Vit > Books: Read‎ (2407)

In the evening we gathered under a big tent, and I listened to my friends talk as they polished their weapons of ivory and bone and fashioned arrows. They introduced me to their wives, who wore the same clothing as they did: they dress in tunics and pants of bearskin or dogskin. At the beginning of my stay, it was difficult for me to stay in their home which was dominated by a powerful stench. Every night, in tall vases of schist, they burn baleen whale oil, which spreads an odor very disagreeable to those not used to it and who likewise don’t care for the aromas emanating from the dried fish, the hunks of meat, and the turds that the men, women, and dogs leave about.

I proceeded with caution, for I was bedazzled and deafened. The sea lapped and the ceiling resounded with the sound of waves breaking against the walls. I didn’t go to the end of that grotto. A sudden terror came over me; I began to run, out of my mind with fear.
When I reached the seashore in the open air I burst out laughing.

My father killed five people. Like most murderers who need only to press a key or push a lever or a switch to elevate themselves for one unfettered instant to the rank of masters of life and death, he did this without touching a hair on his victims’ heads or even looking them in the eye but by means of a series of chrome winches to flood a navigation channel used by riverboats.

Lockmaster! To me and my sister Mira, who had overheard local people make sarcastic jibes and giggle about the curator’s self-appointed title, it seemed at the time as if, before her departing, our mother had embroidered a mocking nickname on his chest, and he took it with him to his doom.

How thin, perhaps only gossamer-thin, was the membrane separating the essence of a peaceful person who loved music, painting and his children – or at least his livestock – from the beast lurking deep within? And what would it take for this membrane to rupture, to rouse this beast and unleash a maelstrom of contradictory possibilities for a human lifespan?

My parish is con

My parish is consumed with boredom, that’s the word. Like so many parishes! Boredom is consuming them before our very eyes and we can do nothing about it. Some day, perhaps, the contagion will reach us, too, and we will discover this cancer in ourselves. It’s something one can live with for a very long time.

A child of poor parents who goes straight from a deprived house to the seminary at the age of twelve will never know the value of money. I even think it’s hard for us to remain strictly honest in business. It’s best not to gamble, however innocently, with what most lay people consider not a means but an end.

Of course, man is everywhere his own worst enemy, his own secret and insidious enemy. Wherever the seeds of evil are scattered, they are almost certain to germinate. Whereas it takes exceptional luck, phenomenal good fortune, for the smallest grain of good not to be stifled.

Mattis looked to see if the sky was

Mattis looked to see if the sky was clear and free of clouds this evening, and it was. Then he said to his sister Hege, to cheer her up: “You’re like lightning.”
The word sent a cold shiver down his spine, but he felt safe all the same, seeing the sky was perfect.
“With those knitting needles of yours, I mean,” he added.

The girl washed her hands in the same pool as Mattis. Down in the water, made turbid by their mud, their hands touched for a brief moment as they plunged them in. A shock ran right through him. Gradually the running water swept the pool and the hands in it clean again. But now he dared not go anywhere near her.
The girl looked at him, and he had no time to think.
“It was almost like touching an electric fence,” he blurted out.

“There’s a proper ferry service here from today,” said Mattis. “It’s my very first day. And you’re my very first passenger. Do you want to go straight across? My home’s straight across from here. Well, and Hege lives there too, of course.”

I moved to this

I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.

I got some of my schooling from a certain order of religious brothers, a band of men who dressed each in a black soutane with a bib of white celluloid at his throat. I learned by chance last year, and fifty years since I last saw anyone wearing such a thing, that the white bib was called a rabat and was a symbol of chastity.

…men travelled throughout England during the years of the Commonwealth smashing stained-glass windows. The men stood on ladders and used staves or axes to smash the glass. They reported in their diaries the names of each church that they visited and the numbers of windows that they smashed. They declared often in the diaries that they were doing the work of the Lord or promoting his glory.

The vast structure which was slowly taking shape in Galactic Sector Twelve, midway between the rim of the pare

The vast structure which was slowly taking shape in Galactic Sector Twelve, midway between the rim of the parent galaxy and the densely populated systems of the Greater Magellan Cloud, was to be a hospital – a hospital to end all hospitals. Hundreds of different environments would be accurately reproduced here, any extreme of heat, cold, pressure, gravity, radiation or atmosphere necessary for the patients and staff it y would contain. Such a tremendous and complex structure was far beyond the resources of any one planet, so that hundreds of worlds had each fabricated sections of it and transported them to the assembly point.

His patients had been part of a Telfi gestalt engaged in operating an interstellar cruiser when there had been an accident in one of the power piles. The small, beetle-like and – individually – very stupid beings were radiation eaters, but that flare-up had been too much even for them.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilised. Civilised my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up…

As I attempt to weed K’s overgrown garden paths, so do I put order to my memories, disentangling reality from dreams, and Heaven from Hell. These days I do nothing but attempt to interpret those enigmatic wheels, those churning shadows, those cries beyond cries; the story beneath all stories: my own.

The landscape of my boyhood is haunted by ghosts armed with tridents, decked with cockles, tooting twisted conches. When it rains, as it often does, I can hear dogfish barking in the thunder, and in lightning clearly see the claws of catfish striking at the body of Heaven. Evenings the alleys are surging with pelicans and tiger-faced sharks.

“How gladly civilians and soldiers alike traded serenity for vertigo! Someone cried: ‘We’ll celebrate victory at Christmas!’ Everyone imagined something fleet and coloured and noble. But Christmas came and went and the New Year, too. War was no longer the heady tumult of confronting armies out upon the open field; it was maddening stagnation in mud mazes and tunnels of smoke.”

The night Sputnik passed overhead, I opened my eyes for the first time in thirty years, and before closing them again for another twenty, I sang a song…

She was a young girl of eighteen years old. In the penumbra, the wide face carved in shadows acquired reliefs of tragic luminosity. Balder examined the pale plumpness of her cheeks that he had kissed so many times and felt his joviality melt under the heat of those dark-green eyes, which gave the creature a catlike and collected expression.

Balder remained silent. His desires don’t mean a thing here. He may have been a cynic, but nothing prevents a cynic from falling in love. And he was in love with Irene. He replied, dismayed:
“I have cared for her like a father, as if she were my own child.”
Irene looked at him attentively and, perhaps remembering some not-so-paternal intimacies she had had with him, smiled mockingly, as if saying to him: “Darling… you are a shameless comedian.”

Even though he was just twenty-seven years old, deep wrinkles began to appear on his face. When walking, he dragged his feet. Seen from behind he seemed to be hunchbacked, walking forward, it seemed that he was advancing on a surface full of potholes, in such a way that he was swayed by inertia. His hair was falling over his temples and covering his ears. He dressed poorly, and was always seen unshaven and with inky nails.
Also he became paunchy.

It took two useless years to produce this definitive minute. What does it mean? Is life similar to a movie? Ninety thousand meters of celluloid were filmed to use just three thousand…
He shook his head disconsolately at not being able to comprehend the secret essence of existence.

In the painting, a sprawl of subdued color – gray, gold

In the painting, a sprawl of subdued color – gray, gold, blue – forms an abstract female figure shown head-on: breasts like blunted pyramids, braced beneath shoulders so broad no ambulant human could hold them upright. Mangled, muddy hips bracket the focus of her crudely rendered crotch, outsized in turn by massive, jagged hands slung to her knees. Atop it all, the woman’s diminutive face, a landscape of moon dirt, leers slyly toward the viewer, as if aware of something inevitable none among us might wish to know.

Alice watches herself from inside herself perform for the police and the reporters, the cameras, the vortex represented in each eye. She gives them exactly what they wish for – content – even if every question they offer, for once, has a clear answer: “I don’t know.”

It takes a while to recognize the body’s face: it is Alice Knott, a bygone name appearing in our mind as some echo of an icon of our memory, almost like a friend, or someone we’d wished to know in such a way, though really by now we are not sure who Alice Knott might be. She is so old it seems impossible; her skin a surgery of putty, puffy leather, lacing, colored veins. She has no hair, no teeth, no nails.

That was when mum came in. She said “here’s your treat lesonfon” which is

That was when mum came in. She said “here’s your treat lesonfon” which is what she calls us sometimes, it is “children” in French, she told us once. It was our supper, usually we can’t eat it when we watch telly but she said “just this once” and it was hot dogs and oven chips which was a treat too, because mum says we can’t have oven chips because their too expensive, their a real waste of money.

The sun was almost gone down and everything was really orange, so I thought “I like this Rome actually.” We went over a bridge over a river which mum said is called the Tiber, it is in a big trentch in the ground…

Then mum started again in her serious voice. She said “Lawrence this is a very difficult time for us” she said “we don’t have anywhere to live, we need peoples help, cant you see that?” so I said “yes mum.” She said “I want you to promise you’ll behave really well to everybody from now on, will you do that?”

Mum pointed at it again and this time I notised that there were some tiny red spots, I didn’t see them before, so I said “what are they mum, are they juice from the strawberries?” but mum shook her head, she looked sort of sad now, she was holding the cake and she was looking at the floor. She said “smell it, Lawrence love, its poisson.”

At length sounded the little silver bell – the chamber door was flung open, and

At length sounded the little silver bell – the chamber door was flung open, and in rushed Peregrine, amidst a whole fireflood of variegated Christmas lights. Quite petrified, he remained standing at the table, on which the finest gifts were arranged in the most handsome order, and only a loud “oh!” forced itself from his breast.

The whole appearance of the stranger, in spite of all her grace and loveliness, had yet something supernatural about it, which those who had not Peregrine’s awe of woman would yet have received with a cold shudder through every vein.

At this time there was a man in Frankfurt, who practised the strangest art possible. He was called the flea-tamer, from having succeeded – and certainly not without much trouble and exertion – in educating these little creatures, and teaching them to execute all sorts of pretty tricks.

“Be all this, however, as it may, you have put yourself under my protection, dear Master, and nothing shall persuade me to deliver you up to your enemies; as to the seductive maiden, I will not see her again. This I promise solemnly, and would give my hand upon it, had you one to receive it and return the honourable pledge.”

“Let me shout, let me rejoice, for all must deceive me if a bright morning sun do not soon arise, which will clear up every mystery.”

Clenin opened the door and laid a fatherly hand on the stranger’s shou

Clenin opened the door and laid a fatherly hand on the stranger’s shoulder. At that moment he noticed that the man was dead. He had been shot through the temples.

Barlach had lived abroad for many years and had made a name for himself as a criminologist, first in Constantinople and later in Germany.

“God knows I’m used to inefficiency in our canton, but the procedure that is evidently considered the natural course to take in the case of a murdered police lieutenant casts such an appalling light on the professional competence of our village police that I am still horrified.”
“Rest assured, Dr. Lutz,” Barlach replied, “our village police are as fit for their job as the police in Chicago, and I’m certain we’ll find out who killed Schmied.”

Petya – or, as he was known now, ensign Batchei – has simultaneously heard two sounds: a whine of a shell and a boom of an explosion. Never before those sounds were heard so threateningly close and so dangerous.
Then he was knocked off his feet, thrown upward, and while flying he lost his consciousness.

He hardly could come to his senses when she at once possessed the whole of him. He could only plaintively look at her as if wishing to say what are you doing to me?
And right from this moment he found himself in that excruciating and at the same time blissful state known as love at first sight.

They were looking at each other – a soldier and the general – and their eyes were full with such murderous hatred that they themselves were afraid of it.
Then the general has understood that this young soldier was on the side of Bolsheviks and he would know no quarter.

When Willalee Bookatee turned on that Muntz television and the Gospel Singer’s voice slipped out into his cabin, it was balm poured into a wound. Nothing mattered. The world dropped down a great big hole. Everything – whether it was a razor cut, or a tar-scalded eye, or a burning case of clap off a Tifton high-yellow whore – everything quit but that voice and it went in his head and down his flesh to where his soul slept.

…a sea of female flesh, wet, violently heaving, smelling slightly of salt, surrounding him at the altar after the hymnsinging had ceased, the warm waves pressing in, eddying about him, a collective air coming off them smelling of breath and love.

He waited for the last group of uniformed schoolchildren to leave before going up to the second floor, where a glass case protected the suit Gaitán was wearing on the day of his assassination, and then he began to shatter the thick glass with a knuckle-duster. He managed to put his hand on the shoulder of the midnight-blue jacket, but he didn’t have time for anything else: the second-floor guard, alerted by the crash, was pointing his pistol at him.

Conspiracy theories are like creepers, Vásquez, they grab on to whatever they can to climb up and keep growing until someone takes away what sustains them.

“Feelings of humiliation, resentment, sexual dissatisfaction, inferiority complexes: there you have the engines of history, my dear patient. Right now someone is making a decision that affects you and me, and they’re making it for reasons like these: to harm an enemy, to get revenge for an affront, to impress a woman and sleep with her. That’s how the world works.”

“A fanatic is a person who’s only good for one thing in this life, who discovers what that thing is and devotes all his time to it, down to the last second. That thing interests him for some special reason. Because he can do something with it, because it helps him to get money, or power, or a woman, or several women, or to feel better with himself, to feed his ego, to earn his path to heaven, to change the world.”

Who, at Timo’s, hasn’t killed at least one man? In the war, or some other w

Who, at Timo’s, hasn’t killed at least one man? In the war, or some other way. By denouncing him, maybe, which is the easiest. You don’t even have to sign your name.
Timo, who never boasts about it, must have killed lots, otherwise the occupiers wouldn’t let his bar stay open all night without sticking their nose into what goes on there. Even though the shutters are always closed, even though people have to approach by the lane and show their faces through the door, they aren’t so naive as not to know.

‘Are you sleeping at your mother’s?’
He slept in all kinds of places, sometimes in the little house behind Timo’s, where the girls rented rooms, sometimes at Kromer’s – Kromer had a nice room with a divan – sometimes at other people’s houses, taking pot luck. But there was always a camp bed for him in Lotte’s kitchen.
‘I’m going home.’

And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth.

It’s a northern winter day and there is a slight thaw. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The dawn hardly could come a

It’s a northern winter day and there is a slight thaw. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The dawn hardly could come around and it’s dusk again.

“He convinces us that we mustn’t punish the wicked, he proves that one can’t serve without faith, and all this is very nice, but then suddenly he breaks loose and starts again writing nonsense, for example, he asks what’s the use of soap? How can it be he doesn’t know the use of soap? How to wash hands then? How to wash hair? To tell the truth all the men are foolish when they attempt to contemplate matters they don’t know a thing about.”

A woman’s distorted face blushed in sensual ecstasy, she hurriedly lowered a veil and came out. Big, hysterical tears were running down her cheeks. Her eyes dimmed while her lips and nose reddened and protruded so her entire face began to resemble a muzzle of a bitch in heat.
She guessed how disgusting she was.

In the past I wept. I was so far away from my native country; so many mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, fields, and ravines lay between me and her, the beloved, the admired, the adored. This morning she embraces me and I lose myself in her voluptuous caress.

On a certain covert night, shot through by the odious and dreadful fear of being arrested by police henchmen, Georg Büchner, the youthful star flashing brightly in the firmament of German poetry, slipped away from the brutality, stupidity, and violence of political skulduggery.

Oh, how lovely the lake was in the near distance, silvered by the moon which, falling in love with the water, plunged glowingly into the lake to be blissfully reflected in the body it adored. The water shuddered and lay completely still, delighted by the adoration. Moon and water were like boyfriend and girlfriend captivated by a kiss to which they surrendered.

His kiss, his kiss w

His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he’d given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination… that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born.

He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke – but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite.

Gambling is a sickness. My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards. He fanned them out; in the mirror, I saw wild hope light up his eyes. His collar was unfastened, his rumpled hair stood up on end, he had the anguish of a man in the last stages of debauchery.

Figaro here; Figaro, there, I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and – oh, my goodness me, this little Figaro can slip into my lady’s chamber smart as you like at any time whatsoever that he takes the fancy for, don’t you know, he’s a cat of the world, cosmopolitan, sophisticated; he can tell when a furry friend is the Missus’ best company.