The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object. Bleeding and trembling with weariness as he was, he felt that nothing was beyond his power, and when he flung himself upon the living Death, the eternal Surd in the universal mathematic, he was astonished, and yet (on a deeper level) not astonished at all, at his own strength. His arms seemed to move quicker than his thought. His hands taught him terrible things. He felt its ribs break, he heard its jaw-bone crack. The whole creature seemed to be crackling and splitting under his blows. His own pains, where it tore him, somehow failed to matter. He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year.
..It's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, they don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.
The two hemispheres of my mind were in sharpest contrast. On one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.
Her ghost meets me when I open the book from home. It is her copy of Death in Venice, the one she read in high school, in the years before I knew her. It is stained with suntan oil. She must have read it on a beach somewhere and imagined that water city.
I leaf through it. She writes 'important' in the margin next to Aschenbach's musings on the artist. 'Who shall unriddle the puzzle of the artist's nature? Who understands that mingling of discipline and license in it is so deeply rooted?'
She scrawls 'important' again on page twelve. She puts a question mark next to the word puerile, which she has circled. It is coupled with sensuality, underlined.
Puerile means childishly silly, Lola. It means juvenile.
Also there's a question mark next to 'very much he feared being ridiculous.' For what to this teenager could seem ridiculous in Aschenbach's delirious quest for beauty in a dying city?'Solitude gives birth to the original in us,' I read, 'to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.'
I am toute seule. And I am afraid.
'The trip will be short and he wished it might last forever.' Read more »
How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.
I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to. Read more »
The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.
