magpie nest

@tseneipgam

(RIP golden age of tumblr, this is just a book worm diary now)

9,859 posts

"Then he looked back and saw the road was empty. It made him feel as sad as a house without furniture"

"And on the main road whose long ribbon of dust stretched endlessly away, along sunken lanes where trees bowed down like cradles, on paths where the corn reached up to his knees, with the sun on the back of his neck and morning air in his nostrils, heart filled with the bliss of the night, spirit at peace and flesh content, he would go on his way chewing over his happiness like someone who can still taste the truffles that they have just eaten for dinner."

"Charles's conversation was as flat as a pavement, and other people's ideas and thoughts passed by on it in their everyday clothes withoul arousing any emotion, laughter or dreams."

"Emma never stopped to wonder whether she loved him. In her view love always arrived suddenly, accompanied by claps of thunder and bolts of lightning - a storm from heaven that bursts over your life, tuts it upside down, scatters your intentions like leaves, sweeps your healt into the abyss. She didn't realize that when the gutters are blocked, lit Vain makes pools of water on the retrace of a house, so she was livié in perfect peace of mind when sudden she found a crack in the wall"

"He said, almost to him- self, I shouldn't have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well? looked at Bob. 'Really?' I said. He nodded. "But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,' I said. "Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corpo- rate and political and religious psychopaths ruin econo- mies. They ruin societies. This - Bob was saying - was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The an- swer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right. You're standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psycho- paths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the rocks thrown into the still pond."

"The man got worried and said, "What kind of weapons have they OM,, 801?" Coyote said, "They have secret weapons. I can't tell you." But when he was really worried, she told him, "They have huge guns that shoot magic bullets that turn human people into bears. I brought a couple of the bullets." And she showed him the bear's testicles. All the warriors came and looked and said, "What can we do?" Coyote said, "Well, what you ought to do is this. Your general should shoot his magic bullets at the bears, and turn them human." But the general said, "No. Get that coyote out of here, she only makes trouble!" They started shooting at Coyote, and she ran away. The war began. The bears had their hearts and claws, the humans had tobacco smoke and guns. The humans shot and killed all the bears one after another, all but a few, just four or five who had come late to the war and could get away. They ran away and hid in the wilderness. There they met Coyote. "What did you do that for, Coyote?" they said. "Why didn't you help us? All you did was steal the balls off our best warrior!" Coyote said, "If I could have got the balls off that human man, everything would have been all right. Listen. Those people fuck too often and think too fast. You bears only fuck once a year and sleep too much. You haven't got a chance against them. Stay here with me. I don't think war is the way to live with those people." So the bears stayed in the wilderness. Most animals stayed in the wilderness with Coyote. Not the ants, though. They wanted to make war with the humans, and they did, and they're still at it."

"That song will be sung when dying begins. It may be sung for a short time or a long time. The person dying may be able to sing with the watchers then, singing aloud or silently while going into death. The others, the watchers, keep watching and listening as they sing. When it is time to sing the second song for the dying they will know, because the person dying has become still, or the breath is trying to get free. When the pulse and breath have ceased, the third song is begun. When the face is cold, it is ceased. The teacher tells these things between singing the songs, and teaches also that any of the watchers' songs may be sung again and again until the dying is over. The fourth and fifth songs are to be sung first at the burial, and aloud thereafter at any time or place for four days, and aloud at the grave after that for five days, and after that only in silence, in the mind, until the next World Dance. After that they should not be sung for that person."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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.

"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."

"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"

"Once elevated by Descartes to "master and propritor of nature," man has now become a mere thing the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world of life"...has neither value nor interest: it eclipsed, forgotten from the start"

"As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distin- guished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths par- celed out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world. To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic."

"What does Cervantes's great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote's hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel's core not an inquiry but a moral position. Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irre- d pressible desire to judge before he understands. Reli- gions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its lan- guage and relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the vic tim of a narrow-minded tvrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court repre- sents divine justice and K. is guilty. This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to toler- ate the essential relativity of things human, an inabil- ity to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand."

"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)."

"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.)"

"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."

" 1

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two of three doors. I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. And that is it. Anything else prob- ably will not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry.

2

In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). On one side, Tolstoy, say; and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Svevo's narrator, Zeno Cosini, or Bertie Wooster. Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that vast moth-eaten musical brocade' called religion has also had its. W. G. Sebald once said to me, 'I think that fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself, is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.' Sebald continued: 'If you refer to Jane Austen, you refer to a world where there were set standards of propriety which were accepted by everyone. Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history, and that we do have to acknow- ledge our own sense of ignorance and of insufficiency in these matters and therefore to try and write accordingly.' "

"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."

"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. "

"A clear blue sky was hard to take. Marek saw it as empti- ness, a place with no heaven in it. He preferred the clouds be- cause he could imagine paradise behind them. He could stare up and focus his eyes on shapes in the clouds, wonder if that was God's face or God's hand making an impression, or if God was spying down at him through the gauzy mist. Maybe, maybe."

"The mothers brought her food and clothing, spoke kindly, offered her puppies from their litters, kittens, flowers. They thought her milk would be more nutritious if she was happy. Ina could have made friends with these women, but she was only comfortable with the babes. She had been hurt too badly to trust anyone grown up. She didn't like to go to town. The plot of land on which her family's house had once stood had been split up and taken over, replotted. The old mulberry tree had burned and died and been cut down to a stump and was now used as a place to ax firewood. The village reminded Ina too much of what she'd lost, and there was no herb that could heal her loneliness. When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn't know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed."

"MAN is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill-judged, costly, criminal - es- pecially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products. The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation."

"I, Thora Pattern (who live at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather. shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence),"

"His feet had finished bleeding. They were withered now. He thought they were sea-anemones or dried oak-leaves or burst pinecones from outside, where the magpies garbled A-Wimbledon-a-Wombledon-a-fourteen-miles, and a bush-wren obsessed the leafy places with a sound light as poplar-cotton or purple thistle-head, a tiny Piping jig that betrayed more than sight or statistic the vulnerability of the instrument that produced it"

"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 I wake up I hear the last of the day's hikers passing my thicket

two girls with huge water bottles that bounce the sunlight through the branches and into my eyes

it's not easy to sleep on an empty stomach but I guess I did okay

one girl says god I can't believe it's dark already

I know we have to start starting earlier says the other

she takes a sip from her bottle and says no matter how much I say no and cancel stuff there's still no time and the first girl says that's just your scare city mentality you have to work on that

yeah I just you know this you know I don't like change says the second girl and the first girl says of course but we all live in scare city under capitalism so we all have to make an effort to deprogram"

"my new thicket is a nest of twisted trees above a path

hikers come by all day while I rest but I'm ten feet above them and they never suspect

from here I wouldn't even have to leap I'd just have to drop and whichever hiker I wanted would be mine

I try to keep these thoughts from my head and let the dry breeze cause sleep

the hikers talk about their therapists they decide what is good or bad about their therapists and decide if the therapist helped them feel good or bad and they throw these two words around like they have different meanings

a therapist is something I want"

"FRANKLIN H. WHEELER was among the few who bucked the current. He did so with apologetic slowness and with what he hoped was dignity, making his way in sidling steps down the aisle toward the stage door saying "Excuse me . . . Excuse me," nodding and smiling to several faces he knew, carrying one hand in his pocket to conceal and dry the knuckles he had sucked and bitten throughout the play. He was neat and solid, a few days less than thirty years old, With closely cut black hair and the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise (Why Pay More?). But for all its lack of structural distinction, his face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression. Smiling, he was a man who knew perfectly well that the failure of an amateur play was nothing much to worry about, a kindly, witty man who would have exactly the right words of comfort for his wife backstage; but in the intervals between his smiles, when he shouldered ahead through the crowd and you could see the faint chronic fever of bewilderment in his eyes, it seemed more that he himself was in need of comforting."

""You know what you are when you're like this? You're sick. I really mean that." "And do you know what you are?" Her eyes raked him up and down. "You're disgusting. Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on."

"The woman at registration asked me to wait at the door while she pulled on her face shield, not the flimsy almost disposable kind I had seen around town but made of a thick hard plastic, black, almost military. It was open in the back but otherwise it resembled the helmets police were wearing at the demonstrations that filled the news, protests that were largely about the militarization and brutality of the police, brutality that began, I sometimes thought, with the helmets and armor that sealed them off from the people they faced."

"Kathleen Ferrier, whose recordings I had listened to endlessly; one of the first CDs I bought as a teenager, just after I discovered music, classical music I mean, was a recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and three of the Rückert lieder, the first of which became a kind of talisman for me, important in a way I was only just begin- ning to understand art could be important. The song articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that, too, it created something; it didn't just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn't have felt before. It humanized me, I want to say, it was part of that humanization art has been for me, which is something else it has become difficult to say, to say or believe, but I do believe it."

"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."

"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,"

"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...

"Ippolito listened in silence when his father spoke unkindly to him, he never answered back and his face remained quiet and pale, and at night he stayed up to type out the book of memoirs, or to read Goethe aloud when his father could not sleep. For he had the soul of a slave, Concettina used to say, and camomile in his veins instead of blood, and was like an old man of ninety, with no girls whom he liked and no desire for anything, all he could do was to wander about the countryside alone all day with the dog."

"Anna stayed at the window watching the snow, it seemed to go on snowing for ever and the street was silent in the snow and empty, and no policeman appeared. In the anteroom lay Danilo's gloves; the last time he had been to see them he had left them there. As she passed through the room Anna glanced at them and had a strange feeling, and Danilo seemed very far off, it seemed like a dream that it had once been possible to look at him and touch him. He seemed very far off like the dead, and as with the dead it seemed that never again would it be possible to hear from him about the new things he was seeing and thinking."

"What a mania Danilo had for wasting his time with everybody, what a mania he had for knowing what everybody was like inside. And Danilo said that this was politics too, to try and find out what people were like inside, to find out the thoughts and reasonings of a boy of about seventeen, coming of a bourgeois family, spoilt, educated in Switzerland. But Ippolito then said that Danilo was not acting rightly, because he set himself the abstract proposition of finding out what people were like inside, and in each one he saw a political problem, and he had an inquisitorial, offensive way of asking questions. And pethaps without meaning to he had done Giuma harm, Perhaps he had wounded him deeply, inviting him to his house in a way that was perhaps human and friendly and then suddenly starting to question him in that inquisitorial offensive way, that cruel way, Danilo did nor know it but at times he could be very cruel."

"He wandered for a long time among the vineyards and the oak trees, in the places where he knew Ippolito had been in the habit of walking with the dog; and whenever he knocked his foot against a stone he wondered whether Ippolito had also knocked against it, with those feet that now were dead; and wherever he rested his eyes on the countryside he reflected that Ippolito too had looked at that spot, and he thought how strange it was that the eyes of men should pass across things without leaving any trace, thousands and thousands of dead men's eyes had rested upon that green and humming countryside."

"Emilio then sid that Ippolito had been a free being, he had himself chosen the day of his own death. But Cenzo Rena said that a man had not the right to choose the day of his own death. And in any case Ippolito had not made any choice at all, he had allowed himself to get all tied up by his own thoughts, so that he had been killed by them. He died strangled by his own thoughts, he was dead even before he sat down that morning in the public gardens. Emilio then asked whether a man who did not think was a free being. And Cenzo Rena told him not to ask silly questions. The man who accepted the life he had to live was free. The man who made health and wealth out of his own thoughts was free, not the man who made them into a noose to strangle himself with."

"Cenzo Rena said that no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life. They had stopped at the gates of the town, the tin roofs of the soap factory could be seen. He told her that up till that day she had lived like an insect. An insect that knows nothing beyond the leaf upon which it hangs."

"The ritual of the fall had started, as if the proximity of death activated reserves of extraordinary energy in these trees that, instead of continuing to support life, allowed them to celebrate dying."

"As we know, however, the most interesting things are always in the shadows, in the invisible. So here beneath the table there are five pairs of feet, and soon a sixth will appear. Each wears shoes. The first are familiar to us - it is the same wretched pair that ap- peared yesterday at the station, leather loafers on thin soles; now they are resting politely side by side without moving. To their left we find the exact opposite, a pair of restless shoes, black with white toes, which seem more urban, completely out of place in the mountains, as if tak- en straight from an art gallery or an arcade; in fact, their elegance is badly eroded, but we like the nonstop move- ment of the feet inside them, as the heels go up and down by turns. Next there is a pair of leather boots, beautifully polished and laced above the ankle. Their immaculate surface reflects small, blurred spots of light from the sitting room, light in exile. Their toes are touching each other childishly. In the empty place further to the left a pair of clogs will appear shortly, and a pair of feet in thick woollen socks will slide out of them, abandoning their coffin-like footwear to play with each other, rub together, tread on one another. Next we see a sad, slip-on boot with no laces. There is a skinny ankle sunk in it, clad in a hand- made sock. The other boot is resting on someone's knee; under the table a slender hand is stroking it with pale fingernails that look phosphorescent in the gloom. Poor little hand, poor skinny bones and milk-white fingernails. The next pair are smart leather Oxfords, with large feet in woollen socks inside them. One of them sits there quietly while the other raps against the floor unrhythmically, as if angrily."

"And now we shall leave them here, debating around a table covered with an ominously patterned cloth, we shall leave them, to vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles - and then gaze from afar, from above. It has started to rain, droplets are flowing down the roof and forming transparent, shining lace before dripping onto the ground, teasing it, making it itch, carving little hollows, then gathering hesitantly into little rivulets to seek a course among the stones, under a clump of grass, beside a root, and finally down the path trodden by patient animals. But we shall return."

"And that it was unpleasant to live in a place where someone has died (though there is probably no place where no one has ever died - the world has ex- isted for long enough by now). But what astonished him the most was how easily one could come to terms with an- other person's death. How simple it was. Especially here in Görbersdorf, where people were always dying."

"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."

"'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"

"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.' "

"

"My belongings are arranged in the corner. They consig mostly of plants. Everything else went into storage yes. terday. Something is loosened. The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. I wonder about those rare people who never move. Who live on and on in the same house. Never really needing to sort through anything. Never having to handle each and every object in turn. Never having to weigh up its value. Never having to ask, what do I take with me? Never seeing their life like this. All up in a heap. I haven't written so much in aeons, yet I'm no closer to why I do it. Is there, after all, a story I am hoping to uncover and make mine? Never, not in a million years. Pfennig. Pfennig. Pfennig. They have gone now and the word has gone now. Can't there be a new thing we call pfennig?

Today is the second morning in the new place. On the last night in the old place it crossed my mind to write a few lines, but I was too tired and read most of a long film review before turning out the lamp for the last time in that particular room. It occurred to me anyway that I would most likely end up saying trite things along the lines of a chapter of my life is coming to an end and the next phase will surely be the ultimate phase, full of adventure and glory and ease of mind at last, etcetera, etcetera. It's surprisingly difficult not to succumb to that kind of vapid drivel when one is on the brink of shifting into a new and unclear situation. On such a threshold one is susceptible to feeling and expressing hopes for the future, which begins tomorrow, a bright new start, where I will do things differently, with greater integrity and resolve, and so on."

"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.”

"It was so unnerving to lose a world, thought Celine, or even realise that a world could be lost. All the bricks and chil- dren and treetops, everything she could see from her window, now seemed remote and distant. In that kind of situation all she had for her survival was whatever was closest to hand. And the persistent pleasure of her life was this back and forth of conversation between friends, perhaps because a conver- sation was the last remaining place for words to be tender things. She liked the way a conversation could produce unforeseen creatures - concepts she was not sure she believed, or was unaware that she believed - and then sud- denly it occurred to her that this beauty of conversation could be improvised for a different purpose.

- What are we best at? said Celine.

Marta raised an amused eyebrow

- Talking, Celine corrected her."

"You can't worry about what misinterpreters think, said Marta. - But don't you care, said Celine, - when people talk about you? I can't bear it. It feels like death, it feels like a transform- ation. And then for it to be my husband who is angry All language was disgusting, said Marta. But people seemed to adore it. It was like how everyone loved reading these novels in letters. As if everything existed in order to end up in words! Whereas most feelings, or at least the most interesting, she said, avoided language entirely. Then Marta leaned over to pour from a bottle into a dirty cup. Meanwhile the planet continued to be whirled around a zooming sun."

"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."

"We apologise, in advance, for the brief interruption… but it is necessary at this moment in the novella (hence- forth referred to as I Am Sovereign) to warn the reader that Nicola Barker (henceforth referred to as The Author) has been granted absolutely no access to the thoughts and feel- ings of the character Gyasi "Chance' Ebo (henceforth referred to as The Subject). At his inception, The Subject seemed not only a willing, but an actively enthusiastic parti- cipant in the project, yet after several weeks of engagement became increasingly cynical and uncooperative, to the point of threatening to withdraw from the enterprise altogether if The Author deigned to encroach, unduly upon his interior life: For this reason, where possible, The Author has attempted (with The Subject's permission) to side-step his wanton opacity by calmly theorising' on The Subject's possible feel- ings/thoughts/motivations and then transcribing these ideas into the text using an entirely different font (the standard font is Baskerville. The Subject has requested AMERICAN TYPEWRITER as an alternative for the chapters in which he is to be heavily featured. AMERICAN TYPEWRITER was agreed upon her lengthy consula Mon with The Subject The Aulhor should make it plain tha AMBRICAN TYPEWRITER is a font that does not permit the use of italicisation, something that she worries" in the light of her ebullient sble- may ultimately be inhib. iling to the feel and flow of I Am Sovereign. If this is inded the case, The Author apologises - again- unreservedly). It would be difficult - nay foolish - for The Author lo speculate at this juncture on the whys and the wherefores of The Subject's taciturnity. The Author is both saddened and frustrated by The Subject's seeming unwillingness to place his trust/ confidence in her (The Author's) natural sense of balance and fair play in relation to this /her texts). The Author has informed The Subject - via telepathy and WhatsApp that she is merely trying to tell the simple- almost trite-story of a treenty-odd-minute house viewing in Llandudno durung which The Subject makes a brief, relatively inconsequential appearance, but The Subject - while accepting that he was conceived of as present' during said viewing - is determined to remain abstruse, impenetrable and enigmatic. The Subjec also disagrees with the idea that his appearance is merely inconsequential', but rather describes his role as 'limactio, wen seminal' (The Author is uncomoinced that The Subject understands the real meaning of the word seminal')"

"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"

"Five months later, back in England again, Liz Norton received a gift in the mail from her German friend. As one might guess, it was another novel by Archimboldi. She read it, liked it, went to her college library to look for more books by the German with the Italian name, and found two: one was the book she had already read in Berlin, and the other was Bitzius. Reading the latter really did make her go running out. It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the gri- mace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Nor- ton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. But the truth is that she had only had tea to drink and she felt over- whelmed, as if a voice were repeating a terrible prayer in her ear, the words of which blurred as she walked away from the college, and the rain wetted her gray skirt and bony knees and pretty ankles and little else because before Liz. Norton went running through the park, she hadn't forgotten to pick up her umbrella."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

""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!"

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."

"I knew I was one of the luckiest people on the planet. I wasn't one of the 65 million forced out of their homes by war or famine or persecution. I wasn't one of the 28 million refugees and asylum seekers hoping for sanctuary in hostile countries like mine. I wasn't one of the many millions so thoroughly hounded out of their homes that they were officially stateless.? I wasn't waking up on the side of the street in a cardboard box, like the several hundred thousand people with the exact same passport as me. Not yet, anyway. My life probably wouldn't be over at forty-three, which was the average life expectancy of a homeless woman in Britain.3 I was safe and warm and educated. I had no right to feel so miserable."

"My sister has three children. Every summer, they all move into a tent, all five of them and the dog, while the house is rented out to strangers. This is hard, but not unusual. People I know with houses squeeze every drop of capital out of them, because, even when it's hard, squeezing capital out of a house is a hell of a lot easier than squeezing it out of work. Housing is a casino. If I was a little bit older, or a little bit wiser, I could have been on the other side of this gulf, a whole different person with a whole different life and totally different opinions, lolling around on the property ladder, home and safe and dry. But, by the time I knew what I needed, the stakes had changed completely. What everyone liked to call the 'housing ladder' was about three miles up in the air and I had next to no chance of even catching hold of it, let alone hauling myself on to the bottom rung. Average house prices had grown about seven times faster than the average income of young people since I turned eight- cen,' When I left university, a deposit to buy a starter home in the UK was about nine months' average salary. Ten years later, it was three years average salary, and rising." If food prices had risen as fast as house prices in the years since I came of age, a chicken would cost £517 (or £100 for those living in London*). I was taught that if I worked hard and lived an honest and generous life then I would be rewarded. This was misguided. I should have been taught to grab hold of that ladder and stamp on the hands of the people below me."

"'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."

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