Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.
Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.
I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.
How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?
Then came the culmination in ignominy of a long career or splendour and sleaze, glory and tastelessness in movies: The Canonball Run 2.
His schoolmates had never really known him. Even his loving familiy could not tell for sure what lay within this kid who moseyed around among them with a hat on, singing. There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick. That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be.
Unlettered and rough-cut, Dino possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years – anyone trying to fuck with his mind or his body or his soul found this out forthwith. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth and all such frail and flimsy lepidoptera would in their seasons emerge and thrive, wither and die. The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.
Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself.
There was a picnic in Beatty Park. Roozy had gotten hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, and they were all going to be in pictures. No one who saw that movie ever forgot it. The camera captured the silent laughter of the Crocettis and the Barrs. It followed Dino’s friends back and forth as they ran and fumbled, threw and jumped in a makeshift football game. There was merriment everywhere, but there was no Dino. Then the camera scanned to the right, to a tree off in the distance, and there he was by himself under the tree, away from it all, caught unawares and expressionless, abstractedly toying with a twig, sort of mind-whittling it. That was Dino, all right; the Dino inside the Dino who sang and swore and loafed and laughed.
He was born alone. He would die alone. These truths, he, like every punk, took to heart. But in him they framed another truth, another solitary, stubborn stone in the eye of nothing. There was something, a knowing, in him that others did not apprehend. He was born alone, and he would die alone, yes. But in between — somehow — the world in all its glory would hunker down before him like a sweet-lipped High Street whore.
“I hired him,” Hawks remembered, “because an agent wanted me to meet him. And I said, ‘Well, get him around here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’ The agent said, ‘He can’t be here at nine.’ So he came in about ten-thirty, and I said, ‘Why the hell couldn’t you be here at nine o’clock?’ He said, ‘I was working in Las Vegas, and I had to hire an airplane and fly down here.’ And that made me think, ‘Well, my Lord, this guy really wants to work.’ So I said, ‘You’d better go over and get some wardrobe.’ He said, ‘Am I hired?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Anybody who’ll do that ought to get a chance to do it.’ He came back from wardrobe looking like a musical-comedy cowboy. I said, ‘Dean, look, you know a little about drinking. You’ve seen a lot of drunks. I want a drunk. I want a guy in an old dirty sweatshirt and an old hat.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to tell me any more.’ He went over, and he came back with the outfit that he wore in the picture. He must have been successful because Jack Warner said to me, ‘We hired Dean Martin. When’s he going to be in this picture?’ I said, ‘He’s the funny-looking guy in the old hat.’ ‘Holy smoke, is that Dean Martin?’
“Dean did a great job. It was fun working with him. All you had to do was tell him something. The scene where he had a hangover, which he did in most of the scenes, there was one where he was suffering, and I said, ‘Look, that’s too damn polite. I knew a guy with a hangover who’d pound his leg trying to hurt himself and get some feeling in it.’ ‘Okay, I know that kind of guy,’ he said. ‘I can do it.’ And he went on and did the scene with no rehearsal or anything.”
'Go pack your bags,’ he told us. ‘And remember, don’t pay the bill.'
I can scarcely remember any other details of that time of my life. I've almost forgotten my parents' faces.
I don’t remember if I ever thought about the future in those days. I imagine I lived in the present, making vague plans to run away, as I do today, and hoping to see them soon, him and Jacqueline, in the Café Dante.
But Jacqueline is the one playing. Her arms and shoulders scarcely move as the machine rattles and flashes.
As I went along I too had forgotten nearly everything about my life, and each time whole stretches of it had fallen to dust I’d felt a pleasant sensation of lightness.
But surely she hadn’t forgotten those days…. Unless her present life had erased them, in the same way that the blinding beam from a spotlight throws everything outside its path into the deepest shadows.
Every morning I went and wrote near Holland Park, and I was no longer in London but in front of Gare du Nord and walking along the Boulevard de Magenta. Today, thirty years later, in Paris, I am trying to escape from this month of July 1994 to that other summer, when the breeze gently caressed the boughs of the tree in Holland Park. The contrast of shadow and sun was the strongest I have ever seen.
I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.
The general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error.
I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.
I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life, I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.
Long before I stopped writing, I had come to understand that I had never created any character or imagined any plot. My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination.
I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were completely different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them.
Very early in his life, the chief character became accustomed to thinking of his mind as a place. It was, of course, not a single place but a place containing other places: a far-reaching and varied landscape.
He was no mere observer of mental scenery. He was not long in learning that he could alter certain details and have them stay as he preferred them to be.
Some of what I had written had been published, but most of it had been stored as manuscripts or typescripts in my filing cabinets and will be there still when I die.
This might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read... I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced life for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction.
... a long stretch of grassy plains, with a line of trees in the far distance.
