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—He’s right, for Christ sake, everybody suffers, the crime is in this world you suffer and it doesn’t mean a God-damned thing, it doesn’t fit anywhere. You can stand any suffering if it means something, Anselm went on rapidly, but still as though suppressing some specific thing which filled his mind. —The only time suffering’s unbearable is when it’s meaningless, he finished, muttering.
At that Otto raised an eyebrow and licked his lip, preparing to quote the lines with which Gordon reduced Priscilla toward the close of Act II, the scene in the doorway of the summer cottage which glittered before him even now, as though in production. GORDON: Suffering, my dear Priscilla, is a petty luxury of mediocre people. You will find happiness a far more noble, and infinitely more refined . . .
—You remember what Montherlant has to say, Max interrupted them. —Le bonheur est un état bien plus noble et bien plus raffiné que la souffrance . . . His French was unprofessional and surprisingly clear. Otto muttered impatiently at being interrupted the moment he had started to speak, and turned to ask Stanley if he had ever read any of Vainiger, as Max finished, —le petit luxe des personnes de médiocre qualité.
oh my god
The first thing she saw when she entered her apartment was the unnatural radiance of the sunlamp. Agnes Deigh paused there, still holding her keys, as though to appreciate fully the affliction before her, worse second by second as she hesitated, considering what might have happened had she not arrived; even perhaps that there was still time for her to leave, quietly as she had come, back into the transfigurating weather: but before she was able to contain this possibility sufficient to examine it, and find there one of those mortal shocks with which life rarely presents us opportunity to abandon the bonds of circumstances woven with such care, and start off upon any of a thousand alternative courses among which, like the needle in the haystack, lies the real one: habit betrays us, as it betrayed Agnes Deigh. She put a hand on the Swede’s shoulder, and made a sound.
She had, indeed, got a stern look on her face which none of them had ever seen; but as quick as it had come, it softened to one of weary disappointment. Then she said thoughtfully, not looking at anyone, —The people who demand pity of you hate you afterward for giving it. They always hate you afterward. She watched him plod across the room as though in deep snow.
—I’m a writer, he answered.
—Oh. What sort of thing do you do? Esther asked, dropping the weight of his hand, and looking down as though she expected to see it drop to the floor.
—Write.
—Yes, but . . . ah . . . fiction?
—My book has been translated into nineteen languages.
—I must know it, Esther said. —I must know of it.
—Doubt it, said the modest author. —Never been published.
—But you said . . .
—I’ve translated it myself. Nineteen languages. Only sixty-six more to go, not counting dialects. It’s Celtic now. A lovely language, Celtic. It only took me eight months to learn Celtic. It ought to go in Celtic.
—You mean be published?
—Yes, published in Celtic. Sooner or later I’ll hit a language where they’ll publish it. Then I can retire to the country. That’s all I want, to retire to the country. Erse is next.
—It must be an awfully dirty book, said Buster.
Mr. Crotcher gave him a look of firm academic hatred which no amount of love, in any expression, could hope to erase. —It is a novel about ant life, he said.
lmao
—I think it went away, the toothache, it didn’t last, but my work, it’s an organ concerto but it isn’t finished yet.
—But you’ve been working on it for months.
—For years, he said. —And you know, I look at the clean paper that I’m saving to write the finished score on, and then I look at the pile of . . . what I’ve been working on, and, well I can see it all right there, finished. And yet, well . . . you know I never read Nietzsche, but I did come across something he said somewhere, somewhere where he mentioned “the melancholia of things completed.” Do you . . . well that’s what he meant. I don’t know, but somehow you get used to living among palimpsests. Somehow that’s what happens, double and triple palimpsests pile up and you keep erasing, and altering, and adding, always trying to account for this accumulation, to order it, to locate every particle in its place in one whole . . .
—You should have known, Bildow cried out at him as he slogged toward them.
—Whut?
—This, this . . . poem, this thing of Max’s, you wrote that essay on Rilke last spring, you . . .
—Rilke, but that was on Rilke, Rilke the man, an essay on Rilke the man . . .
this is like the funniest exchange in the whole book. some guy plagiarizes rilke in some magazine and the editor of the publication had written an essay about rilke lol
Undisciplined lights shone through the night instructed by the tireless precision of the squads of traffic lights, turning red to green, green to red, commanding voids with indifferent authority: for the night outside had not changed, with the whole history of night bound up in it had not become better nor worse, fewer lights and it was darker, less motion and it was more empty, more silent, less perturbed, and like the porous figures which continued to move against it, more itself.
i just like this
—And you! what do you want? Basil Valentine burst out, advancing again as this figure before him moved backwards up the room, not unsteady, but from side to side, back toward the staircase and the hulk flung at its foot. —Yes, your by all that’s ugly! And you, handling you like a jewel, he went on, his voice rising. —You and your work, your precious work, your precious van der Goes, your precious van Eyck, your precious not van Eyck but what I want! And your precious Chancellor Rolin, look at him there, look at him. Yes, why didn’t you paint him into a Virgin and Child and Donor? Do you think it’s any different now? That that fat-faced Chancellor Rolin wasn’t just like him? Yes, swear to me by all that’s ugly! Valentine hissed, and got breath. —Vulgarity, cupidity, and power. Is that what frightens you? Is that all you see around you, and you think it was different then? Flanders in the fifteenth century, do you think it was all like the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb? What about the paintings we’ve never seen? the trash that’s disappeared? Just because we have a few masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces? What about the pictures we’ve never seen, and never will see? that were as bad as anything that’s ever been done. And your precious van Eyck, do you think he didn’t live up to his neck in a loud vulgar court? In a world where everything was done for the same reasons everything’s done now? for vanity and avarice and lust? and the boundless egoism of these Chancellor Rolins? Do you think they knew the difference between what was bizarre and what was beautiful? that their vulgar ostentation didn’t stifle beauty everywhere, everywhere? the way it’s doing today? Yes, damn it, listen to me now, and swear by all that’s ugly! Do you think any painter did anything but hire himself out? These fine altarpieces, do you think they glorified anyone but the vulgar men who commissioned them? Do you think a van Eyck didn’t curse having to whore away his genius, to waste his talents on all sorts of vulgar celebrations, at the mercy of people he hated?
—You’re just looking for her? It’s . . . her you came for, then? His arms were moving in the dark as though he could scarcely keep himself upright in the thick gloom which seemed to have risen about them. —But I’ve been looking for you! he burst out. And then he did go off balance on the ice, taking a step back from the eyes which had penetrated him and emptied his face. —And she . . . he got out, recovering his balance with another step back, —I don’t know. I don’t know where she is, he said, and repeated it slowly, but as clear, —I don’t know where she is . . . hesitated, and stood still. And when he raised his eyes, looking east toward the hospital, he was alone in the street. The wind had gone down, and the still cold was unbearable. He stood numb, surrounded by ice, among the frozen giants of buildings, as though to dare a step would send him head over heels in a night with neither hope of morning to come nor heaven’s betrayal of its triumphal presence, in the stars.
In patiently prolonged collision with the sea (to such an untropical degree of frankness that a concrete length of seawall is necessary to separate them), and then retreating up the hills, lies the Central American port of Tibieza de Dios. Shiploads of iron beds, houses of broken bannisters whose paint is unable to tell to the querulous eye of the foreigner (for no native would question) what was its original color, indeed has forgotten itself, the streetlights bare electric bulbs strung on wires, it has the transient air of a ragged carnival never dismantled. The population is largely black. It is governed by descendants of Spain who live on the central plateau, given work by an American fruit company whose white employees live between ten strands of barbed wire and the sea, and its modesty and sophistication are at once satisfied in acres of brilliant calico provided by the Tibieza Trading Company, a family of seventeen Chinese, all male, and all different shapes, whose veranda card game never ends.
amazing