the minor. I didn't understand this when I first heard the song, I would study the score later, in music school, and really it didn't help me understand what I had felt when I first heard it. How can I say what it did to me, it unmade me, unmade and remade me around itself somehow. I could never capture that feeling when I sang the song myself, which was one of the things that made me hate my voice eventually, that I could never sing this song in a way that felt adequate to what she made me feel, what I still feel when I listen to her sing the song, no other recording comes close."

"I had come to think of the words free of music. It was one of my favorite poems, authorless, mys- terious, the first two lines unparsable: Weston wynde, when will thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne, a sentence with a broken back. I had taught it for years to high school- ers, I had encouraged them to imagine the speaker, somebody in trouble, a soldier maybe, alone, exposed to the elements, and not just to the elements. Think of the significance of the west, the direction the sun sets, the region of death; could he be longing for death, I would ask them, is he at that pitch of extremity; and what is the small rain, isn't it beautiful, the weird adjective, how can rain be small; and does he want it, the speaker of the poem, does he long for the rain, is that how we should understand the cracked syntax; and isn't the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can't quite make sense of it, settled sense, I mean, for how it won't stay still; isn't the non-sense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our at- tention into it, what makes it not just a message--though it is a message, I would say to them, all art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there's a kind of sense only non-sense can con- vey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible. It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel; it had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once. The poem goes on, the second half makes an easier kind of sense: Cryst of my love were in my Armys And I yn my bed Agayne. An easier kind of sense"

"Hello, she said, good morning, and even in my dazed state something snapped to attention at her accent, which I recognized; it wasn't from Bulgaria, where I had lived, but from a neighboring coun- try, Serbia, maybe, Romania. I wanted to ask her where she was from but that had become a difficult question in America, an offensive question, and I understood the reasons for that and also it seemed a little ridiculous, to have ruled out-of-bounds such a fundamental curiosity, it seemed corrosive to me of sociality itself."

"Then there was a different sensation, a different kind of pressure, and I opened my eyes to see that the head nurse was pressing what looked like a metal bolt to my skin, some connector between the catheter in the artery and the tubing out- side. I never understood how any of it worked but on subsequent days when my blood pressure readings seemed inaccurate they would come and press on that piece painfully hard, until they were satisfied with whatever they saw on the monitor. It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery--which is always true, I don't know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets fush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well all be magic; and now my life depended on it, this brute metal the nurse secured to my wrist with three clumsy stitches, rough Xs binding it in place. My whole arm was covered in blood, it soaked the drape in dark wet patches. My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the pub- lic schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iam- bic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core--though they were necessary to me, I thought, no matter how sick I might be they were still necessary to me. But I wished I understood something about the machines chirring beside me, the wires the two nurses were connecting, the new pattern of lines on the monitor that they agreed was a good waveform."

"I had only half committed to my life with L, I knew, always on alert for it to become intolerable, a prison or a trap. As I signed the papers for our house, alone, signing for myself and for I, who was in Spain, he had given me power of attorney- at every step we were out of our depth, my sister G, the lawyer, had to counsel us through it- even as I signed the papers I had wondered if I was building a prison for myself, the way I had seen my friends and siblings do; I wondered if it was just a way to cast off a free- dom I didn't know what to do with, after a life in which I had felt so seldom free. I had finished my program, I had received a fellowship, I could have gone anywhere, why should I stay in a town I didn't love, in a part of the world that was for me, as I felt then, the opposite of poetry-_it's always a kind of blindness to feel that, about any place, but I felt it. But it hadn't become a prison, or not often, not yet, not a prison but not exactly bliss either. There were conflicts that I didn't know how to manage, little things, a stray word, an in- terruption; there were times when I got angry in a way I didn't understand, that I couldn't trace back to a source on the proper scale."

" Once in the car I had spoken sharply to him and he had begun to cry, silently in the seat beside me, he had turned his face to the window as fat tears slid down, and I had felt a kind of vileness I'm not sure I had known before, as I pulled off to the side of the road and unhooked my seat belt and put my arms around him and said again and again that I was sorry. There were things one couldn't apologize for, I knew, irreparable things, and if I hadn't quite committed one I felt the potential for it. I remembered a line from a novel I loved, I have the germs of every human infirmity in me; everything my father was I could become, which would be hell, I thought, actual hell, I promised myself I would never make L cry again. But they're inevitable, the little cruelties of intimate life. L had been guilty too, maybe not of cruelty but of thoughtlessness, dismissive- ness, he could be exasperating, he had hurt me too; so that the key to a long life with another, the key that kept it from being a prison, wasn't devotion, which I had a talent for, but forgiveness, which was something I had to learn. And I had learned it, more or less, I was learning it day by day, even as I had begun to take our life together for granted, which was the real danger of domesticity. I felt that as I saw him now, as I put my face to his neck and breathed in the scent of him, his lotion and aftershave; I felt the way it had become easy to forget him a little, to forget the force of my feeling for him, which was impossible maybe to stay conscious of all the time but which I felt now, his precious- ness to me, my thankfulness for him. Maybe it could teach me to cherish my life, I thought, if I got better, if I got to leave the hospital and return to the life we had made together, maybe I could undull myself to the luck we had had, that I had had, the luck of the love I felt embracing him, already I could feel my skepticism but I pushed it for the moment aside. "

" I got tired of saying what kinds of books I write, of hear- ing people's surprise that poets still existed, I got tired of the questions about success, whether I had had any, which always made me think of an interview with James Baldwin, a clip that made the rounds on Twitter every few months or so, in which he says It is not possible for an artist to be successful, tilting his head to emphasize the words, languorous, faggy, both earnest and bored, wonderful."

"I thought of the Gospel of Thomas, the line everyone quotes about being saved by what is inside you, by bringing it forth, but then there's its corollary, that darker promise Jesus makes that what you do not bring forth will destroy you. They were terms I could understand, being lost or saved by what one made or failed to make; and I had brought forth so little, I had laid up all my treasures for that future time I wouldn't have now, maybe, the time that had been cut short. I was being stupid, I thought, or really I had been stupid before, stupid to have let myself be lulled, I had been wiser as a child. There were no guarantees, it was ridiculous to imagine life at sixty or seventy, to think of the future as a broad passage, an avenue, when really it was a narrow corridor of slamming doors. But that isn't true either: planning for the future or living for the moment, nobody knows how to live, there's no way to know, anything anyone says is bullshit, entirely arbitrary, true or false by chance. There are no arts of living, I thought. I looked to the window, though the shade was drawn. Beyond it was the tower where I knew children's oncology was housed, Alivia had told me when I asked her earlier in the day. Why should I feel ag- grieved, I thought, if you want injustice look there, dying at forty-five or fifty isn't unjust. So you haven't seized every mo- ment of your life, who has; people die young every day, I said to myself, younger than you, why act like it's such a tragedy."

"The closeness I had felt with him earlier was gone, now there was a great gulf and I was on one side of it alone. If I died what would I be for him but a story, not even my own story but a segment of his, larger or smaller, I would be something he lived past, something he got over, an elegy's inspiration, maybe. Where did it come from, that rage, and where did it go, after a moment, as sud- denly as it came, I watched it as it went, merely afraid again. The great banality, I repeated to myself, commoner than dirt, inspiring a scale of feeling that was ridiculous the moment it passed--as was true of all the immensities, of love and oceans and the night sky filled with stars. Everyone is ridiculous en- countering them for the first time, when feeling swells to match them and is laughable for trying, grotesque with bigness, why should death be any different. Where is your philosophy now, I asked myself. But human beings aren't ever philosophical, I don't think, not really, at least I was the opposite of philosophi- cal, a minuscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the entire world."

"The news was full of that, nurses and doctors and techni- cians who were leaving their jobs, burned out by the pandemic, by the sheer number of patients and the horror of the deaths. Just a few months before there were more bodies than could be processed, so that Twitter was full of terrible images, black bags loaded into cold trucks outside hospitals; it was terrible to see, it punctured all one's pieties to see people treated like blunt mat- ter, like trash. They were exhausted by their jobs and exhausted too by attacks, by people who argued that the whole thing was a hoax, the virus, the deaths, the images, all of it engineered to pave the way for fascism, they said, for the authoritarian state. Twitter was full of that too, everyone calling everyone a fascist, so that the word meant nothing-_-which was the real danger, I thought, words that meant nothing, the way any word could be made to mean nothing; it was a way of erasing reality, or of placing reality beyond our grasp, real facts, real values, it was a tyranny of meaninglessness."

"every poet I knew, every teacher I had had; whatever little aesthetic fiefdom you claimed you could claim he was yours, that he shared your values. I hated all that, the little fiefdoms, the battle lines drawn around what poetry was, what it could or should do, the battles that were so loud in the tiny world of poetry, which no one outside cared about, even knew about; and it was because no one else knew or cared that they were so fierce, the smaller the stakes the more vicious the fight- ing, as if poetry cared, as if the fighting had anything to do with art, which is always so much bigger than anything we could say about it, as if- ...Little sparrow round and sweet. The simplest words, the sim. plest response to reality, a child's response. And then Chaucer there was a specific reference I never remembered, a note in the back of the book would have reminded me, but I didn't look for it. I didn't need to, the salute was enough, the hailing, turning from the modern street to the inaugural poet, opening up the abyss of history and seeing a light shimmering there, a voice one recognizes; that's something else art does for us, finally, it makes the abyssal less abyssal. Or that's how it seemed to me now, riding out the morning's oxy, sitting with the poem on my lap. It was a play on an old idea, the mortal poet meditating on immortal nature, what we take for immortal nature; it's what Keats does in Nightingale, when he says, The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown. Oppen is doing the same thing, mentioning Chaucer; he's mak- ing this particular sparrow all sparrows. It's a way of turning over again the one and the many, I guess, that problem that always plays out in poetry, in all art probably, of wanting to be faithful to the concrete, particular thing, which is where the love in art comes from, I think, what I care about most, devotion to the actual; and wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative. One wants to cherish an object in time and also nail it outside time (that was a poem too, an image from a poem, I couldn't remember which), nail it to eternity; it was a tension you could never resolve, you had to make the tension resonate too. That was also in the second stanza, not just the one and the many but the question of time, the season's leaves, this passing night. But what to do with sparkle, which is the strangest word in the poem, I think, naive but in a differ- ent way from round and sweet. It was a word less consecrated by poetry, maybe, I couldn't think of another poem that used it, a great poem, a poem from the canon, though I'm sure they exist. That's a hard thing about teaching poetry, the fact that so much of a poem's meaning comes from the way a tradition echoes in it, the way words chime across poems and poets, so that sweet shimmers with Sidney, Wyatt, Spenser, all the Petrarchan sonneteers who made sweet and bitter one of the polarities defin- ing love, in Shakespeare's sonnets the word repeats obsessively, sweet self, sweet love, sweet silent thought, sweets and beauties, sweets with sweets; not to mention Keats, who anyway is soaked through with Shakespeare, it's like he downloaded the sonnets into his brain; so that when Oppen uses the word he activates a whole tradition, which makes up much of the resonance of a poem and also much of its pleasure, the palming off of words from poet to poet, little touches across time. But it's a pleasure that only comes late as a reader, after years; you can describe it to students but you can't make them feel it; and so for them it's just a word, simple, nothing special, inert on the page. Maybe that's my case with sparkle, maybe in ten more years, or twenty, if I can read enough poems, the word will come alive for me"

"It's anthropomorphizing, which makes it a strange poem for Oppen, who usually doesn't go in for that sort of thing, the appeal to pathos; but child is a human word, a human rela- tion. And of course it's repeated too, from the title, which cre- ates another relation, or non-relation, possible relation: to the stranger to whom any other is particular and dear, the stranger we have to imagine, if it's true what I just said, if to recognize another means to imagine them in relation, to conjure for every stranger the stranger to whom they are dear. I don't know if that's true in the world but it's true in the poem, I think, which is something else art can do, it can be a laboratory for thinking, for trying out ideas, not just abstractly but feelingly, so that we can live with them and see them through. And not just ideas, faculties, too, ways of being. If it's true, what Kant says about the kingdom of ends, I used to say to my students, if it's true that standing in an ethical relation to another means recognizing that their life has exactly the same value as my life, as the life as those I love, which is to say immea- surable value, boundless value: if each life, even if we say human life, bracketing off that whole set of questions, problems, about the exceptionality of human life vis-à-vis other sentient life, in turn bracketing off the problem of sentience, of how we measure or judge it, how we know it's there; if every human life makes a claim upon the world, for resources, possibility, regard, love, that is infinite in its legitimacy, if each of the billions of human lives has that much value, then of course we can't bear to live in that kingdom, in the full awareness of all that value. In the same way our bodies filter out the innumerable bits of data our senses take in, that endless stream, filter them so we can function, so we can perceive any particular thing, so maybe our moral senses, if we can speak of moral senses, have to filter out data too, have to blind us to value."

"Just imagine, I would say to my students, just imagine what it would be like to try to see each person you pass in a day, to recognize them, their value, to cherish them as any adequate relation would demand they be cherished; imagine granting to each of their sufferings the priority you grant your own suffering. Even if we limited this to the people we see, to our actual encounters, leaving out of it the billions of lives that can only ever be abstractions to us, the faces we will never see; even then it would be utterly debilitating, it would make life impos- sible, even the thought of it is unbearable, as unbearable as the thought of all we betray in failing it. Maybe we need the idea of saints because we need to believe there is some category of per- son adequate to the demands of others, whose eye can be on the sparrow, I don't know; if so it's a category that excludes me. But that's the power of a frame, I would tell them, to take a bit of the world, a person or a sparrow, to make a boundary within which we can establish that relation that is the only acceptable relation, in which we can see all that there is to see and feel all that there is to feel, which is what makes me think that the disciplined attention of art is a moral discipline, even when the content of that morality isn't obvious, in the way Cézanne paints an apple, say, or the bowl that gathers the apples, the hundreds of strokes he makes, each an act of seeing, a judgment, each an attempt to activate in us that awareness we nearly always shut down. And even within the frame this awareness is fragile, which is some- thing else I love in Oppen's poem, its truth telling, though also it's something I only saw after years of reading it, after decades. And if a leaf sparkle: it's the poem's first verb, conjugated not in the indicative but the subjunctive, not sparkles but sparkle; it isn't stating a fact but suggesting a possibility. It's an acknowl- edgment of the contingency of the act of attention the poem commemorates, the contingency of our faculty of caring, I mean, of attending to the world, of tending to it. Why does one leaf sparkle-it is the perfect word, I realize, the precise word, an intermittent light, it conveys contingency, too-why does one leaf sparkle and not another, one sparrow claim our attention. Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved."

"it is as radical as Keats, more radical- it cracks open a door into the experience of the bird, almost as though we become the bird, our feet touching naked rock. The tone shifts, too, the lilting nursery chyme tone; the last line breaks it, more than breaks it, refutes it, I chink, makes continuing it impossible. Rock is an en- tirely new sound, it doesn't chime with anything, it shuts down the poem--which also isn't typical of Oppen, often his poems seem to flow past their endings, to resonate into the white space; often, mostly even, they end without any punctuation at all. But here there's the heaviest punctuation, a full stop, and before that another kind of stop, the consonants snapping off the vowel that anyway has wrenched us out of the world we were in, the nursery world of street and sweet and leaves and feet, it's like an opposite frequency. It feels like a violent ending, really, though only if you're reading in a certain way, which is something else that makes teaching poetry difficult, though it's also why we need poems, I think: they exist in a different relationship to attention and to time; it's impossible for harried students wor- rying about exams, for harried readers checking their phones, to see and feel what's happening in them. Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to per- ceive them is lost, and maybe that's the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems. "

"Read it again, I would tell my students, read it more slowly, when they looked up baffled by a poem, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear but because nothing seamed to happen, because, they almost always thought and sometimes said, what was the point. Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole point of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured ev- eywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures ex- istence. But it was difficult to defend the alternative, to justify it in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits; it was indefensible by that logic, its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics, other relationships to value, I mean other ways to live. The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence. But that knowledge is experi- ential, you can't explain it or demonstrate it or guarantee it, you can only try to tempt students toward it, entice them, and that had become harder and harder over the years when I taught high school, which were the years when everyone got smartphones; when I started they were novelties, prestige items, and when I finished they were ubiquitous. It had become more difficult for me, too, to find my way back to poems, to the mindspace of poems; I'm on my phone as much as anybody else, scrolling and liking, atomizing my attention. Probably I wouldn't have seen Oppen's poem in this way anywhere other than that bed, staring at the poem as I might stare at a painting, which if you do long enough you make discoveries, the painting opens up, you tune yourself to its frequency. I had never experienced the end of Oppen's poem so powerfully, had never felt so starkly the finality of it, the way the world is stripped bare, how the cobbled street--which is a made thing, shaped, familiar, welcoming of human life, human comfort-_becomes naked rock. It's a differ- ent scale of time, too: everything else in the poem is transient,"

"But the trees, I thought, our beautiful trees. They were my companions as I wrote, I loved looking out at them from my desk, the huge creatures that lay now across our lawn. The other one, too, though it was still standing I knew it would have to come down, it was a hazard. We would lose them both, and the thought of it made a fist in my chest. The house could be fixed, I knew, the car replaced, but the trees were irreparable, irreplaceable, and I thought of the decades they had stood, as long as the house. It was time that lay strewn across our yard, not just wood and leaves but the decades and decades they had lived, and I felt grief for them, real grief, it knocked the air out of my lungs."

"Well, she said, I'll head on upstairs. It's been a pleasure, I hope you'll keep feeling bet- ter. Thank you, I said to her, which was inadequate, and I was struck again by the asymmetry between a patient and those who care for them; Alivia said goodbye to patients all the time, after shepherding them through whatever crisis, she was used to it. But for me she was singular, she had cared for me in a way no one ever had, I was attached to her, and what could I say now that she was passing me on. It's like teaching, I guess, a relation- ship that engendered intensity but had transience built in, so that the sign of its success was its ending. It didn't occur to me to ask for her email or social media: it wasn't a personal relation- ship though it had felt personal, it was a bond that existed only in the hospital, not even the hospital, only in the particular ward I had left; here in this other place she had already withdrawn"

"What a strange thing a body is, I thought, how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail; and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well. Poor body, I thought again, looking down on it. I had hated it so much and been so ashamed and I might. have loved it instead, I thought suddenly, it had been all that time available for love and it had never occurred to me to love it, it would have seemed impos- sible, as it seemed impossible now. I don't think L knew how much I hated it, I had learned to hide it by the time we met, to act unashamed, I had learned if not to enjoy being naked with him at least to bear it. But maybe he did know, maybe that was why he slept the way he did, with one hand on my stomach, why he loved to touch me there, and not just when we were sleep- ing; he would come up behind me at all hours of the day and reach under my shirt, and on the couch, too, reading or watch- ing a movie, he always wanted to touch me there, if I pushed his hand away he would reach for me again. Maybe he had sensed what I felt and wanted to teach me a different feeling, I don't know. But there are feelings we don't get to have, I thought as I washed myself alone, with the cold wipes smelling foul, there are lessons we can't learn. Or maybe that's not true, maybe I just needed more time. Maybe I could still get over myself, I thought, maybe L would teach me yet."

"I reached into the bag, taking just one chip. It was thin and almost weightless, an amazing object, really, if you think about it, a miracle of engi- neering, a kind of transubstantiation of a root vegetable, which is an absurd thing to think and also true. When I put the chip in my mouth the pleasure was extraordinary, the taste of it but also the feel as I crushed it with my tongue; closing my eyes I could almost see lights shooting off in the interior, fireworks, after so many days without anything like it it was almost an orgasm. And it was entirely engineered, nothing in nature was like this, so perfectly tuned to our pleasure, whole teams of chemists had designed it. I knew it was pernicious, one of the manipulations of capitalism, a deformation of our natural response designed for addiction, it was the reason I was fat, the reason the whole coun- try was fat, really it symbolized in miniature the utter decadence of all genuine value, the fall of a culture, absolute bliss. Fucking hell, I said. I thought of a conversation I had listened to some- time back, a podcast, between a theologian and a political pun- dit, a liberals' conservative, who had made a brand for himself in recent years as that beleaguered thing, a genuine moderate, he said, party-less now that his party had been radicalized, isolated in his integrity. It was a kind of martyrdom schtick, since there was a whole ecosystem for his kind of thinking, he had a weekly newspaper column, millions of followers on Twitter. This was before the pandemic, they were talking in front of a live audi- ence, and the subject was wonder, which they were both advo- cating for, cultivating wonder; the theologian had published a book about wonder in everyday life, a kind of devotional posture toward the world. The pundit, who often wrote about what he called religious values, liked this idea, he was a churchgoing man, though also he styled himself as practical, no-nonsense, a middle-of-the-road American; he was a kind of homegrown, aw-shucks philosopher, and as the theologian waxed rapturous on his subject, the pundit stopped him short. I hear what you're saying, he said, I agree with you, but the problem with all this wonder is that it can lead to feeling like everything's extraordi- nary, to blissing out over a Snickers bar, at which the audience laughed. That laughter was the pundit's point, he was playing to the audience, he wanted to puncture the theologian's earnest- ness; and maybe he was right that it needed puncturing, but I was disappointed at how quickly the theologian conceded, join- ing in with the laughter, laughing at his own earnestness, at the rapture he had let himself feel. But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing, I had thought, I mean in a strong sense, a source of wonder, like G's chips; maybe it's unfathomably wonderful, both in itself, as a product of science and experiment, and also as the end point of a whole system of production and distribution, the ingredients sourced I'm sure from all over the world, which can only be abstract to me, I don't have the brain for complexity and systems. But even in my dumb cartoonish way I could imagine what it must take...

to make the chip that had lit up my brain, my whole senso- rium: the potatoes came from somewhere, they had been planted and harvested and packed and shipped; the salt had been mined. which is a process I don't know anything about, I'm entirely ig- norant; whatever machines had been designed and built to slice and fry, all of it at scale; and then there was the packaging, which was its own miracle, really, an extraordinary invention, a bag filled with air to cushion these impossibly fragile things, some- body had thought of that; and then the systems of distribution to carry them all over the country, the world, so that you can walk into a store in the middle of America, in a college town in Iowa, and for a few dollars fire up those points in your brain that mean pleasure. If all that wasn't a source of wonder what was, and of deep wonder, there was nothing saccharine about it; of awe, really, since of course it was at once amazing, proof of ingenuity and genius, and also the product of unimaginable suf- fering, of exploitation and violence and labor, whole histories of conquest and colonization, industrial agriculture and ecological devastation; and along the whole chain the devastation of human bodies, from laborers in the fields to fat Americans shopping organic markets; and there was truth in that, too, the intrication of wonder and depravity, pleasure and violence. It's something that saturates the past, that soaks the very root of history, and that permeates the future, too, the whole scale of human time, no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, no truer thing has ever been said, and it's a truth we should acknowledge. Of course I see what the pundit was saying, it would be ridiculous to try to live like that, in the glare of all that wonder and horror, it would be absurd, simply impossible."

"Try to remember this, I admon- ished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace. Remember this, I said to myself. Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn't the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this. You okay, G asked again, and I realized I was in the way, it was a busy entrance, people were coming and going for visiting hours. I stepped to the side. The afternoon was warm, not brutally hot as it had been when I arrived; it was September now, I thought suddenly, early September, soon it would be fall."

"Other houses in the neighborhood had followed their lead, there was a movement to replace lawns, which take up so many resources and offer so little in return, they're ecological nightmares, with native plants and flowers, with prairie grasses, hardy and beautiful and home to a million creatures, shelter and food. "

"He asked her if she would marry him. In that way she would not have to get rid of the baby. The streets were full ofbabies and certainly they grew up into men with scowling, nasty faces, and yet it seemed to him sad that one of them should be got rid of. He himself would not remember often that this baby was not his own child, in any case all those stories about the voice of the blood were very silly, his blood had no voice. He had never dreamed of wanting a child, but seeing that there was one to be had he would take it. Perhaps he was very old to marry her but all the years he had behind him did not weigh much, he had galloped through them so fast, never had he looked back to count the things he had lost. And what made people grow old was to keep looking back in order to count, counting made you grow very old all at once, with a sharp nose and gloomy, rapacious eyes. He himself had always galloped on. Then she looked at him in bewilderment and wondered how old Cenzo Rena could be, fify, sixty, goodness knows."

"She said yes, she would marry him. But she told him she felt a litle cold at the thought of having decided something for the whole of her life. Cenzo Rena said he himself felt very cold too, he felt long, cold shudders down his back, but anyone who was afraid of a cold shudder did not deserve to live, he deserved to hang on a leaf all his life. And she, now, had got to come away from her leaf, only insects remained on leaves, with their little staring, sad eyes, and their little motionless feet, and their short, sad little breathing. In order to get married it was necessary to know whether you felt free and happy together, with cold shudders down your back because even joy has its cold shudders, and with a great fear of making a mistake and a real desire to go forward. And he himself had never felt so free and happy as he had the day before when he had begun to think he might marry her, for he had thought of it at once and had been awake all night thinking about it, and he had had such long, cold shudders that he had got up and drunk some brandy and put on his sweater over his pyjamas."

"They laughed a great deal at secing themselves like that in the mirfor, he with his long waterproof all muddy and crumpled and she dishevelled and bewildered in a dress that had once been a curtain. They did not look at all as if they were just going to undergo a wedding ceremony, he said. They did not look at all exultant and triumphant. They looked like two people who had been flung against each other by chance in a sinking ship. For them there had been no fanfare of trumpets, he said. And that was a good thing, because when fate announced itself with a loud fanfare of trumpets you always had to be a little on your guard. Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water. She had not quite understood what it was, this fanfare of trumpets, she asked him as he was sitting in the revolving chair with his face all covered with soap. A fanfare of trumpets, he said, a fanfare of trumpets. The way fate had of teasing people. Some people waited all their lives for some little fanfare or other, and their lives passed without any fanfares and they felt defrauded and unhappy. And others heard nothing but fanfares and ran about hither and thither, and then they were very tired and thirsty and there was no water left to drink. There was nothing left but dust and fanfares. As they went out of the shop they took another look in the mirror, she told him that at all events she never again wished to wear dresses made out of curtains. Cenzo Rena said she was wrong, dresses made out of curtains suited her very well."

"That grey head beside her had known Ippolito, Giustino and Signora Maria. And yet she found it strange to turn towards that head on the pillow. She turned round and the day began, with the fire on the hearth and La Maschiona and the thoughts that she was gradually disentangling, once again immersed in her insectlike silence. How difficult it was to be husband and wife, it wasn't enough to sleep together and make love and wake up with the head close by, that wasn't enough for being husband and wife. Being husband and wife meant turning thoughts into words, continually turning thoughts into words, and then you would be able to find that a head beside yours on the pillow was no longer strange, provided there was a free flow of words that was born again fresh every morning."

"the baby threw off the blanket and stuck her red thin feet up in the air, Anna covered the thin feet again and again the baby stuck them up in the air, then she sucked one of her hands with a prolonged murmuring sound, for some time she made this prolonged murmuring sound and sucked at her hand with loud clucking noises, and Anna sat looking at her and found nothing to say to her, because she did not know how to chatter to small babies in the way that Signora Maria chattered to them. As soon as the baby had gone to sleep she started trying to disentangle her endless thoughts, she collected all the scattered threads of her own life and woven them together, and she was able to stay for hours in the pine wood beside the baby without being bored, weaving together and then separating her endless thoughts, beside the baby who for a long time had been merely a piece of darkness within her, and then suddenly had become a real baby in the hands of La Maschiona, with feet that were thin and red and long, tender, pale hair, and the name of Cenzo Rena's first love, she sought Giuma's face in the sleeping face of the baby but there was no sign of any other face in that naked sleeping face, with its little lips pursed and pale and its short breathing."

"Russia was very big and just one great expanse of snow, and anyone who got lost in that snow never found the road to come back home again. News arrived constantly, sometimes at Masuri and sometimes at San Costanzo, of men who had been killed in Russia or wounded or missing, all of a sudden as you walked through the lanes you would hear shrill cries, an official announcement had been made that someone had been killed. La Maschiona wanted to pur Mussolini in a cage and send him round very slowly through the lanes of all the villages, so that everyone could do what- ever they liked to him."

"Cenzo Rena told Anna that he would be sorry for that melancholy doctor, if it really happened that they found another one to take his place. But he said that all men made you sorry for them if you looked at them closely, and that in fact one ought to guard against that excess of compas- sion which arose suddenly, from looking closely at people."

"He asked Anna whether she still thought all the time about revolution. Anna said she still thought about it when the baby was asleep, however when the baby was awake the only things she could think about were the things that were good for babies, sun and fresh air and milk and bread and butter, and long monot- onous days with no one firing. But as soon as the baby went to sleep she immediately started thinking again about all the things she used to think about before, she herself, Anna, firing on the barricades, she climbed with her rifle on to the barricades as soon as the baby went to sleep. Cenzo Rena asked with whom did she climb on the barricades, she said that she climbed up with him, with the Turk and with the contadino Giuseppe. Cenzo Rena laughed a great deal at che thought of the Turk on the barricades, he himself believed that the Turk would shut himself up in the house the moment there was even the smallest revolution. They lay talking in the dark till late, and in the morning when they woke up Anna found that the head beside hers on the pillow no longer seemed so very strange"

"Cenzo Rena said that perhaps the war would really be over in a short time, and fascism would go up in smoke both in Italy and in Germany, only perhaps when it went up in smoke it would bring the whole earth to ruin. It seemed to him as though the earth were already starting to go to ruin, with whole cities collapsing all over the place, and people trying to escape all over the place, and those long sealed trains in which the Germans put thousands and thousands of Jews. Cenzo Rena recalled the cheerful trains in which he used to travel once upon a time, and he wondered whether some day a train might become a cheerful thing again, into which people got in order to travel and amuse themselves and arrive. He had heard about these sealed trains from the internees at Scoturno, who knew of their own relations and friends who had been lost on these trains, and he went to Scoturno on purpose to talk about these trains, to the Turk he did not talk about them because the Turk did nor know that they existed. But he could not help picturing the Turk on one of these trains whenever he met him, and so he was Very kind and patient with the Turk and let him complain about his sciatica and about the landlord of the inn, and talk about the war as a thing that must come to an end at once or else his sciatica would never get better."

"But Cenzo Rena told him he could not bear anyone in his house, he had a horror of living with anyone and for that reason Communism would never suit him, for he had been told that a large number of people had to live together in the same house."

"Anna asked him where his wife was. He answered in rather a confused manner, they had had some small disagree- ments but nothing serious, she had now gone to stay with Mammina for a little on Lake Maggiore, and by living apart for a little they were giving themselves time to collect their thoughts. There had been gossip in the village where they were, a story about a woman chemist, he had not even touched this woman but Amalia was always so very jealous. Now he was quite pleased to be alone, in marriage there should always be short periods of separation from time to time, so that one might pause and collect one's thoughts."

"Yes, he remembered moments like that. A glass with something green in it, and all round him the unknown town quivering and humming, and he himself dirty and tired and completely alone. But they had been mere moments and any little thing had sufficed to make him feel the earth under his feet again, the firm, solid earth to walk upon, and all at once he would feel fresh and happy again, with a great hunger and thirst to discover the things of the earth. He thought now that perhaps it had been bad for him to be always spared in this way, never to have fallen to the bottom of one of those cesspools into which men stumble; life had given him a great deal, but a real cesspool, a really deep one, it had never given him. And then he had married Anna, and perhaps if she had let him down it would have been a real cesspool for him, because he had become extremely fond of her, he didn't quite know how, when he had married her he had had no idea that he would be able to grow so fond of her."

"He had deep white scars on the backs of his hands, Cenzo Rena asked him if they were war scars, but he explained that one day in the kitchen of the restaurant he had upset some boiling soup on his hands out of a tureen. It was the fault of the under-cook, who had knocked into him as he was coming forward with the tureen. The under-cook used to go to bed with him and she made a great lamentation over his hands. But then she had left him, because she couldn't help weeping every time she looked at his hands. Women were like that, he said, they hurt you and then they ran away out of remorse. Men were very often like that too, said Cenzo Rena, but the waiter said no, men were different, for instance he had killed the dog and had not run away."

"At present, when he happened to hear cries and lamentations from the conta- dini in the lanes, Cenzo Rena would go out and look, and it would be Germans searching the houses for young men to put on lorries and send off to work in Germany, and Cenzo Rena would start talking German and sometimes he had succeeded in getting the Germans away from the houses and telling them some kind of tall story to get them to leave people alone. It wasn't much, Cenzo Rena said to Giuseppe, it wasn't much but it was all he was able to do. If he had been given a pistol or a tommy gun to fire he would not have shot straight, he would have shot all crooked into a tree, and in the meantime he would have started thinking things which it was not right to think. Giuseppe asked him what he would have started thinking. And Cenzo Rena said he would have started thinking that the Germans were all waiters, poor unfortunates with some sort of a job at the back of them, poor unfortunates whom it was not really worth while killing. And this was a thought that in wartime had no sense, it was an idiotic thought but he himself might happen to have an idiotic thought of that kind. Perhaps the contadino Giuseppe was a man of war; if so, let the conta- dino Giuseppe go with his tommy gun into the hills. The contadino Giuseppe bit his nails and looked at Cenzo Rena discontentedly, how could he go with his tommy gun all by himself into the hills? But at least scatter some nails, he said, at least scatter lots of nails along the road, so that a few tyres might burst from time to time. Yes, perhaps scatter nails, said Cenzo Rena, why not? But where were all the nails to scatter, he asked, he himself had only one nail in his pocket and he pulled it out, it was a nail that was all rusty and crooked and he kept it in his pocket to bring him luck."

"Emanuele had now come downstairs, and he was all red and sweaty because he had been asleep, they had no idea of the life that he led in Rome, he said, he spent his nights at the newspaper and during the day he had all kinds of meetings and never could he spend an afternoon sleeping, in order to sleep he had to come home. But in a short time he would be giving up the newspaper and leaving Rome for good, because he did not know how to produce newspapers. He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was. But newspapers that had to come out every day with the rising of the sun, without any danger or fear, that was another story. You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger of fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and you knew perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn't cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn fiom your very heart. Giuma said how pleased Mammina would be when Emanuele gave up the newspaper and came home for good. Emanuele gulped down a big glass of lemonade with a heap of sugar in it"

"They hunted pheasants, strange birds that burst out from underfoot and flew heavily into the air with a whirr. Their ungainliness was annoying; it prompted one to think them to blame for their own deaths."

"It was not hard to shoot them, and his uncle often succeeded. But Mieczy was quite recalcitrant about killing them, and always aimed a centimetre to the left - a minor deception, pheasant distance as he called it - an action that neither his uncle nor his father ever noticed, preferring to call the shot'abortive. Pheasant distance was a defiance strategy similar to reticence, vanishing at the relevant moment or moving out of sight. Mieczyslaw appeared to take part in the game imposed on him but found a way of escaping it. A slight shift of the sights, imperceptible to others, thwarted the whole performance."

"You see, sir, the Truth with a capital T always relies on the threat of cutting off anything that extends beyond its boundaries. No fringes, none at all. Behind the Truth hides violence,' said August once they had sat down. He gave Wojnicz a piercing, not to say meaningful look. 'Do not demand the Truth. It's a waste of your young time. Here he broke off abruptly."

"He was suddenly animated, his hunger crying out like a bell summoning him to the solemnity of the body."

"By a twist of circumstance, as Frau Opitz's body was descending on ropes into the open grave, the exact au- tumn equinox took place, and the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the Earth. Naturally, nobody noticed this - people have more important things on their minds. But we know it. In the highland valley that spread above the under- ground lake stillness sets in, and although it is never windy here, now there is no sense of the faintest puff, as though the world were holding its breath. Late insects are perching on stems, a starling turns to stone, staring at a long-gone movement among the clumps of parsley in the garden. A spiderweb stretched between the blackberry bushes stops quivering and goes taut, straining to hear the waves coming from the cosmos, and water makes itself at home in the moss thallus, as if it were to stay there forever, as if it were to forget about its most integral feature - that it flows. For the earthworm, the world's tension is a sign to seek shelter for the winter. Now it is planning to push down into the ground, perhaps hoping to find the deeply hidden ruins of paradise. The cows that chew the yellow- ing grass also come to a standstill, putting their internal factories of life on hold. A squirrel looks at the miracle of a nut and knows that it is pure, condensed time, that it is also its future, dressed in this strange form. And in this brief moment everything defines itself anew, marking out its limits and aims afresh; just for a short while, blurred shapes cluster together again. It is a very brief moment of equilibrium between light and darkness, almost imperceptible, a single instant in which the whole pattern is filled, the promise of great order is fulfilled, but only in the blink of an eye. In this scrap of time everything returns to a state of perfection that existed before the sky was separated from the earth. But at once this perfect balance dissolves like a shape on water, the image dims and dusk starts to drift towards night, then night gains the upper hand - now it will be avenged for its six-month period of humiliation, estab- lishing new bridgeheads every evening."

"one might change and become unrecognizable, and yet still remain one's real self inside. Clearly there was both an outer and an inner existence. The internal one was dressed in the 'external' one, and from then on was perceived by the world in that form. But why might the 'internal' feel so uncomfortable inside the 'external? thought Mieczys. Lucius's adventures were like dreadful torment, because the danger of never managing to return to his own shape was always hanging over him, the threat that he would die as a donkey, and that his real nature, his internal existence, would never be recognized!"

"He regarded the fashion for nation states as transitory, and believed it would end badly: the artificial division of people according to such feeble categories as the place where they were born did not suit the complexity of the question of identité. "The concept of "nation" does not speak to me at all. Our emperor, yours and mine, says that only "peoples" exist, nations are an invention. The paradox lies in the fact that nation states are in desperate need of other na lion states - a single nation state has no raison d'être, the essence of their existence is confrontation and being different. Sooner or later, it will lead to war. At this point he said something in French, but Wojnicz could not understand a word of it. Herr August liked to throw in French words, or even better, entire quotations. "The quotation is a legitimate literary genre, he would say. 'And as a man of letters I practise this genre."

"spots of white here and there that, to Wojnick's amaze- ment, turned out to be flocks of sheep - with the speedy dots of sheepdogs and the black commas of shepherds buzzing around them. Here we are watching them, as usual from below, we see them like big strong columns topped by small, chat- tering projections - their heads. Their feet mechanically crush the forest litter, snap the small plants, tear up the moss, and squash the tiny bodies of insects that have failed to heed the vibrations heralding imminent anni- hilation. For a short while after they pass, beneath the forest floor the mushroom spawn quivers, that vast, immense, motherly structure transmits information to itself where the intruders are, and in which direction they are bending their steps."

"If Wojnicz had been familiar with the practice of self-reflection and introspection, which at their next meeting Doctor Semperweiss recommended to him he might certainly have noticed how thoughts arise and what they are like - they are wisps of sensations carried by time like gossamer, moved by the wind, trails of tiny reactions that arrange themselves into random sequences eager for meaning. But their nature is volatile and imper- manent, they appear and disappear, leaving behind an impression that something really did happen and that we took part in it. And that what we are stuck inside is stable and certain. That it exists. In this state some individual words came back to him like an echo; taken out of context, some sentences re- sounded. His mind wandered to Lwow, and to the manor house in Glinna where he had spent his early childhood, as his horizontal position adopted unnaturally in the middle of the day revealed to him forgotten details of his brieflife. For example, he remembered that whenever his uncle Emil was due to arrive in Lwow, special prepara- tons were made. Jözef would run to the shops and always returned with a duck in a basket, while a boy from the market helped him to bring in the vegetables and apples"

"You said that a man shapes a woman's individual identity, so to speak. The state in turn would shape her social roles, said August, addressing Frommer. 'And the church her spiritual life,' put in Frommer with a sneer. 'I stand up for the woman entirely here. I don't know if you gentlemen have heard, but one of the early ecumenical councils considered the question of the female soul. At the time, in the early Middle Ages, it was not so obvious that women had souls. Yes, yes. Well, sometimes when I look at my housekeeper… began Lukas ironically, but he did not complete his sentence. 'At any rate, after many days of debate a secret vote was held. 'And?' asked Wojnicz, impatient for the end of this story. 'And there turned out to be a difference of just one sin- gle vote. Imagine, gentlemen, just one vote!' "But on which side?' cried Wojnicz nervously. "That of course they have souls. Surely you don't doubt it?' And after a pause he added: I have often wondered who the bishop was who tipped the scales."

"'It won'tlet me stop thinking about the fact that a woman has indeed been equipped by nature with the great power of giving birth, but is entirely devoid of control over that power. Something greater must always support her in it, some natural law, some social order, some moral code. That's what Emerentia is!' said August, jabbing the air. Because a woman's body belongs not only to her, but to mankind, said Lukas, a little irritated that they had not drunk a second round. 'Since she gives birth, she's public property, this capacity of hers to give birth cannot be treated as her personal quality, he said, stressing that word, then courteously returned a greeting to a couple passing by. At the same time as being herself, a woman belongs to us all.' Yes, you're right,; said Frommer suddenly, leaning forwards as if trying to spot mushrooms on the pave- ment. Being both a subject and an object simultaneously involves her body, that's obvious. But I am thinking of a woman's intellectual and spiritual qualities. politely. What do you have in mind?' Herr August asked In the philosophical sense we cannot treat a woman as comprehensive, complete subject of the kind that a man is This means that a woman can only develop and retain her identity within the sphere of a man. It is he who gives a framework to her identity. But then she'll be treated like an object!' said Thilo in alarm. Just ahead of them, a sudden gust of wind twisted a small heap ofleaves into a tiny whirlwind, a whirl-breeze, barcly a whirl-puff. That's true, it has to be admitted, like an object. Yet no one is stupid enough to fail to recognize a certain de- gree of female subjectivity. When one looks in the face of a woman, one must admit that there is in fact something separate, distinctive and subjective about her. Right? But on the other hand, her body, and thus she herself, belongs to all, since it is a vessel from which people come, so a woman's body, her belly, her womb, belongs to mankind.' But what is meant by "to mankind"?' said Lukas in a sulk. 'Meaning to whom? That reminds me of the social- ists when they talk of "property of the state". Of the state, meaning of whom? The civil servants?' The whirl-breeze proved to be a harbinger of wind, which had somehow made its way into the windless terri- tory of Görbersdorf and struck at them with considerable force. Wojnicz raised his collar and veiled his mouth with his scarf. Excuse me, young man, said Herr August - who was after all a socialist - holding onto his chocolate-brown hat. 'A woman should have her rights, of course, but she Should never forget that she belongs to society, which appoints the institution of the state to take care of its interests, so to put it logically, a woman, hm, hm, can be commanded by the state. That is true. The state may as- Sign her social roles, tasks, but also, and perhaps above all protect her rights as an individual"

"We shall not say any more about the many minor obli- gations of a patient, padding off each morning to the hydrotherapy Wojnicz found so loathsome, about the towels, the changing rooms, the stethoscopes put to chests - all those things that filled our hero's days to the brim. We shall not describe yet another walk along the promenade towards the Orthodox church or beyond, to Humboldt's shrine, as Herr August called the pavilion on the hill. By now Wojnicz knew how many boxes of pelargoniums hung outside Albynsky's café, apparently named Zum Dreimädelhaus in honour of his daughters, and how many spittoons filled with sawdust stood along his route to the Kurhaus. We shall not quote the laconic content of the postcards sent every second day to his father and uncle"

"This, a so-called dry cough, further dehydrated by cigarettes, quite devoid of any juice or moisture, was just like Walter Frommer's entire body. Sometimes when Frommer moved he seemed to rustle, as though under- neath his neat, black, outmoded frock coat he had oakum instead of muscles. Poor Thilo coughed in a completely different way. From his room came a bubbling noise, the sound of rot- ting matter, age-old fermentation, as if the boy's body were being boiled in retorts by damp miasmas, as if some primeval substance the consistency of mud, from which millions of years ago life had emerged, were mak- ing itself heard. Thilo coughed up masses of phlegm, while Woinicz rooted for him through the wall, because it was not easy. Sometimes Thilo tried again and again to rid himself of the mucus filling his sick lungs, and finally succeeded when hope seemed lost. Then Wojnicz would hear a tearing sound, like cracking, then a splash, followed at once by groaning full of relief. Several times Wojnicz had seen blood-stained wadding in the metal wastebin that Raimund brought out of Thilo's room, to mix its contents with sawdust and burn it, according to sanatorium instructions; this combination of red and white was always shocking, a sight that felt like a blow. Longin Lukas could still be heard from his annex, be- cause on top of his cough he always made a sound as if he were having to perform hard labour and suffering from the effort. It was quite high-pitched, shrill in fact, with a vague note of grievance in it, so that anyone who heard it was bound to feel guilty"

"Shouldn't women dress up in some sort of uniforms too, and wear medals according to how many children they've had, how many dinners they've cooked, or how many patients they've nursed? That would be both beautiful and fair."

"What I have to say might interest you. It's the moth- ers, he went on, who infect the child with excessive emotionality, which eventually leads to all sorts of illness- es and feebleness of spirit, and above all inner effeminacy. Women are volatile and fickle, quite incapable of shaping a child's awareness that the world is our challenge, that its rules are tough, and its order requires us to have a solid attitude, to stand firmly on our feet and not give in to any delusions."

(re: liberty caps)- "Frail and brittle, they seemed to quake at the mere sound of human footsteps, and a careless grip could easily destroy their fragile little caps, no, they were more like hoods, the kind that are put on infants' heads; even the freshest specimen was already damaged, its little hood going black from the bottom, as if aging were a special feature of this species. And yet once you grasped it by the stalk, you could feel its surprising elasticity, the resistance of matter that only appeared to be fragile and easily destroyed - yes, in it lay that strength of the weak, so common in nature, camouflaged and de- ceiving the senses. If not for this quality, the world would consist of nothing but strong, delicious, perfect speci- mens, nothing but the noblest ceps."

"When seen on the promenade, the Kurhaus patients looked taller and cleaner, and their shirts were whiter. They were like well-fed poultry, even if they were as sick as others - the women wore the pigeon breasts' that had been in fashion for several years, a frilly ruffle of cambric or silk on their chests that made it look as if they had just boiled over the top of their tight, narrow skirts, while the men's heads protruded from stiff collars, as if they were being served on a tray for afternoon tea, and their frock coats were like the plumage of male pigeons. The patients dressed carefully for their walks, as though they were not languishing at a sanatorium but taking part in a nation- al holiday. Heard from afar as they strolled along, their voices were like the cooing of pigeons, and they made lit- He holes in the pavement with the tips of their canes and parasols."

"He preferred to belong to this world, which did not yet know him and in whose eyes he still had time to define himself. He would rather take the risk that one day this world too would disappoint him, and he would have to run away again, escape to yet another, more distant loca- tion to avoid falling into the arms of that familiar, hopeless state in which one was simply a bother to oneself and oth- ers. By this point he had just about adopted the idea that his illness had come upon him at a very good moment in his young life, giving him a chance to reformulate him- self, and that he should actually be happy to have ended up here, in this little Silesian health resort, built on the waters of an underground lake."

"'But one can easily imagine creatures known as Flatlanders, who live in a place called Flatland, as if on a sheet of paper, two-dimensional, where there is no depth. Can you see it? Please activate your imagination. They have no concept of us, three-dimensional creatures. We only appear to them when we cut through their two- dimensional, sheet-of-paper world, and even then they can see us only as if in cross-section. Do you know what I'm talking about? They don't see our entire figure, but only whatever bisects the plane of their flat land, so to speak. Take a three-dimensional figure, a cube, for in- stance, with one of its vertices aimed towards Flatland. When it cuts through a two-dimensional plane - try imagining a simple sheet of paper - first the Flatlander will see a single dot, which will at once change into a sec- tion of increasing length, which at some point will start in turn to diminish until it is just a disappearing dot. If you, my dear young man, were to dive head first into Flatland, to put it in a nutshell, first for a split second the Flatlanders would see a dot, then a section the length of the diameter of your head, which would suddenly change into a larger section, just like the width of your torso with the arms pressed against it, and then finally turn into two slightly narrowing sections representing the diameter of your legs that will vanish as soon as your body passes Flatland. No one there could possibly guess what you re- ally look like.' Frommer laughed with satisfaction...'My point is that we may be similarly disabled inhabi- tants of a world that consists of three dimensions, and we shall never know what a four-dimensional world is like. Do you see? We have no tools or senses to introduce us to a world with an extra dimension, let alone a fifth, and a seventh, and a twenty-sixth. Our minds cannot conceive of it' ."

"The gentlemen began to lecture each other, each presenting his position as though pulling the topic over to his side, like a too-small quilt."

""That is how art thinks nowadays, began Thilo. 'It holds that a depicted object is only our mental projection of it, what we know about the object, whereas in fact we have no access to what it really looks like or what it actu- ally is… In other words, even traditional representational art creates objects rather than rendering their truth in re- ality. By doing so, it closes our minds instead of opening them. Well said, young man, said Herr August, livening up. 'In other words, our agreed-upon projections paralyse our cognition. "But modern, progressive art, the twentieth-century kind, has far greater ambitions. It wants to go beyond these limitations, to stage a revolution in perception, it wants to see things in a new way, from many viewpoints simultaneously, even ones that seem impossible. Cubism, futurism. These currents do not reach backwaters like this one."

" 'Democracy, my dear friend, does better within polytheistic systems', said Herr August. 'And why is that? I do not understand the connection. 'Because polytheism prepares our minds to look at the world as being diversified, full of different energies what coexist. Monotheism is more suited to feudalism be- cause of its hierarchical structure of superior and inferior beings. Lukas nodded approvingly. A curious idea, he said, yet it cannot be proved.' Unless we turn to ancient Greece, it worked there, said August, eager to draw his opponent onto his own ter- ritory. There he was invincible. But Lukas was not born yesterday. I, my dear sir, believe that democracy is a sham sys- tem. It always has an element of theatre, and inherently tends to bring out a strong leader who will push towards building an autocracy. Fortunately, outstanding, talented individuals are always going to be born who will not find a place for themselves within a democracy; at most they will take advantage of its mechanisms to assume the lion's share of power and subordinate the democratic commu- nity to themselves. That is how it works, such is the law of the development of societies. Therefore democracy is a transitional system, impermanent by nature. Ours is a hierarchical world, so it was established by God. There is no clearer confirmation of this hierarchy than that re- corded in Genesis. If we lived within polytheism, dear friend, you would think differently. Democracy is a horizontal system, it assumes that many people may potentially have an equal influence on the world.'"

"'As far as brilliance in literature is concerned, dear gentlemen,' said August, picking up the topic, the surest sign of an outstanding work is that women do not like it.' He fell silent, casting his gaze over his compan- ions' faces, pleased to have formulated a neat and well-rounded thesis that surprised him as much as it did the others. Nobody disagreed. They were busy with their food. What a pity we can't test that - we have no women here,' muttered Frommer and pushed away his plate, disappointed that Raimund was now serving compote for dessert; Frommer did not regard compote as a proper dessert."

"He sighed, drummed his fin- gers on the table and said: 'Do an experiment. When you have the opportunity, mention the name of a writer who is important to you in a woman's presence, and ask what she thinks of him. The higher you value some- one, the lower women will rate him, and that's because what women seek in literature is an excuse to arouse their emotions. They are a long way from making use of ideas. Women are inclined towards literature that safely revolves around interhuman affairs, especially relations between ladies and gentlemen' - here a quarter-smile flashed across his face, or a mere eighth of a smile, raising one corner of his mouth like a nervous tic - 'focused on a sentimental and sensual exchange. They always describe the dresses and the patterns on the wallpaper in great de- tail. They are drawn to the lower classes, and they take pity on animals. They often yield to the attraction of all manner of oddities: ghosts, dreams and nightmares, but also coincidences and other chance circumstances, with which they try to conceal their lack of talent in sustaining a consistent plot.' Please give us an example,' asked Frommer. 'You are generalizing greatly. It is hard to provide examples because on the whole few women write. And if they do, we do not read their work.' Indeed,' agreed Frommer. 'Language itself interests men as the most perfect communication tool, as the greatest achievement in the development of the species homo sapiens. Honing sen- tences, studying the depth of meanings, playing with connotations. Why have the greatest poets always been men?' asked August rhetorically, and emptied his glass of liqueur, closing his eyes as he did so to convey his bliss. You are right,' Lukas agreed with him. 'There are no women in the history of literature, just as there are none in science. There are only isolated cases of females who, as a result of the unfathomable mysteries of inheritance, have received from their grandfathers and fathers a mod- icum of the male spirit, the gift of Apollo.' "

"He is not an untrustworthy person, but rather sees the world as a system of conspiracies. It's a specific kind of madness, though innocent. Women's madness is a very different thing, its nature is entirely different from that of men. This has been observed and proved at many hospitals. Men go mad as a result of var- ious kinds of physical disorder, such as a rush of blood to the head, contamination of the blood by reason of an inappropriate diet, or yes, yes, unfortunately, syphilis. In women it's nothing like that, because the female psyche is weaker, with a thinner layer, so to speak, covering the instinctive, animal element that's inside her. By making holes in that cover, mental illness allows all those prim- itive instincts to emerge and gives them power over the fragile, delicate psyche."

"Wojnicz was gazing at this world burning with autumn fires through half-closed eyelids, which was a new exercise in look- ing - he was doing it just as Thilo had advised. It made the world seem flat, composed of nothing but spots and lines, some of them totally unexpected. Whenever his eyes stopped looking in the old way, in which one is al- ready familiar with the object of one's vision, surprising figures came into sight. The road they were now travel- ling, which led through large, open mountain pastures to Langwaltersdorf in the Reibnitz direction, was like a triangle with soft lines, surrounded by streaks of brown, sienna, olive green and rust. These streaks toyed with symmetry, recurring around each successive bend in the road and teasing the fuzzy edges of the triangle with the unexpected texture of the verge, into which the thick, dark lines of trees were rooted. The sky was sinking its teeth in between the mountains visible on the horizon, gnawing at the earth. Red leaves spilling from the beech trees were like claw marks bathed in blood."

"He picked up the package wrapped in newspaper and hugged it to his chest, remembering what he had once seen there. In his own room he unwrapped it, and with the magnifying glass in hand examined the black stain amid a sea of greenery, the spot where two mysterious dots were shining. But the magnifying glass did not reveal any more than that; even the brushstrokes disappeared. All he could see was a great big nothing. Seeing is what matters most, Thilo had once stated. It's not just a question of the eyes we have, we must see with our other senses too, though this has not yet been proved. So he had said. Close your eyes and look. You can see the same room, can't you? You can see where the pieces of furniture are, you can see their solid shapes. I'll put out the light because we don't need it now. He had been right. From that day on, Wojnicz had practised this way of looking as he fell asleep, and he al- ways saw something in the dark-grey light whose source he could not identify - because it was not dark or black beneath his eyelids, as one would expect in a place where there was no light. He had no idea where this feeble, diffuse, dark-grey glow was coming from. Beneath his evelids it recreated the entire room, everything was in its place: the wardrobe, the dressing table, the patch marking the curtains, the windows, even his shoes scattered on the floor. Curiously, he did not know if he was really seeing it, or imagining he could see it - or maybe, even worse. was he seeing something imagining itself? Or perhaps his evelids were partly transparent? Maybe they were a filter, through which the lunar nature of the visible light was now seeping, identical in character, but not the same thing"

" 'Yeees, said Semperweiss, drawing out the word. Inside all of us there's a feeling of not being of standard value, the belief that we lack something that everyone else possesses. All our lives we must come to terms with this sense of inferiority, overcome it or harness it to the cart of our ambitions and our ruinous pursuit of perfection. But what is perfection, does anybody know?' "

"Semperweiss said he communed with imperfection on a daily basis, and that this entire place was a land of imperfection, the last stop for defective specimens doomed to gradual destruction. After years of working here he had learned to think that each person, each human organism possessed a point of least resistance, a weakest point, this was the famous Achilles heel, and it was like the law of the pearl: just as in a mollusc the grain of sand that chafes it is neutralized by mother-of-pearl, ultimately forming a jewel that we find valuable, so all the developmental lines of our psyche will arrange themselves around this weakest spot."

"Each anomaly, claimed Semperweiss (for he certainly did not want to use the word 'defect'), stimulates a particular mental activity, a particular development, and collects it around itself. We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted. 'If you, young person, were to ask me what the soul is, I would answer like this: the soul is the weakest thing with- in us. Your soul is in your morbid symptoms. But Wojnicz refused to listen to this. 'All my life I have believed that one should focus on what is strong, healthy and powerful. That's how my father brought me up. But you're telling me the soul is a dustbin.' I did not say "dustbin". Please look at it from another angle. Our entire culture has grown out of a feeling of inferiority, out of all those unfulfilled ambitions. And yet it is the other way around: that which is weak in us gives us strength.This constant effort to compensate for weakness governs our entire lives. Demosthenes had a stammer, and that was exactly why he became the greatest speaker of all time. Not in spite of it, but because of it."

"'A sense of inferiority affects one's whole life, especial- ly one's thinking. Did you know that? Because we lack confidence, we think up a very stable, rigid system to keep us upright. To simplify what seems to us to be un- necessary complication. And the greatest simplification is black-and-white thinking, based on simple antitheses. Do you understand what I'm saying? The mind estab- lishes for itself a set of acute opposites - black and white, day and night, up and down, man and woman - and they determine our entire perception. There's nothing in the middle. Seen like that, the world is far simpler, it's easy to navigate between these poles, it's easy to establish rules of conduct, and it's particularly easy to judge others, often reserving the luxury of obscurity for oneself. This kind of thinking protects us from any uncertainty, crash, bang, and it's all clear, like this or like that, there is no third option. Aristotle or the golden calf. Here he laughed so jovially that Wojnicz almost joined in with him. 'This protects us from reality, which is built up of a multitude of very subtle shades. If anyone thinks the world is a set of stark opposites, he is sick. I know what I'm saying. It's a powerful dysfunction. But what is the world like?' Blurred, out of focus, flickering, now like this, now like that, depending on one's point of view. Do you understand what I'm saying? The mind estab- lishes for itself a set of acute opposites - black and white, day and night, up and down, man and woman - and they determine our entire perception. "

"'You can escape this primitive, stark division. Don't forget that the binding vision of the world is highly conventional, and it's built upon the personal lack of con- fidence of those making the judgements. Someone like you will prompt antipathy and hatred, because you will be a clear reminder that the vision of the world as black and white is a false and destructive vision. You, Herr Woinicz - or however I should address you - represent a middle world, which is hard to bear because it's unclear. This vision maintains in us a peculiar irresolution, and does not let any dogma take shape. You treat us to a land "in-between", which we'd rather not think about, having quite enough of our own black-and-white problems. You show us that it is greater than we thought, and that it affects us too. You are a bomb, he said, articulating the words emphatically. The worst thing possible is to feel fully valued by others, and particularly - as I would put it - to be considered of standard value. It means we become literalized, and we come to a halt in the development that a lack of full appreciation prompts us to strive towards. When a person recognizes that he has become perfect and fulfilled, he should kill himself.!'"

"It's as if several layers of skin have been removed" I said. "That sounds like shingles;' he said. "That's not how I meant it,' I said, 'I was speaking metaphorically. " don't understand, he said, 'can't you put it another way? Another way?' I said. Yes, he said, 'I want to be able to understand.' Well,' I said, 'that's very consider- ate, but unnecessary - it won't endure. 'Nevertheless, he said. Besides, it might come back. I'm sure it will. I said. Well then, don't you think you should get a han- de on it?' he said. 'Some things can't be handled,' I said. 'Anvthing can be dealt with,' he said, you just have to figure out what it is you're dealing with.' 'Alright then; T said, 'but it's difficult to describe, and I'm not sure talking about it is of much use.' 'It's not useful to talk about it?' he said. 'No, not really - I'll overthink it if I try to put it into words. I'll end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself - I'll end up talking rubbish.' 'I see, he said. 'And why's that?' he said. 'I don't know,' I said. 'Some things are resistant to words may- be, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing - a theory, I suppose. A theory?' he said. Yes. Or a poem perhaps. Some kind of made-up thing anyway,' I said. 'You like poetry?' he said. 'Oh god,' I said. 'Alright, alright - one word then, he said. 'One word?' I said. 'Yes, one ordinary word that you don't need to think about.' 'Alright,' I said, 'that's easy enough.' 'Good,' he said. 'Good, darling. Blank.' I said. Blank?' he said. Yes. I said, 'now you have it'. I'm not sure I do though, he said. 'Well, I don't know then, 'I said, let's just leave it.'

"Stone was always very polite and gracious, and still is it seems: don't recall the incident, he writes, but am glad to discover it was a minor emotional upset that was the cause of your agita- tion and it was not the case that I was boring you to tears. I don't know why he takes it upon himself to use the word minor' to describe the scale and depth of my feelings, and the irony is not lost on me that the minor' element in this situation was in fact me. I was the minor and my feelings were not. They were the opposite - they were huge, ma- jor, overwhelming, more than I could stand. Why does he refer to them as minor' in this way? And why is it better that my inability to engage with the lesson was due to a minor emotional upset that was brought about by one of his colleagues fooling around with me rather than by him being a bore, which in fact he could be? Who would take any consolation from being absolved in this way? It's probably unreasonable of me to be annoyed with Terence Stone, but then again, why would anyone presume to know the measure of somebody else's feelings? Perhaps he is simply hoping for my sake that the whole episode was just a trifle, one that hardly made a dent on me. It oc- curs to me that in the absence ofbeing able to communicate with Robert Turner, Terence Stone has become a kind of stand-in because of his proximity to the situation, and I am perhaps expecting more from him and am exasperat- ed and vexed because he is not saying what I want him to say. What do I want him to say? What is it I want to hear?"“I don't want him to tell me anything - I want him to ask me something, but I don't know what. It doesn't matter what it is, the point is, I don't want him to tell me anything, I want to tell him things and it's clear to me he doesn't want to be told anything, and that's why he described my feelings as minor. He's nip- ping it in the bud, isn't he? Play it down. Gloss over it. Don't say anything that'll encourage her to give full vent, full expression, because that won't be enough, she won't stop there, she won't stop until she's obtained fully en- compassing acknowledgement of the wrong she was done. Sod that. Nip it in the bud. That's why I can't en- dure pleasantness. It seems warm and accepting and sincere, but it isn't at all, it's absolutely thin - you come to the sheer edge of it very quickly, and there's nothing then, you're on your own. And that really is its social purpose, to keep anything out of the ordinary at arm's length, and in that way nothing is turned on its head, nothing is spoilt, there is no scandal. Because that's the main thing, isn't it, avoiding a scandal. And if you don't play along you're made to feel unseemly and excessive. Uncontained, en-tirely unsophisticated. You feel like an oik in fact, and you are, you are an oik, a blundering oik who might well upset the apple-cart. Those with the upper hand flatter and appease you with attention and pleasantries, and for a little while you do feel in fact that they care, but their kindness and concern is terribly thin and you get to the edge of it very quickly, the stark edge of it, and there's nothing then, you're on your own, and it's humiliating to the core- you realise you've been tricked, fobbed off royally, none of that beneficence was for your benefit, it was strictly for theirs. You realise they were sympathetic in order to dis- arm you, disarm you and make you go quietly away. You realise they don't give a fig for you at all, they're simply being polite. Polite, politus, polished. Smooth it all away, yes. Expunged. What the corps d'elite really care about is keeping things exactly as they are, because the way things are is jolly nice, thank you very much, it suits them very well. For the sake of balance I shall also venture that they're not aware that they're doing this - they are not doing it on purpose, it comes naturally. Totally ingrained.”

(chthonic= relating to or inhabiting the underworld)

“-Did you have a good afternoon writing darling? he’d say. 'Did it go well? Is it progressing satisfactorily? Do you feeling good about it?' And what would I say? What would I say to that, exactly? It's better for me to go about things anonymously. I don't like to be too aware it’s me writing. That might sound nonsensical, given that so many sentences here begin with ‘I’. How then could I not be aware that it is me writing this? I don't know exactly. Perhaps what I'm getting at is that other people's ideas about me aren't something I want to be too aware of while I'm writing this. I don't want the way they see me to intefere and keep me at the surface of things. I need to go down a bit. I need to disappear, go under, get down where she is. Then it is she who savs ‘I’ not me, not me. Something like that. It's never quite so neat. I'm conscious that the tidy domiciliary scene I've described above in cates an elegant country hotel more than it sug eSS E home. I must be factoring in the likelihood that if Xavie came into money again he'd want to have staff as Xavier often said I wasn't very domestic which really an noyed me. Obviously if he'd said the opposite Id bane been very annoyed by that too. I didn't see why he had to say anything. The fact is I always prepared lovely dinners for us and the bed was always lovely because I'm very particular about bed linen and everything looked lovely actually, my friends often remark upon how lovely I make a place, and, what's more, it gave me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to make things especially nice for Xavier, so I didn't quite know what he was getting at when he said i wasn't domestic. 'What on earth do you mean?' Id sax. It's hardly a dump in here. 'It's very stylish, he'd say, but you're not the domestic sort, thank God - it would be aw- ful for me if you were.' “

“Soon it will be Christmas again. Christmas is ri- diculous. The way it is exactly the same year after year is completely ridiculous. The same decorations, the same clothes, the same songs, the same food, the same senti- ments - you spend the year trying to improve your lot in one way or another and at the end of it you get walloped with all this unvarying rubbish again, it's horrible - what a really perverse way of ending a year. It's tedious and asinine yet everyone is trapped in it because nobody wants to let anyone else down, though if you ask anyone they'll likely tell you they'd be very happy to spend Christmas day with five types of cheese and the curtains drawn.”

“I didn't finish the email I began writing to him in the hotel. Someone phoned me and when I went back to it after talking to whoever that someone was I deemed the email I had begun to write ut- terly pointless. It said nothing new, I realised. 'It seems to me you don't know the first thing about love,' it began, and I don't know how many times I've written that in an email to Xavier. Over and over again we had these spats where we shot down the other's conception of love. You don't know what love is! - You have no idea what it means to love someone! - You have no heart! -You are a narcis- sist! - You are entirely unsuitable! - If you really loved me you'd stay away from me! - Love asks nothing! - You don't know the first thing about me! - I want nothing more to do with you! - You're insane! - You're too much for me! - Do what you like! - No one's ever loved you like love you! - I must have been out of my mind! - You're completely deluded! - Be absolutely sure you know what You're doing! - Leave me alone! - Straighten yourself out! - Don't call me! - Your love makes me sick! - I can't believe we're going through all this again! - You are not at all what I thought you were! - You're on another planet - Every minute spent with you has been a complete waste of my time! - You don't listen to a word I say! - I refuse to let you ruin my life! - Where has the wonderful person I fell in love with gone! - It would be my pleasure not to see you ever again! - This is hopeless! - Go to hell! On and on. I did not finish the stupid email. It was stupid. I no longer needed to say anything high-handed or depreca- tory to Xavier. What for? It was all over now. Let him have the last word. Let him have the last word. I pray you won't regret this, love.” 

“Dear Terence Stone, Green is life is poison is sickness is peace is envy is fast is angelica is innocence is delirium is money is grass is chlorine is health is vomit is absinthe is tarnish is lab- yrinth is melancholy is nature is kryptonite is moss is gangrene is phantasmagoric is deceit is lush is infection is solitude is beginning is asparagus is putridness is secret is decay is spreading is tropical is nausea is mould is freshness is vitality is snot is lagoon is guilt is enchant- ment is mildew is vile is rampant is the colour of my ink yes, the colour of my ink, change, yes, instability, yes, life, life, yes, death, yes. Death. And the days, I write the days in green, and the things I need, the things I need - I write those in green too.”

“I'll conjecture that he sends letters off fairly promptly after penning them, and it's reasonable to suppose that he was especially eager to get this particular letter off post-haste - and it's not far-fetched to imagine that he awaited a response with a rare pitch of wobbly excitement, that's just normal - anyone feels a tingle of anticipation after they've got in touch with someone, especially someone they haven't seen or been in contact with for almost thirty years. And the days go by and anticipation, which can be so gloriously expansive while it is still nascent, begins to depreciate and splinter into needling reprovals”

“since children and Christmas aren't subjects I have much to say about, except to point out that Christmas is entirely irrelevant now surely because people are always buying expensive things and they don't have to wait to watch this or that blockbuster movie and everyone guz- les wine and eats fancy food every day of the week, so what exactly does Christmas bring that we don't already have on-demand day in day out all year round? And if you're not one of those who are quaffing and indulging all year round you've probably no chance of being able to do it at Christmas and it's very stressful having to try.”

“We were talking about his origins, where his parents came from and so on, he said something about his features. I happen to like his mouth a great deal, it's very beautiful. I didn't say that, but my hand went to his face, there it was on the side of his face, turning his face slightly away from me so that it was now in profile, 'You've a love- ly profile, ' I said, something like that, I can't remember exactly, and just as quickly my hand was no longer on his face, but it had been. It had been on his face and that's a strange thing to know, and I'd be surprised if I ever forgot that. I don't regret it. I don't regret things like that. I might do the following day, and for a few days after that, that's to say I'll likely feel absolutely mortified and green about the gills, but then time passes soon enough and so too does my nausea and mortification. In the end I don't care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is to die of boredom, the alterna- tive is to be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out, the alternative is to drink too much and become taciturn and twisted, the alternative is to not show up at all, and I've done all those things and getting carried away and making a fool of my- self from time to time is, in the end, so much easier to bear.”

“l am in bed a lot of the time now: It worries me a bit, butt squirm about at the desk and I dor't much like siting ot iving on the sofa. I haven't laid down on it for severa Weeks now. It might be nice. I think I enjoyed it before. Before what exactly? I feel like I haven't been on the sofa since I got back from Scotland. I just feel more at home and less perturbed when I am in bed. I think a lot is going on inside of me. I get very excited out of the blue, as ir something really incredible is going to happen. It dissi- pates quite quickly, but that's generally the way excitement is. Tea. Rain. That box under the desk. It has almost all of my notebooks in it. I deposited as many of them in there as I could before coming here so that I would be able to start putting them in order, and of course I haven't even lifted the lid. Are they the past? No, not entirely. I am made of what they contain and I am living now. I am here. I am still here.”

“Sometimes we felt like we should feel like telling him off. More than that. Yes, more than just telling him off actually. Because he had been quite bad. He'd behaved very badly we re- alised. Yes as time went on we realised just how bad his behaviour had been. We realised it but we didn't feel irate or anything did we. No we didn't really. There the feeling was, open and available, and actually quite inviting. We came close to it now and then. We did. We did. But all the same it was not our feeling. No it wasn't. It was an ac- commodating and perfectly comprehensible feeling that was getting bigger and louder all the time, but even so, it was not our feeling. Never mind. Feelings that you grow yourself are much harder to tend to. That's right. They don't follow a particular course. They don't, they run wild and get very thorny and tangled up here and there. That's right.”

"She couldn't leave her husband, because without any money of her own she would be dependent on the hospital- ity of others. It was true that at any point it was possible to seduce another man and so acquire some influence over him but that seemed a limited and precarious power - to be once again dependent on the whim of a man. Everything there. fore, as it always has been for those with no money of their own, and no obvious means of making any, was very con- fined and limited. But the power that had destroyed her, she was suddenly thinking, might also be the power that could help her too. She had this vision of a group of writers and artists around her who would repay her for entertainment and snacks with their own arguments and fictions - a field of influence, cloudlike and enveloping."

"There was literature everywhere. The world was a jungle called writing. In this world writers became politicians and politicians wrote for newspapers and meanwhile everyone wrote to each other every day, as if an experience were not an experience until it had acquired its own image in words. Words were being printed on newspaper sheets, scribbled on notebook scraps and letters, hoarded in archives, pasted up on walls or bound together in little booklets for distribution in the arcades. The paper they had to use was rough, was heavy and stained and it ripped very easily, but the words themselves, it seemed, were becoming lighter and lighter, quick sketched symbols for catching the universe in a deli- cate, ineffable net. And the more ineffable a net is the more impossible it is to escape it."

"People wanted to compose their own crônicas, or comment on the writings of other people, only interrupting this writ- ing for more reading, which led to even more writing. It was as if writing was a narcotic or at least an obsession, and no one really thought about the effects of producing so many words - not on those whom the words described, or on those who produced the words, or on a world in which so many words existed. A world in which writing is everywhere is really a world of reading. Everyone was writing - but this meant that everyone was reading, and then experiencing a deep illness of reading. And among these words and articles were the libels about Celine and her friends, as well as many other women who found themselves described maliciously as famous. Defaming and libelling and stalking and attacking had never been so easy: it was the golden age of psychosis. This writing was all anonymous and the anonymity seemed to confer impunity, like how everyone savaged the house party Celine had been thrown for her seventeenth birthday. It made these writers feel invincible and invisible, and perhaps the two states were the same. Celine understood all this while still thinking it was dis- gusting. She had a fear that meaning was shifting, maybe not just shifting but disappearing, and it was happening because there were now no true sources of information. So much information was being put out there in real time, local and non-local information, and all of it was warped. Every sen- tence extended objects or people beyond their natural habitat, creating images and rumours - the way a shadow might be peeled away from a person and converted into a silhouette."

"To be exposed in this way was to exist in a total abject state with nothing to protect her from being made up by people less imaginative or intelligent than she was. But this gave her a knowledge that no one else possessed. People seemed to believe that they had the power to determine their own image. They didn't realise, thought Celine, that they were determined by other people and the words of other people. All the forests and squid and greyhounds had been engulfed by the literary world, the way a serpent will envelop an ele- phant. This world, of course, exists wherever representations of people are made, and its essence is compromise, terror, vanity, fashion and death - because in the business of repre- sentations all value is subjective, and therefore impermanent, and therefore only ever installed by force. But still, the pro- portions between this world and the other gigantic world are very mobile and delinquent. At any moment, it turned out, the old world could disappear entirely and become little digital strings of symbols, vanishing into the white air."

"It now seemed to Celine that if she wanted to survive then everything depended on manic activity. Her desires were expanding. The old systems were dying out but Celine felt that there was nothing to take their place. So people were running in many directions at once. Some people chose time- lessness, and these were the artists. Some people wanted power, and these were bankers or politicians. Others wanted the future, and these were visionaries. Whereas the move she wanted to make was to inhabit the present moment as urgently as possible."

"Men everywhere talked about universal values while it seemed that the only universal stories were stories of women being killed or beaten or raped or abandoned. The case that everyone was talking about was a murder trial where an immigrant housekeeper had savagely killed a busi- nessman in self-defence, after he assaulted her when she resisted his attempt to rape her. It seemed very obvious to Celine that no man had the right to judge this woman, how- ever crazed her murder had been, since she was part of a system that was organised by men themselves. Those on whom injustice had been visited forever could not be forced to keep to a certain moral code, and certainly could not be held to that code by the people who caused the injustice. Just as they could not be criticised for moments when they were complicit in what they purported to attack: the way Julia once confessed to her how much she liked it when men hurt her in bed. All resistance would naturally have to borrow from whatever it attacked. But if she ever said this, even to radical intellectuals or poets, they gently explained to her that this was against all moral reason"

"The river was turquoise. The sky was light green and pink. It was very beautiful, and it made her hopeful, as if she could begin activities that she had never begun before, and she felt that more activities would always be possible, in a long and unbroken chain."

"That evening Celine and Marta opened some fizzy wine which they started drinking from the bottle. Outside there was a tropical rain, making every leaf silken. It was the kind of moment when in the ponds there are frogs emerging with their gelatinous eyes, blinking in the grey light. Everywhere was warm and raining and it made the world inside feel deli- cate and lovable. An object was a unique and battered thing, inside a drenched environment."

"like the way, she once told Julia, you push open a door to discover there's been a rainstorm, and you step out into the amazingly rinsed and electric world."

"He had a very pure soul but also such a yearn- ing to be known that occasionally his soul would find itself in very impure landscapes. As she mentioned Antoinette and Rosen, these celebrities and their vast power, he could suddenly and helplessly imagine triumph, people adoring him, so much money - maybe even a house in the country. He pictured a dinner many years later, where a committee member at the Comedy would admit to him that turning that script down had been the biggest mistake the studio had ever made. And maybe this is natural. A writer is an animal who is often pure but somehow wants fame, all the time, however lethal it may be, because they are also infected with this ill- ness of timelessness. They love language and want to make works where this dark thing is made light but they also want this language to last forever. And so, sadly, a writer is this animal who confuses fame with love."

"And meanwhile with her friends Celine felt herself relax. ing and this feeling was very new. They had been educated for so long to hide themselves and to see the business of liv. ing as a constant negotiation with danger. To be a woman, they had been taught, was to disguise your character so per- fectly that it was impossible for anyone to try to understand it. But at the same time as deceiving others you were meant to be able to see through the deceptions of other people while simultaneously never revealing that you had seen through these deceptions, because it was very dangerous to show that you wanted to understand a person's true nature. Whereas now they had invented a kind of softness, where these questions were somehow not relevant or not true. But still, it might be very adorable, said Marta. And for the moment might all be true. But swathes of apricot skies were not enough. They were never enough to be going on with."

"She had never thought of having children. It seemed too much of a way of limiting your future, and especially of limiting your future because of a man. She always wanted intensity instead. It was possible to say I am a body and pos- sible to say I have a body and Celine felt that all pleasure consisted in being able to maintain the second statement and not the first. But too often the first sentence was the more accurate, whether in conversation with a man, or in bed with a man, or now, as the consequence of going to bed with a man. To be pregnant was to know that your identity was only a body forever. Perhaps for the men themselves it was possible to imagine the other mode of being, to think that they merely owned a body the way a person might own a greyhound - but maybe that just meant that they were too casily deceived. Maybe the only thing that was true was the brute matter of being a body."

"It was sometimes impossible to speak in any way precisely with a man. It was as if she could see how power was always distributed, its endless circuit, the way you can see the entire electrical circuit of a city when you zoom over it at night. The circuit was very simple. The circuit was men/ women, and in some way she refused this, thought Celine. She did not know exactly how, but she refused it."

"There was one little space she loved in particular in the forest. She sat there every morning, letting the insects arrive around her, the sound of the gannets fleeing overhead to the sea. Occasionally people would pass by with their animals, or someone would be gathering fruit or mushrooms. Julia had always refused any restrictions on the forest: anyone could enter it and use it how they wanted, and Celine liked this sense of makeshift usefulness. She felt altered, as if she was now living on the seabed of an ocean of air, and she let herself be a series of feelings, little nuances. It's really terrible how language modifies the world, she was thinking. So much of what's important in a life hap- pens incredibly rarely, sometimes only once, and therefore it's distressing how quickly language has to take it over, our experience, and make it neater and more regular and less abstractly splurged."

"Certainly, something was speaking. It was language, at least: that monstrous thing. But also it was the trees, or the light, or the sun. She knew this very certainly but also slowly, the way bubbles emerge in a glass of water left out overnight."

"In the burnt grass, an exposed toad was throbbing hysterically, like a terrified heart"

"When she came back to bed, she picked up her baby and held her. She was a girl, and Celine felt something almost like fury when she thought about this fact, or at least something fierce and intense. It was an emotion very close to eating sensual and particular. It was beautiful but it also hurt."

"While everyone applauded his daughter tugged a metal helmet over her head and the magician, standing on a scaffold many feet above her, dragged her up to the ceiling using a giant magnet. Everything was unseen force, spooky action at a distance. It was very unnerv- ing to see that kind of force, even if it did resemble other attractions: the way you could make a man's penis move, for instance, just by a way of opening your mouth. Or the way a room would change its tone and composition because a celebrity had entered it."

"People find it so difficult to control the world! The world is a vast animal that will not listen to humans at all, or respect the sincerity of their moves. She had thought she had such moves in her but her courage was often fading, worried Celine. And meanwhile all the systems around her were exchanging information, oblivious of the people without whom the sys tems and networks would not exist at all, and these systems were a great fire consuming everyone. The other word for this process was possibly time. She felt the word was very vague."

"Because of course it often happens that some people remain in your life while others disappear, it is very unpre- dictable who disappears and who remains and so there is a corresponding strangeness in surprisingly returning to a person to whom you've once been in some way close, but never a friend, and whom you're now trying to use in your ongoing resistance to the basic order. There were so many chasms, compromises, little memories, or at least it seemed that way to Celine. It had turned out, as she got older, that some correspondences with other people were little fragile things, hanging off events from fraying strings, and in the absence of the events or circumstances that sustained them they seemed to flutter away, into the turquoise air."

"But still, she had determined that she would never allow herself to disappear in silence, especially if this silence were a silence imposed by other people - and so she sent a message to Lenoir"

"Celine felt a kind of downcast shame. It seemed appalling that she hadn't known this about Julia, and also appalling that Julia had never told her. It was one of the problems of living among people - that you thought you knew so much about your friends but that it tended to require a catastrophe before anyone spoke sincerely with another person. Human nature was appalling."

"Celine felt middle-aged. She felt that some things were now out of reach. It was like the present moment was elsewhere, thought Celine. There could be a time when you felt so much part of the present moment that you thought that you and this moment were identical, but then it turned out you could continue and the present moment would just gently move to one side, maybe not even so very far, but far enough away for you to notice a distance between yourself and the soul of things. So that the ballet you were always trying to perform became more and more difficult, you were moving, you were making your moves, but the rhythm you needed to dance to was less audible and more confusing."

"What she really wanted, said Celine, was not to be public at all. The problem with this point of view, Marta replied, was that you had very little choice about being public or not. Either you were public or you weren't, and they seemed very much to have been made public forever. Always, said Celine, and this was the aspect of the affair she hated, it was the woman who was evil. The kind of story these writers turned lives into! It was always the boring woman, not loving or giving or lively enough for some resplendent man. But also: the woman who was too giving, too lively - so desperate with desire that she terrified the man in front of her. The woman was hated for doing something which men wanted her to do: to pursue them desperately and ardently. Whereas, continued Celine, it was surely obvi- ous that many men in fact wanted their wives to be seduced. Much more common than a woman who was all desire, was a man wanting in some way to invent a distance between him and his current partner."

"The way the forest was developing was partly its own invention and partly, explained Saratoga, because Julia had planted some seedlings which she had been given by Jaco which he had brought back from America. She had planted them among her surviving trees and very quickly, very slowly, they had started to set up little communication systems that were new and overlapping. Everything was dry but inside the saplings it was milky, thick liquors held inside the woven tubes of each stalk. They were trying to understand the alien earth and air. Everything was rustling, was curious. They had found themselves in burnt-out soil, and the effect on them was very exciting. Little ferns emerged and reproduced in mid-air, among the branches. The look was almost comical. It was a forest where the size was miniature, a forest that was also sparse, which meant that in a way it was the opposite of a true forest, the kind of forest which seemed to be defined by density. It allowed the trees new kinds of information. What then happened was that new interpreters emerged, to communicate between the soil and the trees. Little mush- rooms appeared at the base of each tree trunk. First there were chanterelles everywhere, yellow among the black earth. Underground, the threads from these fungi grew into the hairs of the roots, so that they couldn't be separated. Every- thing was a blur and tangle. The threads gathered little messages from the soil and the rock. These mushrooms were new in the forest. No one had seen them before. The trees fed the fungi their sugary drinks and in exchange the fung diverted away from the trees anything they thought might be harmful to them, the toxins or metals, and when they had gathered enough of these elements they transformed into ever crazier varieties of mushroom: porcini, cepes, boletes. Everything was a form of thinking and comparison. If water fell in one area, too far for the trees to reach, it could be transported back to the trees through the filaments of the fungi. It was an education, a little process of apparent self- assembly - the way a group of people might take over a disused gas station and somehow transform it into a cinema for the benefit of the whole community. She walked with Saratoga among the trees, and it was very beautiful, thought Celine, because it finally seemed possible that she would not need to speak."

"Maybe what was happening was a slight slippage in the things they each valued, or the way they expressed these val- ues. Marta was becoming wild in the way she imagined a future world. She liked to talk about the little revolutions that were beginning or maybe beginning on the edges of things, all over the oceans. Whereas Celine felt more restrained but also more savage or ambitious. The point was, she thought, that you couldn't think about the future using the methods you use in the present moment. You had to think about the future using future methods. Otherwise any new society would be too similar to the old societies. So they needed more original thinking. It was becoming obvious that to be in a couple with a woman was very different to being in a couple with a man. With Marta she had only private rituals, they were allowed nothing public or communal, and this was difficult to con- tinue forever. The total strangeness of what they were attempting was becoming some kind of burden too. Perhaps whatever it meant to be with another person also required other people's public and calm attention. A secrecy was always too unreal."

"It added a larger frisson to Beaumarchais's speech which, like so many speeches in the black box of literature, was about the end of literature, the death of value - because it's always agreeable to believe in the death of writing, especially if you also believe that society is dying around you. If an entire art form is dead then no one needs to worry that someone, somewhere, might be in the process of creating a work of new and exorbitant value, but instead you are personally absolved of all responsibility for the art form's absent existence."

"Celine felt that the words she was using were more and more not wrapping themselves around a situation. They were little scraps that might have been pretty and alluring but they couldn't do whatever it was she wanted them to do."

"She was troubled by any image of herself, and suffered when she was named. She wanted friendships where all images were vacant: to abolish the horror of the adjective. If you had to use adjectives, she thought, whether about a person or a piece of music or any other sensation, you were on the side of the image, and therefore of domination, and therefore of death."

"To only have a small vocabu- lary had a strange effect on reading, as if these articles or reports she was reading were hinting at a mystery that those who spoke the language more fluently might never notice. It was apparent that people here feared many things, they feared people from the North and East and West and South, they feared the black population, the people from the islands or those who had escaped from slavery in the South, they feared the Mohawks and the Sioux, and in reaction to this fear they seemed to propose a total violence against the people who made them afraid, which didn't seem rational to Celine or in any way likeable, even though the people who thought these things could also, as she knew, be very caring and attentive in different ways. It was a contradiction, and more and more Celine no longer enjoyed a state of contradiction."

"Was this, thought Celine, a greater meaning? In her lessons with Catherine it began to seem that if she were going to understand the words then she would have to think in a different way. There was a nut called a pigan or pegan or pican. There was no way, she felt, of her spelling any of these words correctly - the words seemed too intricate and slippery for her usual system of sounds. There was a word to describe the force that moved a mushroom to flower overnight through the soil. There was a word for the way the sweetgrass looked when it was ripe. What she found most difficult was the way the world was divided into the animate and the inanimate. There was a way of speaking to a person that was not the same as speaking to a notebook. It was a dif- ferent verb. She had never needed to learn this before, the way Izabela once described how Russian had its little words for repeated motion and single motion, for motion on foot or motion in a vehicle, but whereas such differences had seemed maddening to Izabela, Celine found the unusual forms out here delightful."

"If she had to define the kind of bridge she was on, thought Celine, it would be something to do with the new knowledge that Catherine was bringing her, or the new vastness she was entertaining, out here in the forests. It no longer seemed eccen- tric to think of a forest as a place that was peopled - or to believe that you could speak with the sun or animals or plants, the way she had heard voices before. It was like the world was a backdrop for voices, and there was no reason why a single voice should always be produced by a single visible thing. And it occurred to Celine very simply that the reason why this rupture or enlargement didn't alarm her was because she had invented new versions of herself already on at least two or even three occasions. The men around her talked about change - but always with this vast bedding of security around them. In any crisis it was always possible for a man to sepa- rate from his wife or begin a new job or move to a new country, and therefore never to know the true terror of ruin. And whereas this masculine security had sometimes appealed to her so much that she was even jealous of them for this extra power, she realised that to have these reinventions forced on her maybe allowed her access to a larger wisdom, however disturbing it might be."

"How does anyone think they know anything about another person? said Celine.

- I used to sleep with her, said Lorenzo.

So fucking what? said Celine. - You think that means Julia knows you too, just because she knows how much you like to lick her asshole? Again Lorenzo didn't speak, this time with a different kind of heaviness.

- You see? said Celine.

- People hate being talked about by other people. It's an absolute terror. And they were right, continued Celine more gently, sitting down opposite Lorenzo, they were absolutely right to fear it, because to be talked about by other people was the first les- son a person ever received in death, their first lesson in being turned into an object, into something that was you but also not you, at the same time. And yet when people talked about other people the conversation seemed to them so precise, so absolutely precise and pertinent, like the way, she finished he thought he understood Julia totally."

"But what do you all do here? she asked. - How do you live? Everyone began to laugh. - This is the happiest place in the universe, said Harper. We don't need to do anything. I understand this might seem weird. Humans always have to make things. Whereas here all production and reproduction is done without any effort through mediums, in code. -I don't understand, said Celine. - Think of a book, said Harper. - Or a portrait. A medium is something that allows another thing to extend its life beyond its usual boundaries. A medium is a place where life multiplies. - Sure, said Celine, - but those are just images, just words. - Maybe think about it like this, said Harper. - Ever since the universe began, it has been trying to find the best way of providing itself with information about itself. The more the universe thinks, the more it gradually organises itself, in more and more extravagant mediums. The first mediums were molecules, and cells, until gradually they assumed the form of minute organisms, then animals and fungi and plants until soon the code assumed the form of little communities. Then it became language, like books and magazines and gos sip. Then language became images. And then we arrived here."

"There was something about living at this new perspective which Celine found totally delightful. Even if she also missed bodies, she thought. She missed the feeling of someone's solid and sweating body against her. But then perhaps this was old-fashioned of her, to miss desire so much, the way she found it old-fashioned when people so needed to know who was a woman and who was a man. All of life, it seemed, had been warped by that relation."

"Celine, it felt in some way inauthentic and it occurred to her that this was possibly related to the way Julia had in many ways existed throughout her life for men, but then Celine berated herself - because it was never pos- sible to judge another woman for the way she tried to survive. It was so exhausting not to see oneself through the minds of other people that it could sometimes seem to you that every woman who did not think like you was captured or seduced, and it was important to remember not to look down on other women, because who knew what secret strategies they were pursuing? "

"It made Celine feel uneasy, as if something terrible had just happened. She had not seen this man for more than a decade, maybe two, and it was very confusing, to see him here, since he represented something so minor from her pre- vous life, but at the same time it meant that she was suddenly remembering places she had not been to for a very long time, little squares and houses or the bridges over the river. It was horrible to be so walled up in your past!"

"The garden Celine and Saratoga had constructed wasn't really a garden at all, but more a sequence of confusions. There was their studio or pavilion. And then around it was an increasingly entangled structure that wasn't entirely made by them at all. They intended it as a place of total experiment and mischling kinkiness, a series of green explosions. Every- thing was slow release and delay, as if to imagine how a landscape could be constructed involved choreographies way beyond the usual forms: into months and seasons and years."

"Julia had for not feeling anger at other people. It was easy to conquer meanness but to conquer anger was much rarer. And especially it was difficult to conquer anger at people who would not give up an image they had of you that had been formed many years ago, when you were different, in a different life."

"There the island was, still coming out between the sea and the gulf, garlanded by keys and cays and fastened by its little seines to the ocean. Everything around him was growing and multiplying. Seeds were being scattered. All the plants were working together with the sun. They were work- ing very hard to repair the terror of the indigo plantations, the fields that the white people had burned. The plants were the sun transformed into something luxuriant."

"The Author wishes The Reader to understand that he thought - long and hard- about cutting The Subject fom I Am Sovereign altogelher, but ultimately felt that to 'to so would involve a profound compromise of her febrile and unconstrained imagination (The Subject is unconvinced that The Author understands the real meaning of the word febrile). The Author sincerely hopes that The Reader will extend a measure of compassion and understanding towards herself/ the text during the following three chapters and do their best to work with The Author in imagining the extraordinary rich- ness and diversity of The Subject's potential role - as it was originally conceived - in I Am Sovereign. (The Subject also sincerely hopes that The Reader will extend a measure of compassion and understanding towards himself/his right to self- determination during the following three chapters and do their best to work with him in imagining the extraordinary richness and diversity of his actual role- as opposed to the role he is to be patronisingly grifted by The Author - in I Am Sovereign.) The Author wishes to make it clear (and she feels that this actually 'goes without saying' - although she is saying it) that it has been necessary to make certain - very subtle - adjust- ments to I Am Sovereign in order to try and counterbalance the problems engendered by The Subject's unexpected reticence. Novels are finely honed and delicate organisms. The character of Wang Shu for example) has been greally reduced and simplified as a consequence of these necessary adjustments. In the original version Wang Shu spent only a fraction of her time on the phone talking in Chinese. Several pages in which Wang Shu spoke - most touchingly and evocatively - about her skill in playing the 'erhu, a traditional two (er' in Chinese) stringed instrument with its horsetail and bamboo bow and box-like body featuring- among other exotica: python skin- were summarily eradicated. These included the moving story of Wang Sku's unsuccessful (nay, borderline tragic), audition for the Guangzhou Symphony Youth Orchestra as a teenager, her shores of extraordinary bravery and persis- tence in bouncing back from this terrible disappointment, and her eventual - joyous/life-affirming - acceptance into the National Youth Orchestra of China. In some senses these scenes represented an exquisite (and all the more so for being both utterly unexpected and immensely well judged) 'opening up' of Wang Shu, and The Author sincerely considered them to be among some of the finest work she has ever produced. judgement?.) (The Subject would not agree with this particular value-judgement"

"The character of Morpheus was added to I Am Swvereign in the final draf. In the earlier version a kitten called sindy featured, but this kitten was a tortoiseshell longhair and The Subject became irritated by the way her fur kept marking his white jeans and compromising his Look' (even though Charles kindly supplied him with a selection of lint rollers throughout the writing of I Am Sovereign's first draft). The Subject would like it to be known that The Author insisted on his wearing white jeans when in fact he had pre- ferred to wear grey, moleskin jodhpurs.) Finally, it should be noted that in the original version of I Am Sovereign the character of Avigail at no point vacates the property on Ty Isa Road. Due to her high levels of profes- sionalism, the character, Avigail, would never willingly leave clients in the lurch while showing a vendor's home. To do so would run counter to her very nature. (The Subject finds it frankly laughable' that Avigail's professionalism should be mentioned in this context. He has no idea what relevance Avigail's professionalism - or want of professionalism - has to do with the issue at hand.) In some senses The Aulhor considers it little short of a tragedy: that The Subject's decisions have impacted so heavil, on I Am Sovereign as a whole, but strenuously maintains that she respects his choices and - ultimately - bears The Subject no lasting ill will. (The Subject calls this final statement by The Author senti- mental, sententious poppycock.)"

"Unless Eckhart Tolle actually derived this phrase from Richard Grannon's sister's yoga teacher, that is. Who's to say? Everything's up for grabs, here. The Author is also thinking about re-writing the chapter about Avigail and silence (Chapter 5) because she is now wondering whether stillness is inherently more interesting (conceptually/spirit- ually) than silence, and more rarely addressed - as a subject - by other writers. It's so wearying when everything is being perpetually challenged and contested like this, though, isn't it? But shouldn't fiction strive to echo life (where everything is constantly being challenged and contested)? Or is fiction merely a soothing balm, a soft breeze, a quiet confirmation, a temporary release?"

"Why should it be either/or? Can't fiction be exquisitely paradoxical? But then which of us goes to Dreams or IKEA to buy a new mattress and then takes the thing home and carefully peels back the strong, clean fabric that neatly covers it to reveal the springs? We don't. We just bounce on to the mattress, stretch out, sigh, and fall blissfully asleep. The Author suspects that this novella (which is currently in danger of becoming a novel so needs to end quite soon) is either extremely deep or unbelievably trite. It's impossible to tell. The Author (Gyasi 'Chance' Ebo claims) will per- sist in calling it 'unbelievably trite' because she is fundamentally disingenuous. The Author (The Author claims) will persist in calling it 'unbelievably trite' because profound level - it is unbelievably trite. at some Nothing of much note happens, really, does it?""

"The Author is recently returned from a trip to Normandy, in France, which she undertook with a friend - also called Nicola - who owns a farmhouse there and happens to be one of the world's leading experts on the vulva. The Author wrote much of Chapter 7 while sitting on the grass in the other Nicola's paddock under a giant oak tree with acorns falling down all around her. On the final day of her trip, the other Nicola mentioned, in passing, that sitting in long grass may have placed The Author in danger of being attacked by a local burrowing insect which lives in the long grass in that particular region of France. Said insect burrows stealthily into the body's warm folds and crevices and generates an almost unspeakable level of itching. There is no known treatment for this itching. Although - on a positive note - the parasite can only unleash its itch on a single occasion. After falling prey to its wiles the first time, the victim will then become immune. The Author naturally asked the other Nicola why she had neglected to tell her this detail (about the burrowing insect hidden in the grass) until the final day of their holiday. The other Nicola confessed that it had slipped her mind (in the midst of a ter- rifying, ongoing, asiatic hornet infestation). The Author then exfoliated her private parts, vigorously, in the shower. The two Nicolas also collected a giant haul of quinces from a bush near the motorway ser- vices and the scent of these exquisite fruits on the kitchen table has permeated the later stages of I Am Sovereign."

"Is The Author truly Sovereign? Is The Author truly Queen of her own Serenity? On the drive from the ferry terminal, through Cal- ais, the other Nicola kept pointing to the tall, wire fences and adjacent, green patches of ground and telling The Author how on previous visits the entire area had been inhabited by young (for the most part) African men trying to find any means possible of crossing the Channel to Britain. The Author gazed, impassively, at these blank, empty, liminal spaces as they drove by in the other Nicola's little silver Audi TT sports car. Can it be any coincidence then, that only a couple of days later The Author began removing Gyasi "Chance' Ebo from the narrative? What does this mean? For The Author? What does this mean? For The Reader? What does this mean? For Gyasi Chance' Ego No! E-bo! E-bo! E-bo!"

"The Author wishes The Reader to understand that she has been AT WAR - throughout the entire novella - with auto-correct as a result of the names she has (carefully/blithely) selected for her characters. Every time The Author writes the name Wang Shu the text is automatically corrected to Wang She. Every time The Author types the name Ying Yue the text is automatically corrected to Ying Due. Every time The Author writes the name Gyasi 'Chance' Ebo, auto-correct instantly tries to alter the surname to Ego. Every time The Author writes the name Avigail, the text is automatically altered to Abigail. Imagine how The Author has cussed and hissed and growled! Imagine how The Author has railed against this all-pervasive technological urge to conformity! The overriding concept for I Am Sovereign is that it should take place, in its entirety, during a twenty- minute house viewing in Llandudno. The Author estimates that she has a minute or two left over to play around with. But The Author is determined that this book will be a novella, and every word that she types is extending the length of the novella and thereby transforming it into something bigger and more significant. The novella, as a form, is mar- vellously unobtrusive. The novella, as a form, is delightfully slight. The novella, as a form, is not too ambitious. The novella, as a form, is eminently manageable. The novella, as a form, is generally unchallenging. The novella, as a form, is unbear- ably cute. The Author has been prey to 'mixed feelings' about the novel, as a form, ever since completing her last work (H(A)PPI) which - to all intents and purposes - destroyed the novel (as a form) for The Author. How can you continue to live inside a thing that you no longer believe in? That would be like praying to a God who didn't exist, surely? No. No. I Am Sovereign. The Author just needs to hope. And she needs to love. And she needs to believe, in spite of."

"Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone. Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen min- utes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and a half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused. The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair tourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid."

"After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like Paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was be- hind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tend- ing hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings."

"At night she slept in the most modern building in Lourdes, a functionalist monster of steel and glass that buried its head, bristling with antennas, in the white clouds that floated down from the north, big and sorrowful, or marched from the west like a ragtag army whose only strength was its numbers, or dropped down from the Pyrenees like the ghosts of dead beasts."

"She read books in French about Greece or witchcraft or healthy living. Sometimes she felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise through Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes, the masses, the killer whose mind no one un- derstands, not even the FBI special agents or the charitable people who dropped coins in her hands. Other times she saw herself as the mother of Medon and Strophius, a happy mother who watches her children play from the window while behind them the blue sky struggles in the white arms of the Mediterranean. She whispered: Pylades, Orestes, and those two names stood in her mind for the faces of many men, except Amalfi- tano's, the face of the man she was looking for now."

"The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club."

"He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the peo- ple living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn't exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn't exist or hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the ex- haustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled. This was something he'd probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he'd forgotten having read."

"Anvway; these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal mem- or, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal storv of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity."

"

For a while he didn't move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer.

The idea, of course, was Duchamp's.

All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp's stay in Buenos Aires is a ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of dis-tress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geome- try book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could "go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages. " Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn't just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp's instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open book dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, "It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea." I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging "the seriousness of a book full of principles," and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, "the treatise seriously got the facts of life." "

"and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the moun- tains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind."

"When he looked at the blank sheet again he had written the following names in three columns:

Pico della Mirandola Husserl Eugen Fink Merleau-Ponty Bede St. Bonaventure John Philoponus Saint Augustine Schopenhauer Hobbes Locke Erich Becher Wittgenstein Llull Hegel Pascal Canetti Freud Boecio Alexander of Hales Marx Lichtenberg Sade Condorcet Fourier Lacan Lessing

For a while, Amalfitano read and reread the names, horizontally and vertically, from the center outward, from bottom to top, skipping and at random, and then he laughed and thought that the whole thing was a truism, in other words a proposition too obvious to formulate. Then he drank a glass of tap water, water from the mountains of Sonora, and as he waited for the water to make its way down his throat he stopped shaking, an imperceptible shaking that only he could feel, and he began to think about the Sierra Madre aquifers running toward the city in the middle of the endless night, and he also thought about the aquifers rising from their hiding places closer to Santa Teresa, and about the water that coated teeth with a smooth ocher film. And when he'd drunk the whole glass of water he looked out the window and saw the long shadow, the coffinlike shadow, cast by Dieste's book hanging in the yard."

"but you haven't thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand. That isn't true, said Amalfitano, I have thought about it, I have. If you had thought about it, said the voice, you'd be dancing to the tune of a different piper. And Amalfitano was silent and he felt that the silence was a kind of eugenics. He looked at his watch. It was four in the morning. He heard someone starting a car. The engine took a while to turn over. He got up and went over to the window. The cars parked in front of the house were empty. He looked behind him and then put his hand on the doorknob. The voice said: be careful, but it said it as if it were very far away, at the bottom of a ravine revealing glimpses of volcanic rock, rhyolites, andesites, streaks of silver and gold, petrified puddles covered with tiny little eggs, while red-tailed hawks soared above in the sky, which was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death. Amalfitano went out onto the porch. To the left, some thirty feet from his house, the lights of a black car came on and its engine started. When it passed the yard the driver leaned out and looked at Amalfitano without stopping. He was a fat man with very black hair, dressed in a cheap suit with no tie. When he was gone, Amalfitano came back into the house. I didn't like the looks of him, said the voice the minute Amalfitano was through the door. And then: you'll have to be careful, my friend, things here seem to be coming to a head."

"Then he considered other possibilities. Of course, he said to himself, he didn't believe in ghosts or spirits, although during his childhood in the south of Chile people talked about the mechona who waited for riders on a tree branch, dropping onto horses' haunches, clinging to the back of the cowboy or smuggler without letting go, like a lover whose embrace maddened the horse as well as the rider, both of them dying of fright or ending up at the bottom of a ravine, or the colocolo, or the chonchones, or the candelillas, or so many other little creatures, lost souls, incubi and succubi, lesser demons that roamed between the Cordillera de la Costa and the Andes, but in which he didn't believe, not exactly because of his training in philosophy (Schopenhauer, after all, believed in ghosts, and it was surely a ghost that appeared to Nietzsche and drove him mad) but because of his materialist leanings. So he rejected the possibility of ghosts, at least until he had exhausted other lines of inquiry. The voice could be a ghost, he wouldn't rule it out, but he tried to come up with a different explanation. After much reflection, though, the only thing that made sense was the theory of the lost soul."

"Then he woke up and made himself and his daughter something to eat. Back in his office he felt extremely tired, unable to prepare a class or read anything serious, so he returned resignedly to Kilapán's book. Sev- enteen proofs. Proof number 1 was titled He was born in the Araucanian state. It went like this: "The Yekmonchi,' called Chile,? was geographi- cally and politically identical to the Greek state, and, like it, forming a delta, between the respective latitudes of the 35th and 42nd parallels. Ignoring the construction of the sentence (where it read forming it should have read formed, and there were at least two commas too many), the most interesting thing about the first paragraph was what might be called its military slant. It began with a straight jab to the chin or a full artillery assault on the center of the enemy line. Note 1 clarified that Yekmonchi meant State. Note 2 stated that Chile was a Greek word"

"Then they recog- nized each other and relaxed and set off together toward the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, which reminded Marco Antonio of the stories of people who'd been in comas or declared clinically dead and who claimed to have seen a dark tunnel with a white or dazzling bright- ness at the end, and sometimes these people even testified to the pres- ence of loved ones who had passed away, who took their hands or soothed them or urged them to turn back because the hour or microfrac- tion of a second in which the change took effect hadn't yet arrived. What do you think, Professor? Do people on the verge of death make this shit up, or is it real? Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibil- ity? I don't know, said Amalfitano curtly, since he still hadn't gotten over his fright, and he wasn't in the mood for a repeat of their last meeting. Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if vou want to know what I think, I don't believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat."

"One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamor- phosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pick- wick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the pertect exer- cises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

"he mixed in words in English or French, words to other songs, pop ballads or tangos, tunes that cele- brated drunkenness or love. And yet these interruptions were brief and sporadic and he soon returned to the original song, in Russian, the words of which Amalfitano didn't understand (although in dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues). Still, he sensed that the words were sad, the story or lament of a Volga boatman who sails all night and commiserates with the moon about the sad fate of men con- demned to be born and to die. When the last Communist philosopher finally reached the crater or latrine, Amalfitano discovered in astonish- ment that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin. This is the last Com- munist philosopher? What kind of lunatic am I if this is the kind of nonsense I dream? And yet the dream was at peace with Amalfitano's soul. It wasn't a nightmare. And it also granted him a kind of feather- light sense of well-being. Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and sup. ply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: sup- ply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said: "I think it's time for a little drink." And after he had drunk and given the poor Chilean professor the sly squint of a hunter, he began to sing again, if possible with even more brio. And then he disappeared, swallowed up by the crater streaked with red or by the latrine streaked with red, and Amalfitano was left alone and he didnt dare look down the hole, which meant he had no choice but to wake."

"Right, said Fate, and he turned away and stared out the window at the clouds that looked like cathedrals or maybe just little toy churches abandoned in a labyrinthine marble quarry one hundred times bigger than the Grand Canyon."

"He liked to go to the rocky beaches on a Sunday and breathe the smell of the Pacific. When we were both in prison, I got postcards from him in which he told me he'd dreamed he was breathing that air. Which is strange, because I haven't met many black folks who took to the sea the way he did. Maybe none, definitely none in California. But I know what he was talking about, I know what he meant. As it happens, I have a theory about this, about why we don't like the sea. We do like it. Just not as much as other folks. But that's for another occasion. Marius told me things had changed in California. There were many more black po- lice now, for example. It was true. It had changed in that way. But in other ways it was still the same. And yet there was no denying that some things had changed. And Marius recognized that and he knew we de- served part of the credit. The Panthers had helped bring the change. With our grain of sand or our dump truck. We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep. So he de- cided he'd go back to California and live the rest of his life there, in peace, out of harm's way, and maybe he'd start a family. He always said he would call his first son Frank, after a friend who lost his life in Soledad Prison. Truth is, he would've had to have at least thirty children to pay tribute to all the friends who'd been taken from him. Or ten, and give each of them three names. Or five, and give them each six. But as it happened he didn't have any children because one night, as he was walking down the street in Santa Cruz, a black man killed him. They say it was for money. They say Marius owed him money and that was why he was killed, but I find that hard to believe. I think someone hired that man to kill him. At the time, Marius was fighting the drug trade in town and someone didn't like that. Maybe. I was still in prison so I don't really know. I have my theories, too many of them. All I know is that Marius died in Santa Cruz, where he had gone to spend a few days. He didn't live there and it's hard to imagine the killer lived there. The killer fol- lowed Marius, is what I'm saying. And the only reason I can think of why Marius was in Santa Cruz is the ocean. Marius went to see the Pa- cific Ocean, went to smell it."

"STARS. He said that people knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you're driving from Des Moines to Lin- coln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it's the oil or the radiator, maybe it's a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you're done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That's a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave. Having reached this point, Seaman warned that stars were one thing, meteors another. Meteors have nothing to do with stars, he said. Meteors, especially if they're on a direct collision course"

"with the earth, have nothing to do with stars or dreams, though they might have something to do with the notion of breaking away, a kind of breaking away in reverse. Then he talked about starfish, he said he didn't know how, but each time Marius Newell walked along a beach in California he came upon a starfish. But he also said that the starfish you Find on the beach are usually dead, corpses tossed up by the waves, with exceptions, of course. Newell, he said, could always tell the dead starfish from the ones that were still alive. I don't know how he did it. but he told them apart. And he left the dead on the beach and returned the liv- ing to the sea, tossing them near the rocks to give them a chance. Except once, when he brought a starfish home and put it in a tank, with some of that Pacific brine. This was in the early days of the Panthers, when we spent our time directing traffic in the community so cars wouldn't speed through and kill the children. A couple of stoplights would have come in handy, but the city wouldn't help us. So that was one of the first of the Panthers' roles, as traffic cops. And meanwhile Marius Newell saw to his starfish. Naturally, before too long he realized that he needed a pump for his tank. One night he went out with Seaman and little Nelson Sanchez to steal one. None of them was armed. They went to a store that special- ized in the sale of rare fish in Colchester Sun, a white neighborhood, and they went in through the back door. When Marius had the pump in his hands, there came a man with a shotgun. I thought that was the end of us, said Seaman, but then Marius said: don't shoot, don't shoot, it's for my starfish. The man with the gun didn't move. We stepped back. He stepped forward. We stopped. He stopped. We took another step back. He came after us. At last we got to the car that little Nelson was driving and the man stopped less than ten teet away. When Nelson started the car the man lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and he took aim. Step on it, I said. No, said Marius. Go slow. The car rolled out toward the main street and the man came walking after us, his gun raised. Now you can hit it, said Marius, and when little Nelson stepped on the gas the man stood still, shrinking until I saw him disappear in the rearview mirror. Of course, the pump didn't do Marius any good, and a week or two later, for all the care he'd lavished on that starfish, it died and ended up in the trash. Really, when you talk about stars you're speaking figuratively. That's metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You've used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he's seeing stars. "

"In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nine- tenth century, said the white- haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single mur. del could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn't want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terri ble crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he's afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he's about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eves. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren't invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about mad- ness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it's because polite society was so small back then. I'm talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being trans- ported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eve. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The stor didn't just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers aeross Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren't part of society, the dark sinned people who died on the ship weren't part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horse- back in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn't tell you."

"When he got back to the motel it was four in the morning. Over the course of the night he had gotten drunk and then sobered up and then gotten drunk again, and now, outside his room, he was sober again, as if instead of drinking real alcohol Mexicans drank water with short-term hypnotic effects. For a while, sitting on the trunk of his car, he watched the trucks going by on the highway. The night was cool and full of stars. He thought about his mother and what she must have thought about at night in Harlem, not looking out the window to see the few stars shining in the sky, sitting in front of the TV or washing dishes in the kitchen with laughter coming from the TV, black people and white people laugh- ing, telling jokes that she might have thought were funny, although prob- ably she didn't even pay much attention to what was being said, busy washing the dishes she had just used and the pot she had just used and the fork and spoon she had just used, peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peaceful- ness and banked embers, peacefulness and tranquillity and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness, that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then peacefulness isn't just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peace- fulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending."

"The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionist's ear. Then he sat down again and the accordionist's mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child on the verge of tears. The violinist had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the woman with the cat face bent their heads together. The narco's nose was big and bony and aristocratic look- ing. But aristocratic looking how? There was a wild expression on the ac- cordionist's face, except for his lips. Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspector's chest. The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought."

"There are odder things than sacraphobia, said Elvira Campos, especially if you consider that we're in Mexico and religion has always been a prob- lem here. In fact, I'd say all Mexicans are essentially sacraphobes. Or take gephyrophobia, a classic fear. Lots of people suffer from it. What's gephyrophobia? asked Juan de Dios Martínez. The fear of crossing bridges. That's right, I knew someone once, well, it was a boy, really, who was afraid that when he crossed a bridge it would collapse, so he'd run across it, which was much more dangerous. A classic, said Elvira Cam. pos. Another classic: claustrophobia. Fear of confined spaces. And an. other: agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. I've heard of those, said Juan de Dios Martínez. And one more: necrophobia. Fear of the dead, said Juan de Dios Martínez, I've known people like that. It's a handicap for a po- liceman. Then there's hemophobia, fear of blood. That's right, said Juan de Dios Martínez. And peccatophobia, fear of comitting sins. But there are other, rarer, fears. For instance, clinophobia. Do you know what that is? No idea, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Fear of beds. Can anyone really fear beds, or hate them? Actually, yes, there are people who do. But they can deal with the problem by sleeping on the floor and never going into a bedroom. And then there's tricophobia, or fear of hair. That's a little more complicated, isn't it? Yes, very much so. There are cases of trico- phobia that end in suicide. And there's verbophobia, fear of words. Which must mean it's best not to speak, said Juan de Dios Martínez. There's more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in si- lence, which is never complete silence, is it? And then we have vestipho- bia, which is fear of clothes. It sounds strange but it's much more widespread than you'd expect. And this one is relatively common: iatro- phobia, or fear of doctors. Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it man- ifests itself in different ways. Isn't that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women. I don't know what to say to that, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Then there are two fears that are really very romantic: ombrophobia and thalassophobia, or fear of rain and fear of the sea. And two others with a touch of the romantic: anthophobia, or fear of flowers, and dendrophobia, fear of trees. Some Mexican men may be gynophobes, said Juan de Dios Martínez, but not all of them, it can't be that bad. What do you think optophobia is? asked the director. Opto, opto, something to do with the eyes, my God, fear of the eyes? Even worse: fear of opening the eyes. In a figurative sense, that's an answer to what you just said about gynophobia. In a literal sense, it leads to violent attacks, loss of consciousness, visual and auditory hallucinations, and generally aggressive behavior. I know, though not personally, of course, of two cases in which the patient went so far as to mutilate himself. He put his eves out? With his fingers, the nails, said the director. Good God, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Then we have pedophobia, of course, which is fear of children, and ballistophobia, fear of bullets."

" That's my phobia, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Yes, I suppose it's only common sense, said the director. And another phobia, this one on the rise: tropophobia, or the fear of making changes or moving. Which can be aggravated if it be- comes agyrophobia, fear of streets or crossing the street. Not to forget chromophobia, which is fear of certain colors, or nyctophobia, fear of night, or ergophobia, fear of work. A common complaint is decidopho- bia, the fear of making decisions. And there's a fear that's just beginning to spread, which is anthrophobia, or fear of people. Some Indians suffer from a heightened form of astrophobia, which is fear of meteorological phenomena like thunder and lightning. But the worst phobias, in my opinion, are pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself. If you had to suffer from one of the two, which would you choose? Phobophobia, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Think carefully, it has its drawbacks, said the director. Between being afraid of every- thing and being afraid of my own fear, I'd take the latter. Don't forget I'm a policeman and if I was scared of everything I couldn't work. But if you're afraid of your own fears, you're forced to live in constant contem- plation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle, said the director."

"the Temple of Jerusalem to be built, he strictly forbade the use of iron as a support in the construction, even in the smallest details, and he als forbade the use of ion in circumcision, a practice, let it be said in pass. ing and with no intention to offend, that mightve had its purposes in Those days and those deserts, but now, with modern hygiene, strikes me as unnecessary, I think men should circumcise themselves at twenty-one if the want, and if they don't want to, fine. Getting back to iron, said Florita, let it also be said that neither the Greeks nor the Celts used it in the collection of medicinal or magical herbs. Because iron signified death, inflexibility, power. And this was at odds with healing practices. Though later the Romans attributed a long series of therapeutic virtues to iron, believing it relieved or cured various afflictions, like the bites of rabid dogs, hemorrhage, dysentery, hemorrhoids. This notion carried over into the Middle Ages, in which it was also believed that demons, witches, and wizards fled from iron. And why shouldn't they when iron was the instrument of their deaths! They would have been complete id- iots if they hadn't run away! In those dark years iron was used in the practice of the divinatory art called sideromancy. This consisted of heat- ing a piece of iron in the forge until it was red-hot and then tossing bits of straw on it, which burned with a blinding brightness, like the stars. The metal, well polished, served to protect the eyes from the venomous glare of witches. That makes me think, if you'll pardon the digression, said Florita Almada, about the dark glasses worn by some of our political leaders or labor bosses or policemen. Why do they cover their eyes, I ask? Have they been up all night studying how to help the country ad- vance, how to promise workers greater job security or pay raises, how to fight crime? Maybe so. It's not for me to say otherwise. Maybe that's why they have circles under their eyes. But what would happen if I went up to one of them and took off his glasses and saw that he didn't have cir- cles under his eyes? It frightens me to imagine it. It makes me angry. Very angry, dear friends. But it made her even more frightened and an- gry, and this she had to say here, in front of the cameras, on Reinaldos lovely show, so fittingly called An Hour with Reinaldo, a nice, wholesome program that gave everyone a chance to laugh and enjoy themselves and learn something new in the process,"

"The book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it. This was how he discovered Laminaria digitata, a giant seaweed with a sturdy stem and broad leaves, as the book said, shaped like a fan with numerous sections of strands that really did look like fingers. Laminaria digitata is native to cold waters like the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. It's found in large masses, at low tide, and off rocky shores. The tide often uncovers forests of this seaweed. When Hans Reiter saw a seaweed forest for the first time he was so moved that he began to cry underwater. It may be hard to believe that a human being could cry while diving with his eyes open, but let us not forget that Hans was only six at the time and in a sense he was a singular child. Laminaria digitata is light brown and resembles Laminaria hyper- borea, which has a rougher stalk, and Saccorhiza polyschides, which has a stem with bulbous protuberances. The latter two, however, live in deep waters, and although sometimes, on summer afternoons, Hans Reiter would swim far from the beach or the rocks where he had left his clothes and then dive down, he could never spot them, only fantasize that he'd seen them there in the depths, a still and silent forest. Around this time he began to draw all kinds of seaweed in a notebook. He drew Chorda filum, made up of thin strands that could nevertheless grow to be twenty-five feet long. It had no branches and looked delicate but was really very strong. It grew below the low-tide mark. He also drew Leathesia difformis, rounded bulbs of olive brown that grew on rocks and other seaweed. A strange-looking plant. He never saw it, but he often dreamed about it. He drew Ascophyllum nodosum, a dun-colored, irregu- larly patterned seaweed with oval blisters along its branches. There were male and female varieties of Ascophyllum nodosum, which produced fruitlike growths akin to raisins. In the male, they were yellow. In the female, they were a greenish color. He drew Laminaria saccharina, a single long frond in the shape of a belt. When it was dry, crystals of a sweet substance called mannitol were visible on its surface. It grew on rocky coasts, clinging to various solid objects, though it was often washed out to sea. He drew Padina pavonia, an uncommon seaweed, small and fan shaped. It was a warm-water species found from the southern coasts of Great Britain to the Mediterranean. There were no related species. He drew Sargassum vulgare, a seaweed that lived on the stony beaches of the Mediterranean and possessed small pedunculated reproductive or- gans among its fronds. It was found in shallow water as well as in the deepest seas. He drew Porphyra umbilicals, a particularly lovely sea- weed, nearly eight inches long and reddish purple in color. It grew in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the English Channel, and the North Sea. There were various species of Porphyra and all of them were edible. The Welsh, in particular, were fond of them."

"The story's reception was overwhelming. The first to be surprised, it must be said, was the writer himself. The second was the editor, who had read the story pencil in hand and didn't think much of it. Letters arrived at the magazine's offices asking for more contributions from Ivanov, that "unknown," that "promising voice" "a writer who believes in tomorrow." • "a writer who inspires faith in the future we're fighting for," and the letters came from Moscow and Petro- grad, but also from combatants and political activists in the farthest cor- ners of the country who identified with the grandfather character, which kept the magazine editor up at night, since he, a dialectical and method- ical and materialist and in no way dogmatic Marxist, a Marxist who as a good Marxist hadn't studied only Marx but also Hegel and Feuerbach (and even Kant) and who laughed heartily when he reread Lichtenberg and had read Montaigne and Pascal and was relatively familiar with the writings of Fourier, couldn't believe that of all the good things (or, to be fair, the few good things) the magazine had published, it was this story, cloyingly sentimental and with no scientific basis, that had most moved the citizens of the land of the Soviets. Something is wrong, he thought. Naturally, the editor's sleepless night was a night of vodka and jubilation for Ivanov, who decided to cel- ebrate his first success in Moscow's worst dives and then at the Writers House, where he dined with four friends who resembled the four horse- men of the Apocalypse. From then on Ivanov was asked only for science fiction stories, and after carefully scrutinizing his first, which he had more or less tossed off, he repeated the formula with variations, drawing on the riches of Russian literature and various chemistry, biology, med- ical, and astronomy publications that he accumulated in his room just as a moneylender accumulates unpaid promissory notes, letters of credit, canceled checks. In this fashion his name became known in every cor- ner of the Soviet Union and he was soon established as a professional"

"He read the futurists, the members of the Cen- trifuge group, the imagists. He read Platonov's first stories and Babel, as well as Boris Pilnyak (whom he didn't like at all) and Andrey Bely, whose novel Petersburg kept him up for four days. He wrote an essay on the fu- ture of literature, which began and ended with the word nothing. Mean- while. there was trouble in his relationship with Marya Zamyatina, who had another lover besides him, a doctor specializing in lung disease, a man who cured tuberculosis patients! And who lived most of the time in the Crimea and whom Marya Zamyatina described as if he were Jesus Christ reincarnated, minus the beard and plus a white coat, a white coat that cropped up in Ansky's dreams in 1929. And he kept working hard at the Moscow Library. And sometimes, when he remembered, he wrote letters to his parents, to which they responded with love and nostalgia and courage, never mentioning the hunger or scarcity that were rampant in the formerly fertile lands of the Dnieper. And he also had time to write a strange humor piece titled Landauer, based on the last days of the German writer Gustav Landauer, who in 1918 wrote his Address to Writers and in 1919 was executed for his participation in the Munich Soviet Republic. And in 1929, too, he read a recently published novel, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, which struck him as notable and memorable and distinguished and drove him to seek out more books by Döblin, finding in the Moscow Library The Three Leaps of Wang-lun (1915), Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Engine (1918), Wallenstein (1920), and Mountains, Seas, and Giants (1924)."

"They make their way across a vast snow-covered plain. The horses sink in the snow. The Chi- nese leader sings. How were the stars created? Who are we in the mid- de of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain? Suddenly the Chinese leader falls off his horse. The young Russian examines him. The Chinese leader is like a burning doll. The young Russian touches the Chinese leader's forehead and then his own fore- head and understands that the fever is devouring them both. With no lit- tle effort he ties the Chinese leader to his mount and sets off again. The silence of the snow-covered plain is absolute. The night and the passage of stars across the vault of the sky show no signs of ever ending. In the distance an enormous black shadow seems to superimpose itself on the darkness. It's a mountain range. In the young Russian's mind the cer- tainty takes shape that in the coming hours he will die on that snow- covered plain or as he crosses the mountains. A voice inside begs him to close his eves, because if he closes them he'll see the eyes and then the beloved face of the hypnotist. It tells him that if he closes his eyes he'll see the streets of New York again, he'll walk again toward the hypnotist's house, where she sits waiting for him on a chair in the dark. But the Russian doesn't close his eyes. He rides on."

"What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he'd had many brushes with arrest, prison, and deportation, and although he couldn't be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spine- less. Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that af- flicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an inte- gral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being over- looked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with sem- blances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming."

"After Ivanov's death, Ansky's notes grow chaotic, apparently haphazard, although amid the chaos Reiter divined a structure and a kind of order. Ansky talks about writers. He says the only viable writers (though he doesn't explain what he means by viable) are those from the underclass and the aristocracy. Proletarian and bourgeois writers, he says, are merely decorative figures."

"a rich Catholic buys the painting and no sooner does he get home than he proceeds to burn it. The ashes of The Return from the Conference float not only over Paris, reads Reiter with tears in his eyes, tears that sting and rouse him, but also over Moscow and Rome and Berlin."

"During the day he wrote and read. Writing was easy, because all he needed was a notebook and a pencil. Reading was a little harder, be- cause the public libraries were still closed and at the few bookshops one could find (most of them mobile) the prices were exorbitant. Even so, Reiter read and he wasn't the only one: sometimes he looked up from his book and everyone around him was reading too. As if all the Germans cared about was reading and food, which wasn't true but sometimes seemed to be, especially in Cologne. Meanwhile, Reiter noted, interest in sex had waned considerably, as if the war had used up men's reserves of testosterone, pheromones, de- sire, and no one wanted to make love anymore. They only fucked whores, as far as Reiter could tell from what he saw on the job. There were some women who dated the occupying forces, but even for them desire was really the mask of something else: a theater of innocence, a frozen slaughterhouse, a lonely street, a movie theater. The women he saw were like girls who've just woken from a terrible nightmare."

""My poor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, vora- cious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren't unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create any- thing like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flow- ers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wild- flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn't Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there's no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn't unworthy of the paper it's printed on, but those books or articles, if you pay close attention, are not written by them. "Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A mi- nor writer, or so it appears. The poor man's wife can testify to that, she's seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be in- controvertible. But what she's seen is only the outside. The shell of liter. ature. A semblance," said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. "The person who really writes the minor work is a se- cret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece. "Our good craftsman writes. He's absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn't know it, is watching him. It really is he who's writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary cre- ation, she's witnessing a session of hypnosis. There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much bet- ter off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all its knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There's nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recog nize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of po- ems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of stvle or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of conceal- ment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our mis fortune, the magic flower of winter!"

""Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertigi- nous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government insti- tutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry- all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back. "Plagiarism, you say? Yes, plagiarism, in the sense that all minor works, all works from the pen of a minor writer, can be nothing but pla- giarism of some masterpiece. The small difference is that here we're talking about sanctioned plagiarism. Plagiarism as camouflage as some wood and canvas scenery as a charade that leads us, likely as not, into the void. "In a word: experience is best. I won't say you can't get experience by hanging around libraries, but libraries are second to experience. Experi- ence is the mother of science, it is often said. When I was young and I still thought I would make a career in the world of letters, I met a great writer. A great writer who had probably written a single masterpiece, al- though in my judgment everything he had written was a masterpiece. "I won't tell you his name. It'll do you no good to learn it"

"thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the par- ticular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief inter- ludes that vie with one another in monstrousness"

the superficial trappings that all human beings are obliged to bear unu the deaths, like the rock of Sisyphus, yes Sisyphus, known as the cratesta men, son of Aeolus and Enarete, founder of the city of Ephyra, whic is the old name for Corinth, a city that the good Sisyphus turned into the staging ground of his happy misdeeds, because with his characteristic nimbleness of body and intellectual inclination to see every tum of fate as a chess problem or a detective story to unravel, and his instinct for laughter and jokes and jests and cracks and quips and gags and pranks and punch lines and spoofs and stories and gibes and taunts and send. ups and satires, he turned to theft, in other words parting all passersby from their belongings, even going so far as to steal from his neighbor Au- tolycus, also a thief, perhaps with the remote hope that one who steals from a thief is granted one hundred years of forgiveness, and at the same time smitten by his neighbor's daughter, Anticlea, because Anticlea was very beautiful, a treat, but the girl had an official suitor, she was prom- ised to Laertes, of subsequent fame, which didn't daunt Sisyphus, who could count on the complicity of the girl's father, the thief Autolycus, whose admiration for Sisyphus had sprung up like the regard of an ob- jective and honorable artist for another artist of superior gifts, so that even though it could be said that as a man of honor he remained true to his promise to Laertes, he didn't look unkindly upon the romantic atten- tions Sisyphus lavished on his daughter or treat them as disrespect or mockery of his future son-in-law, and in the end his daughter married Laertes, or so it's said, but only after surrendering to Sisyphus one or two or five or seven times, possibly ten or fifteen times, always with the col- lusion of Autolycus, who wanted his neighbor to plant the seed of a...

grandchild as clever as Sisyphus, and on one of these occasions Anticlea was left with child and nine months later, now the wife of Laertes, her son would be born, the son of Sisyphus, called Odysseus or Ulysses, who in fact turned out to be just as clever as his father, though Sisyphus never gave him a thought and continued to live his life, a life of excesses and parties and pleasure, during which he married Merope, the dimmest star in the Pleiades precisely because she married a mortal, a miserable mortal, a miserable thief, a miserable gangster in thrall to his excesses, blinded by his excesses, among which not least was the seduction of Tvro, the daughter of Sisyphus's brother Salmoneus, whom Sisyphus pursued not because he was interested in Tyro, not because Tyro was particularly sexy, but because Sisvphus hated his own brother and wanted to cause him pain, and for this deed, after his death, he was con- demned in hell to push a stone to the top of a hill only to watch it roll down to the bottom and then push it back up to the top of the hill and watch it roll again to the bottom, and so on eternally, a bitter punish- ment out of all proportion to his crimes or sins, the vengeance of Zeus, it's said, because on a certain occasion Zeus passed through Corinth with a nymph he had kidnapped, and Sisyphus, who was smarter than a whip, seized his chance, and when Asopus, the girl's father, came by in desperate search of his daughter, Sisyphus offered to give him the name of his daughter's kidnapper, but only if Asopus made a fountain spring up in the city of Corinth, which shows that Sisyphus wasn't a bad citizen or perhaps he was thirsty, to which Asopus agreed and the fountain of crystalline waters sprang up and Sisyphus betrayed Zeus, who, in a blind rage, sent him ipso facto to Thanatos, or death, but Sisyphus was too much for Thanatos, and in a masterstroke perfectly in keeping with his craftiness and sense of humor he captured Thanatos and threw him in chains, a feat within reach of very few, truly very few, and for a long time he kept Thanatos in chains and during all that time not a single human being died on the face of the earth, a golden age in which men, though still men, lived free of the anxiety of death, in other words, free of the anxiety of time, because now they had more than enough time, which is perhaps what distinguishes a democracy, spare time, surplus time, time to read and time to think, until Zeus had to intervene personally and Thanatos was freed and then Sisyphus died."

"a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax col- lectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one's fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark. "

"Over the course of the next few days, very cold days all over Europe, Bubis read the manuscript of Inheritance and despite the chaos of the text, in the end he was left with a feeling of great satisfaction, because Archimboldi had lived up to all the hopes he had placed in him. What hopes were these? Bubis didn't know, or care to know. They certainly didn't involve Archimboldis steady output, which was something any hack could achieve, or his storytelling powers, of which Bubis had been convinced since The Endless Rose, or his capacity to inject new blood into the sclerotic German language, a deed accomplished, in Bubiss judgment, by two poets and three or four fiction writers, among whom he counted Archimboldi. But it wasn't that. What, then? Bubis didn't know, although he felt it, and not knowing didn't trouble him in the least, among other reasons perhaps because knowing only led to trouble, and he was a publisher and God's ways truly were mysterious."

"Pure blather, thought the baroness, who had never believed in ghosts or ideologies, only in her body and the bodies of others, as she walked through the Campo Ghetto Nuovo and then crossed the bridge to the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, and turned left onto Calle Turlona, all old houses, buildings propping each other up like little old Alzheimer's pa- tients, a jumble of houses and mazelike passageways where distant voices could be heard, worried voices asking questions and offering an- swers with great dignity, until she reached Archimboldi's door, in a house that gave no clear indication, within or without, as to which floor one was on, whether it was the third or the fourth, perhaps the third and a half."

"According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one pur- pose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise some-thing and he'll come back to Earth,"

"He lived for a while on Icaria. Then he lived on Amorgos. Then on San- torini. Then on Sifnos, Syros, and Mykonos. Then he lived on a tiny is- land, which he called Hecatombe or Superego, near the island of Naxos, but he never lived on Naxos. Then he left the islands and returned to the Continent. In those days he ate grapes and olives, big dry olives which in taste and consistency were like clods of dirt. He ate white cheese and cured goat cheese that was sold wrapped in grape leaves and could be smelled from one thousand feet away. He ate very hard black bread that had to be softened with wine. He ate fish and tomatoes. Figs. Water. The water came from a well. He had a bucket and a jerry can like the kind they used in the army that he filled with water. He swam"

"The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A scent of fowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard a dog bark. The essayist, who had remained standing in the doorway as Archimboldi examined the room, handed him the keys and assured him that here, though he might not find happiness, which in any case didn't exist, he would find peace and quiet. Then Archimboldi went down to the essayist's room, which was on the first floor and looked like an exact copy of the room he'd been assigned, not so much because of the furnishings and size, but because of the bareness. Anyone would sav thought Archimboldi, that the essayist was another new arrival. There were no books, no clothes strewn about, no wastepaper or personal ef. fects, nothing to differentiate it from his room except for an apple on a white plate on the nightstand. As if reading his thoughts, the essayist met his eyes. His expression was perplexed. He knows what I'm thinking and now he thinks the same thing and can't understand it, just as I can't understand it, thought Archimboldi. Actually, the look on their faces was more a look of sadness than perplexity. But there's the apple on the white plate, thought Archimboldi. "That apple has a seent at night," said the essavist. "When I turn out the light. It smells as strongly as Rimbaud' Voyelles. But everything col lapses in the end," said the essayist. "Everything collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain. I understand, said Archimboldi, although he didn't understand at all. Then they shook hands and the essayist closed the door."

"The overgrown hedges on both sides of the lane that led down to the cove were singing. Sparrows and wrens and swal- lows darted in and out of the gorse and the blackthorn and the hawthorn. There was a blackbird on the telegraph wires, singing its heart out. I stopped to pick a yellow gorse flower, rubbing it between my fingers to smell the coconut. The black- thorn had already started flowering in places, the dead-looking twigs surging unexpectedly into life. When I squinted at it, the blackthorn seemed to be frothing. The road was covered in white petals, like a dusting of snow, or confetti left over from a wedding. Daffodils marched in rows through the fields"

"In 2012, a modern group calling themselves Diggers 2012 set up camp on a piece of abandoned ground at the Runnymede Campus of Brunel University. Runnymede was the place where King John signed the Magna Carta, which put commoners' rights into law, although most of these rights have since been eroded. The land the modern Diggers occupied had been unused for six years. The Diggers called it Runnymede Eco Village. They were forcibly evicted, because the unused land was earmarked by developers for luxury flats." One way to make the earth a common treasury for all, both rich and poor, would be to introduce a land tax. 12 The revenue could be invested in a sovereign wealth fund that could one day fund a Universal Basic Income' - the modern equivalent of the right to farm the commons, ensuring that 'every one that is born in the land may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth'. In his book, All That is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster, Danny Doling explains how not having a land tax is one of the factors underpinning serious economic inequality: when land prices rise, as they have risen in the UK, someone is making a mint out of doing nothing but starting off rich. Only those who start off rich can own great quantities of land and then buy more. "

"When I was a child, I used to imagine running away and living in this cave, wrapping myself up in seaweed at night, like the seal pups in my favourite book. I's a good thing I didn't, because the cave fills up with water at high tide and it's most likely I would have drowned. Since I last visited the cave, several years ago, boulders had gathered in its mouth, like teeth. There was a small patch of wet sand in front of the boulders, where I sat, sheltering from the worst of the wind watching the band of rain travel towards me, heralded these great waterfalls of light that were pouring out of the grey sky and gathering in lakes of silver on the surface of the ocean. If I had been there between two and three hundred million years ago, I would not have been shivering in the mouth of a cave. I would have been standing in the centre of a mountain range the size of the Himalayas. Like the Himalayas (which are still getting bigger) the mountains that used to tower into the sky on this peninsula were caused by a kind of tectonic traffic accident, when the continents now known as Europe and America slowly crashed into each other, squeezing the land upwards. Then the continents of Europe and America, or rather the plates underneath them, slowly bounced back, away from each other, creating a gap, which we call the Atlantic. The plates are still moving. The Atlantic is widening at a rate of two millimetres per year."

"Before enclosure, in rural Britain, ordinary people's means of survival were guaranteed by common land. Villagers had the right to grow food, graze livestock and collect firewood. Over the centuries, these rights have been eroded, and so has the sense of entitlement that went with them. Not only has common land disappeared, but so has public land. Since I was born, ten per cent of the total land in Britain has been sold by the state to private developers. It used to be possible to squat in disused buildings, and such things as squatters' rights. In 2012, squatting was made illegal. No wonder house prices were going up and up, along with rates of anxiety and depression. If you didn't own property, then you weren't entitled to anything. All you could do was hope the people who owned the factories (and the call centres, and the industrial farms, and the department stores, and the landed estates) would pay you enough to satisfy the demands of the people who owned the land and the houses - often the same people."

"After university, I discovered I had a talent for getting wasted, and swapped bingeing for drugs. Recreational drugs suppressed my appetite and covered up the underlying problems that caused me to starve and binge in the first place. But the positive feelings that came from chemicals were fleeting and the flip side was anxiety and depression, which led me straight back to the eating disorders. When I was stressed or lonely or sad, I still displaced the feelings on to food, eating too much or too little, or just worrying about it, wasting my life worrying about looking wrong or being the wrong shape. Since I was a teenager, the number of people suffering from eating disorders had been rising by about seven per cent every year. 7 lain Pirie, Associate Professor in Politics and Interna- tional Studies at Warwick University, argues that it's not just the way women are represented in the media that's helping to fuel this rise (a well-documented problem), but capitalism itself, which has corrupted our relationship with our own bodies and the food that sustains them. Pirie argues that the cycle of bingeing and purging that characterizes bulimia ner. vosa is similar to the accelerated and chaotic consumption that underpins modern culture and is vital for economic growth, s The conflicting expectations placed on our bodies by adver- tiers - bombarding us with messages that food is a reward and a compensation (Have a break, have a KitKat), while at the same time telling us that not eating puts us higher on the moral and social hierarchy - are actually deadly.* Eating so much it hurts and then throwing it up in a fit of utter self-loathing is the perfect metaphor for consumerism. There is a fatal conflict between the needs of the economy, manifested as increasingly raucous advertising and a fetish for growth, and the needs of people, animals, and the ecosystems that support us, the planet we must all call home."

"It rather defeats the object of having a house, if you can't afford to live in it,' said Justin, 'but I make nearly as much money in three months, renting my house out, as I do in a whole year of working.' We opened the beers and drank them outside, sitting on the pallets by the shower tray and the tap. The sparrows must have had their babies, because they were flying between the hedge and the hole in the shed with insects and worms in their beaks, instead of leaves and twigs. Being a sparrow was hard, especially lately. Three quarters of the sparrows in the UK had disappeared since I was born. If it carried on like that, sparrows would soon be an endangered species. You didn't expect sparrows to be endangered. Endangered things were glamorous and foreign and mythical, like polar bears and elephants and albatrosses. Not sparrows. Sparrows were everyday birds, small and brown and ordinary-looking. It was difficult to even imagine a world without sparrows."

"It was a sort of natural law, like a table having to have four legs the same length in order to stand up. Technology, furniture, work- they had their place, but their place was a means, not an end. It was the same with houses. They were supposed to facilitate living not be the point and purpose of life."

"I dived under a wave, pushing the front of my board down with my hands and kicking the back of it down with my right foot, or trying to. I was not very good at duck diving, which meant I spent more time underwater than most surfers. I'd developed the habit of keeping my eyes and mouth open under- water, letting the brine swill around in my mouth. I found it extraordinary that I could let seawater wash in and out of my open mouth without drowning. The reason I didn't drown was the same reason I sometimes got hiccups that went on for ages. The reflex that keeps people hiccuping once they've started is controlled by a nerve that allows the lungs to open enough to take a breath of air and then close off suddenly before gulping water - essential for amphibians, and a hangover from when humans were fish. In our first few weeks in the womb, we all still look like fish. Our eyes are on the sides of our head, our top lip and jaw are like gills on our neck, and our nostrils are on the top of our head. The cleft above our top lip is evidence of the way our faces rearrange themselves in the embryonic stage, according to evolution, so that we re born, not fish, but human."

"'There is a widespread assumption that self-nourishment stands in opposition to what Thoreau would have called phil lanthropy. Philanthropy', from the Greek philanthropos, which means man-loving, is defined in the OED as 'the desire to promote the welfare of others'. I had grown up with this assumption that philanthropy was expressed by action, and my friend's comment got me where it stung. I closed the laptop and drove back to the shed. I ran the exchange backwards and forwards in my mind, trying to work out where I actually stood, as opposed to where I stood because I was in the habit of standing there. I did not like to be thought of as lazy and selfish, and I did respect my friend's efforts to save the planet. However, I also agreed with Thoreau, who believed that philanthropy was "greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it',29 There was something increasingly radical in doing nothing, it seemed to me, within a society that had a fetish for being busy. Twiddling one's thumbs in mighty solitude was never going to look like saving the planet, but at least I wasn't causing any harm. 'To the extent that we consume, in our present circum- stances, we are guilty,' wrote Wendell Berry. "To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd". It was Wendell Berry who used the word usufruct* in a critique of capitalism, arguing that, the dispossession and privation of some cannot be an acceptable or normal result of the economic activity of others'." It was hard for me to do anything without adding to the dispossession and privation of others. Every time I went anywhere in my car, I was polluting the atmosphere my neighbours needed for their survival, not to mention contrib- uting towards total climate breakdown. Every time I had a cup of coffee, I was helping to justify deforestation.t3 Every time I logged on to the internet, I was helping to justify the existence of an industry that, on current trends, would be using one fifth of the entire world's electricity and releasing five per cent of its total carbon emissions by 2025.33 American data centres (places where computers store, process and share information) were going to need as much energy as the whole of Hinkley Point B nuclear power station, the equivalent of 73 billion kilowatt-hours of energy, by 2020,34 Just imagine the reduction in carbon emissions if everyone in the whole world spent half an hour a day twiddling their thumbs."

"When I was forty-five and I realized it wasn't all in front of me anymore. At least half of it, and probably the better half, was behind me.'

"How do you cope?"

" I spend a lot of time twiddling my thumbs in mighty soli- tude, in the hope that the reason for my existence will suddenly reveal itself. I have discovered it hurts less, in the long run, to embrace my solitude than to try to escape from it. I tell myself that life is a phenomenological event and I'm just observing. That's how I cope with being fifty-two and still working in a cafe for six pounds seventy-five an hour.'

It started to rain. Justin gathered up the tray with the teapot and the jug of milk and the two cups on it. I followed him into the cafe. Justin sat on the fridge and I leaned against the freezer.

"Has it worked? Has the reason for your existence revealed itself to you?'

"Not yet. I live in hope.' Justin snarled again. "Although, it's probably worth bearing in mind that, when the sophists exam- ined the problem of existence, they found that nothing existed, and that, even if something did exist, then nothing could be known about it, and that, even if something could be known about it, then that knowledge could never be transmitted"

"Well, that is encouraging."

"Basking sharks are the second-biggest fish in the world, after whale sharks. Some basking sharks are twelve meters long. Once, when I was a teenager, I got close enough to a basking shark to touch it. Its skin felt like sandpaper. I loved the fact that nobody knew where they went in the winter. Until 2008, when a female was tagged for eighty-eight days and it was revealed that she swam all the way from the UK to Newfoundland, in Canada, a distance of more than 2000 miles."

"I leaned back against a rock and thought about my shed and watched the light getting sucked westwards until it vanished altogether, leaving us in shadow. There was something spe- cial about the light in early autumn, the way it seemed to get under the skin of the cliffs, showing the lined beauty of them, the history that had been scarred on to their faces by time and weather and sea, just like time and weather had put lines on my own face. The cliffs made me feel better about growing old. The sea was picking up the very last of the sun. It seemed to be made out of liquid glitter. The cliffs on each side of the bay were like circling arms. It was so beautiful, it made my heart ache."

"I didn't travel very far, because I didn't have money for diesel, but I had plenty of books, and what I lost in range, I gained in depth. I saw things that winter I'd never seen before, even though I had lived on the peninsula for most of my life. The world seemed to get smaller and bigger at the same time. On the one hand, there was the mundane repetition of the things I had to do to survive, and, on the other hand, there was the vast ocean and the empty cliffs and the great tent of a sky that filled up with stars on clear nights. The fact that the stars existed many hundreds of millions of light years away put the usual strain on my imagination. I struggled to hold both realities in my head at the same time: the reality of my daily life, and the reality of the vast and unknowable universe that was the backdrop to it. I stopped worrying about the reason for my existence. The longer I lived in such close proximity to the mysterious earth and the restless ocean and the storms that tore across the peninsula at night and tried to blow my house down, the more I felt that existence itself was significant, and the more I wanted to suck all the marrow out of it, as Thoreau wrote in Walden, and not, when I came to die, feel that I hadn't lived. I loved the sight of the cliffs when they were drenched in rain or mist, looming dormant under the wide sky, guarding the frontier between land and sea. I loved them most when the winds were blowing gales and the air was like a solid wall that could hold me up if I leaned against it. I liked watching the crows ride the currents, fast, out of control, like they were surfing the air. I liked watching them tack back again, facing the extremes of nature, like robust, black-winged sailing boats."

"The Green Party recently suggested that we should measure wealth in terms of free time instead of money. By that measure, I was loaded. I spent my free time on the ongoing art project that was my life, and my spare time making the small amount of money I needed to survive."

"Instead of social housing, there are private landlords like Charles Gow, who owns at least forty ex-council properties,3 (His father, Ian Gow, was a Conservative minister and Thatcher aide during the peak years of the Right-to-Buy boom.) Since the mid-1990s, thanks to the lack of rent control in the UK. landlords like Charles Gow have made an average profit of 16.3 per cent on buy-to-let mortgages. Rents in London rose by 9 per cent in 2012 alone.3 As George Monbiot put it, Landlords now possess the kind of power once wielded by Norman barons:'34 In 2015, the Conservative government introduced a policy called Help to Buy. Help to Buy, a system of government-backed loans for first-time buyers, was presented as a way to get more people on to the housing ladder and to encourage developers to build more houses. It didn't apply to the people who need homes the most, the millions with less than a hundred pounds in savings, because to apply for a loan you needed to have five per cent of the value of the house you wanted to buy anywhere between 10,000 and £25,000. In fact, Help to Buy helped to make housing even more unaffordable by helping to keep house prices artificially high. The loans funnelled public money into the pockets of private developers, leaving the taxpayer with all the risk. "

"The vast majority of people in the UK would benefit greatly from a tax on the value of land. As Danny Dorling points out, Few people own very large gardens, let alone grouse moors or office blocks. The land value tax would also revolutionise commercial property taxation. In one step, the nature of our relationship with land, property and housing would change." Council tax bills would fall as those who could afford to pay were forced to shoulder more of the cost of the services that add value to their property. Housing would be cheaper and more plentiful: 'A land tax means there is less economic sense in one family owning as many homes and as much land as possible, as it becomes more expensive to own more than you need. "