Literary Exceprts

[Lauritz Melchior]

For those of you who've always wanted to share something that you've read, but didn't know where to share it, this is the thread for you. Following (form me, at least) are excerpts from two stories: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, and The Portrait by Nikolai Gogol.


[quote="Nikolai Gogol from The Portrait"]translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It's excerpted from "The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol".

" He went up to the portrait again, so as to study those wondrous eyes, and noticed with horror that they were indeed staring at him. This was no longer a copy from nature, this was that strange aliveness that would radicate from the face of a dead man rising from the grave. Either it was the light of the moon bringing delirious reveries with it and clothing everything in other images, opposite to positive daylight, or there was some other cause, only suddenly, for some reason, he felt afraid to be alone in the room. He quietly withdrew from the portrait, turned away and tried not to look at it, and yet his eyes, of themselves, involuntarily cast sidelong glances at it. Finally he even became frightened of walking about the room; it seemed to him that some other would immediately start walking behind him, and he kept timorously looking back. He had never been a coward; but his imagination and nerves were sensitive, and that evening he was unable to explain this involuntary fear to himself. He sat in the corner, but there, too, it seemed to him that someone was about to look over his shoulder into his face. Not even the snores of Nikita resounding from the front room could drive away his fear. Finally, timorously, without raising his eyes, he stood up, went behind his screen, and got into bed. Through a chink in the screen he could see his room lit up by moonlight, and directly opposite him he could see the portrait on the wall. The eyes were fixed still more terribly, still more meaningly, on him, and seemed not to want to look at anything but him. Filled with an oppressive feeling, he decided to get up, grabbed a bedsheet, and, going over to the portrait, covered it completely.

Having done so, he went back to bed more calmly, began thinking about the poverty and pitifulness of the artist’s lot, about the thorny path that lay before him in this world; and meanwhile his eyes involuntarily looked through the chink in the screen at the sheet-covered portrait. The moonlight intensified the whiteness of the sheet, and it seemed to him that the terrible eyes even began to glow through the cloth. In fear, he fixed his eyes on it more intently, as if wishing to assure himself that it was nonsense. But finally, indeed now … he saw, saw clearly: the sheet was no longer there … the portrait was all uncovered and staring, past whatever was around it, straight into him, simply staring into his insides …. His heart went cold. And he saw: the old man stirred and suddenly leaned on the frame with both hands. Finally he propped himself on his hands and, thrusting out both legs, leaped free of the frame … Now all that could be seen through the chink in the screen was the empty frame. The noise of footsteps sounded in the room, finally coming closer and closer to the screen. The poor artist’s heart began to pound harder. Breathless with fear, he expected the old man to look behind the screen at any moment. And then he did look behind the screen, with the same bronze face, moving his big eyes. Chartkov tried to cry out and found that he had no voice, tried to stir, to take some movement, but his limbs would not move. Open-mouthed and with bated breath, he looked at this terrible phantom, tall, in a loose Asian robe, waiting for what he would do. The old man sat down almost at his feet and then took something from under the folds of his loose garment. It was a sack. The old man untied it and, taking it by the corners, shook it upside down: with a dull sound, heavy packets shaped like long posts fell to the floor, and each was wrapped in blue paper and had ‘1,000 Gold Roubles’ written on it. Thrusting his long, bony hands from the wide sleeves, the old man began to unwrap the packets. Gold gleamed. However great the oppressive feeling and frantic fear of the artists, still all of him gazed at the gold, staring fixedly as it was unwrapped by the bony hands, gleaming, clinking thinly and dully, and then wrapped up again. Here he noticed one packet that had rolled farther away from the rest, just near the leg of his bed, by its head. He seized it almost convulsively and looked fearfully to see whether the old man would notice. But it seemed the old man was very busy. He gathered up all his packets, put them back into the sack, and, without looking at him, went out from behind the screen. Chartkov’s heart pounded heavily as he heard the shuffle of the retreating steps in the room. He clutched his packet tighter in his hand, his whole body trembling over it, when suddenly he heard the footsteps approaching the screen again – evidently the old man had remembered that one packet was missing. And now – he looked behind the screen again. Filled with despair, the artist clutched the packet in his hand with all his might, tried as hard as he could to make some movement, cried out – and woke up.

He was bathed in a cold sweat; his heart could not have pounded any harder; his chest was so tight that it was as if the last breath was about to fly out of it. ‘Could it have been a dream?’ he said, clutching his head with both hands; but the terrible aliveness of the apparition was not like a dream. Awake now, he saw the old man going into the frame, even caught a glimpse of the skirts of his loose clothing, and his hand felt clearly that a moment before it had been holding something heavy. Moonlight lit up the room, drawing out of its dark corners now a canvas, now a plaster arm, now some drapery left on the floor, now trousers and a pair of unpolished boots. Only here did he notice that he was not lying in bed but standing right in front of the portrait. How he got there – that he simply could not understand. He was still more amazed that the portrait was all uncovered and there was in fact no sheet over it. In motionless fear he gazed at it and saw living, human eyes peer straight into him. Cold sweat stood out on his brow; he wanted to back away, but felt as if his feet were rooted to the ground. And he saw – this was no longer a dream – the old man’s features move, his lips begin to stretch toward him, as if wishing to suck him out… With a scream of despair, he jumped back – and woke up.

‘Could this, too, have been a dream?’ His heart pounding to the point of bursting, he felt around him with his hands. Yes, he was lying on his bed in the same position in which he had fallen asleep. Before him stood the screen; moonlight filled the room. Through the chink in the screen he could see the portrait properly covered with a sheet – as he himself had covered it. And so, this, too, had been a dream! But his clenched hand felt even now as if something had been in it. The pounding of his heart was hard, almost terrible; the heaviness on his chest was unbearable. He looked through the chink and fixed his eyes on the sheet. And now he saw clearly that the sheet was beginning to come away, as if hands were fumbling under it, trying to throw it off. ‘Lord God, what is this!’ he cried out, crossing himself desperately, and woke up.

And this had also been a dream! He jumped from the bed, half demented, frantic, no longer able to explain what was happening to him: the oppression of a nightmare or a household spirit, delirious raving or a living vision. Trying to calm somewhat his mental agitation and the stormy blood that throbbed in tense pulsations through all his veins, he went to the window and opened the vent pane. A chill breath of wind revived him. Moonlight still lay on the roofs and white walls of the houses, though small clouds passed across the sky more often. Everything was still: occasionally there came the distant rattle of a droshky, whose coachman was sleeping somewhere in an out-of-sight alley, lulled by his lazy nag as he waited for a late passenger. He gazed for a long time, thrusting his head out the vent. The sky was already beginning to show signs of approaching dawn; finally he felt the approach of drowsiness, slammed the vent shut, left the window, went to bed, and soon fell sound asleep, like the dead.”
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2500th member give or take 3

[Lauritz Melchior]

This isn’t representative of the book as a whole, but it’s a fascinating excerpt. I highly recommend that everybody read A Walk in the Woods as it’s incredibly entertaining.

[quote="Bill Bryson from A Walk in the Woods"]


The great irony of anthracite is that, tough as it is to light, once you get it lit it's nearly impossible to put out. Stories of uncontrolled mine fires are legion in eastern Pennsylvania. One fire at Lehigh started in 1850 and didn’t burn itself out until the Great Depression – eighty years after it started.

And thus we come to Centralia. For a century, Centralia was a sturdy little pit community. However difficult life may have been for the early miners, by the second half of the twentieth century Centralia was a reasonably prosperous, snug, hardworking town with a population approaching 2,000. It had a thriving business district, with banks and a post office and the normal range of shops and small department stores, a high school, four churches, an Odd Fellows Club, a town hall – in short, a typical, pleasant, contentedly anonymous small American town.

Unfortunately, it also sat on twenty-four million tons of anthracite. In 1962, a fire in a dump on the edge of town ignited a coal seam. The fire department poured in thousands of gallons of water on the fire, but each time they seemed to have it extinguished it came back, like those trick birthday candles that go out for a moment and then spontaneously reignite. And then, very slowly, the fire began to eat its way along the subterranean seams. Smoke began to rise eerily from the ground over a wide area, like steam off a lake at dawn. On Highway 61, the pavement grew warm to the touch, then began to crack and settle, rendering the road unusable.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines brought in experts, who proposed any number of possible remedies – digging a deep trench through the town, deflecting the course of the fire with explosives, flushing the whole thing out hydraulically – but the cheapest proposal would have cost at least $20 million, with no guarantee that it would work, and in any case no one was empowered to spend that kind of money. So the fire slowly burned on.

In 1979, the owner of a gas station near the center of town found that the temperature in his underground tanks was registering 172°F. Sensors sunk into the earth showed that the temperature thirteen feet under the tanks was almost 1,000°. Elsewhere, people were discovering that their cellar walls and floors were hot to the touch. By now smoke was seeping from the ground all over town, and people were beginning to grow nauseated and faint from the increased levels of carbon dioxide in their homes. In 1981, a twelve year-old boy was playing in his grandmother’s backyard when a plume of smoke appeared in front of him. As he stared at it, the ground suddenly opened around him. He clung to tree roots until someone heard his calls and hauled him out. The hole was found to be eighty feet deep. Within days, similar cave-ins were appearing all over town. It was about then that people started getting serious about the fire.

The federal government came up with $42 million to evacuate the town. As people moved out, their houses were bulldozed and the rubble was neatly, fastidiously cleared away until there were almost no buildings remaining. So today Centralia isn’t really even a ghost town. It’s just a big open space with a grid of empty streets still surreally furnished with stop signs and fire hydrants. Every thirty feet or so there is a neat, paved driveway going fifteen or twenty yards to nowhere. There are still a few houses scattered around – all of them modest, narrow, wood-framed structures stabilized with brick buttresses – and a couple of buildings in what was once the central business district.

I parked outside a building with a faded sign that said, rather grandly, “CENTRALIA MINE FIRE PROJECT OFFICE OF THE COLUMBIA REDEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY.” The building was boarded and all but falling down. Next door was another, in better shape, called Speed Stop Car Parts, overlooking a neatly groomed park with an American flag on a pole. The shop appeared to be still in business, but the interior was darkened and there was no one around. There was no one anywhere, come to that – no passing traffic, not a sound but the lazy clank of a metal ring knocking against the flagpole. Here and there in the vacant lots were metal cylinders, like oil drums, that had been fixed in the ground and were silently venting smoke.

Up a slight slope, across an expanse of vacant lots, a modern church, quite large, stood in a lazy pall of white smoke – St. Ignatius, I assumed. I walked up. The church looked sound and usable – the windows were not boarded and there were no KEEP OUT signs – but it was locked, and there was no board announcing services or anything even to indicate its name or denomination. All around it, smoke was hovering wispily off the ground, and just behind it, great volumes of smoke were billowing from the earth over a large area. I walked over and found myself on the lip of a vast cauldron, perhaps an acre in extent, which was emitting thick, cloudlike, pure white smoke – the kind of smoke you get from burning tires or old blankets. It was impossible to tell through the stew of smoke how deep the hole was. The ground felt warm and was loosely covered in a fine ash.

I walked back to the front of the church. A heavy metal crash barrier stood across the old road and a new highway curved off down a hillside away from the town. I stepped around the barrier and walked down old Highway 61. Clumps of weedy grass poked through the surface here and there, but it still looked like a serviceable road. All around on both sides for a considerable distance the land smoked broodingly, like the aftermath of a forest fire. About fifty yards along, a jagged crack appeared down the center of the highway and quickly grew into a sever gash several inches across, emitting still more smoke. In places, the road on one side of the gash had subsided a foot or more, or slumped into a shallow, bowl-shaped depression. From time to time I peered into the crack but couldn’t gauge anything of its depth for the swirling smoke, which proved to be disagreeably acrid and sulphurous when the breeze pushed it over me.

I walked along for some minutes, gravely examining the scar as if I were some kind of official inspector of highways, before I spread my gaze more generally and it dawned on me that I was in the middle – very much in the middle – of an extensively smoking landscape, on possibly no more than a skin of asphalt, above a fire that had been burning out of control for thirty-four years – not, I’m bound to say, the smartest place in North America to position oneself. Perhaps it was no more than a literally heated imagination, but the ground suddenly seemed distinctly spongy and resilient, as if I were walking across a mattress. I retreated in haste to the car.

It seemed odd on reflection that I, or any other severely foolish person, could drive in and have a look around a place as patently dangerous and unstable as Centralia, and yet there was nothing to stop anyone from venturing anywhere. What was odder still was that the evacuation of Centralia was not total. Those who wanted to stay and live with the possibility of having their houses fall into the earth were allowed to remain, and a few had evidently so chosen. I got back in the car and drove up to a lone house in the center of town. The house, painted a pale green, was eerily neat and well maintained. A vase of artificial flowers and other modest decorative knickknacks stood on a windowsill, and there was a bed of marigolds by the freshly painted stoop. But there was no car in the drive, and no one answered the bell.

Several of the others houses proved on closer inspection to be unoccupied. Two were boarded and had “DANGER – KEEP OUT” notices tacked to them. Five or six others, kincluding a clutch of three on the far side of the central park, were still evidently lived in – one, amazingly, even had children’s toys in the yard (who on earth would keep children in a place like this?) – but there was no answer at any of the bells I tried. Everyone was either at work or, for all I knew, lying dead on the kitchen floor. At one house I knocked at I thought I saw a curtain move, but I couldn’t be sure. Who knows how crazy these people might be after three decades of living on top of an inferno and breathing head-lightening quantities of CO2, or how weary they might have grown of outsiders cheerfully poking around and treating their town as a curious diversion? I was privately relieved that no one answered my knocks because I couldn’t for the life of me think what my opening question would be.

It was well past lunchtime, so I drove the five miles or so to Mt. Carmel, the nearest town. Mt. Carmel was mildly startling after Centralia – a busy little town, nicely old-fashioned, with traffic on Main Street and sidewalks full of shoppers and other townsfolk going about their business. I had lunch at the Academy Luncheonette and Sporting Goods Store (possibly the only place in America where you can gaze at jockstraps while eating a tuna salad sandwich) and was intending then to push on in search of the AT, but on the way back to the car I passed a public library and impulsively popped in to ask if they had any information on Centralia.

They did – three fat files bulging with newspaper and magazine clippings, moist dating from 1979-1981, when Centralia briefly attracted national attention, particularly after the little boy, one Todd Dombowsky, was nearly swallowed by the earth in his granny’s backyard.

There was also, poignantly now, a slender, hardbound history of Centralia, prepared to mark the town’s centenary just before the outbreak of the fire. It was full of photographs showing a bustling town not at all unlike the one that stood just outside the library door, but with the difference of thirty-some years. I had forgotten just how distant the 1960s have grown. All the men in the photographs wore hats; the women and girls were in billowy skirts. All, of course, were happily unaware that their pleasant, anonymous town was quite doomed. It was nearly impossible to connect the busy place in the photographs to the empty space from which I had just come.

As I put the things back in their folders, a clipping fluttered to the floor. It was an article from Newsweek. Someone had underlined a short paragraph towards the end of the article and put three exclamation marks in the margin. It was a quote from a mine fire authority observing that if the rate of burning held steady, there was enough coal under Centralia to burn for a thousand years.
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2500th member give or take 3

[Lauritz Melchior]

Chapter 16 from Douglas Adams’ “Life, the Universe and Everything”. When I first read this some years ago, I burst out laughing.


“Arthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about and clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs that he still indulged himself in whenever he made any of these hateful and painful materializations that he was determined not to let himself get used to. He looked around for the others.
They weren’t there.
He looked around for the others again.
They still weren’t there.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them.
He looked around for the others
They obstinately persisted in their absence.
He closed his eyes again, preparatory to making this completely futile exercise once more, and because it was only then, while his eyes were closed, that his brain began to register what his eyes had been looking at while they were open, a puzzled frown crept across his face.
So he opened his eyes again to check his facts and the frown stayed put.
If anything, it intensified, and got a good firm grip. If this was a party, it was a very bad one, so bad, in fact, that everyone else had left. He abandoned this line of thought as futile. Obviously this wasn’t a party. It was a cave, or a labyrinth or a tunnel or something – there was insufficient light to tell, certainly insufficient light to hold a party in. All was darkness, a damp, shiny darkness.
And there was no sound, no noise at all, except for the echoes of his own breathing, which sounded worried. And the more he listened to them, the more worried they began to sound.
He coughed very slightly, in an introductory sort of way. He then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his cough trailing off among winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via further unseen corridors, as if to say … ‘Yes?’
This happened to every noise he made, and it unnerved him. He tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow dirge and he stopped.
His mind was suddenly full of images from the story that Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They didn’t. He let it go again. He didn’t know what he did expect.
Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him for at that moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.
It said, silently:
YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED
The sign flicked off again, in a way that Arthur was not at all certain he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.
The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this:
…,
Only in green neon.
It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this perplexedly for a second or two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he further reflected. Or at least, nonhuman pedantry.
The sentence then completed itself with these two words:
ARTHUR DENT.
He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at it. It still said ARTHUR DENT, so he reeled again.
Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness with just the dim red image of his name jumping in his retina.
WELCOME, the sign now suddenly said.
After a moment, it added:
I DON’T THINK.
The stone-cold fear which had been hovering around Arthur all this time waiting for it’s moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on him. He tried to fight it off. He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.
‘Er, hello?’ he said.
He cleared his throat and said it again, more loudly and without the ‘er.’ At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.
He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves and leaped off. He put out a hand onto the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn’t holding up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:
DO NOT BE ALARMED.
After a pause, it added:
BE VERY, VERY FRIGHTENED, ARTHUR DENT.
Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.
‘Hello?’ he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. ‘Is anyone there?’
There was no reply, nothing.
This unnerved Arthur even more than a reply would have done, and he began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther away from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.
At this point it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.
There was nothing there.
Just blackness.
This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the way he had come.
After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was now backing toward whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.
This, he couldn’t help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.
It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, while his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.
‘Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again,’ said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing that he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was … it was … it was …
Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.
A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.
He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.
It was a terribly realistic hologram.
It vanished.
‘Or perhaps you remember me better,’ said the voice suddenly, and it was a deep, hollow, malevolent voice that sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind, ‘as the rabbit.’
With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously soft and lovable rabbit – an image again, but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eye.
‘Born in darkness,’ rumbled the voice, ‘raised in darkness. One morning I poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt like some primitive instrument made of flint.
‘Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.
‘You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you’d made of my previous skin.
‘Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless.’
The voice paused while Arthur gawked.
‘I see you have lost the bag,’ said the voice, ‘probably got bored with it, did you?’
Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had been in fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he traveled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag, and that, curiously enough, even as they stood there, he was just noticing for the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be made out of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn’t the one he’d had a few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was, and wasn’t one he would have chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn’t his, and he would much rather have his original bag back, except that he was of course terribly sorry for having so peremptorily removed it, or rather its component parts, i.e., the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz., the rabbit whom he currently had the honor of attempting vainly to address.
All he actually managed to say was ‘Erp.’
‘Meet the newt you trod on,’ said the voice.
And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leaped backward, and found himself standing in the middle of the rabbit. He yelped again, but could find nowhere to leap to.
‘That was me, too,’ continued the voice in a low menacing rumble, ‘as if you didn’t know….’
‘Know?’ said Arthur with a start, ‘know?’
‘The interesting thing about reincarnation,’ rasped the voice, ‘is that most people, most spirits, are not aware that it is happening to them.’
He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was concerned there was already quite enough effect going on.
‘I was aware,’ hissed the voice, ‘that is, I became aware. Slowly. Gradually.’
He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.
‘I could hardly help it, could I?’ he bellowed, ‘when the same thing kept happened, over and over and over again! Every life I ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any time, I’m just getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent, pow, he kills me.
‘Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit of a pointer. Bit of a bloody giveaway!
‘“That’s funny,” my spirit would say to itself as it winged its way back to the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended venture into the land of the living, “that man who just ran me over as I was hopping across the road to my favorite pond, looked a little familiar….” And gradually I got to piece it together, Dent, you multiple-me murderer!’
The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors. Arthur stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.
‘Here’s the moment Dent,’ shrieked the voice, now reaching a feverish pitch of hatred, ‘here’s the moment when at last I knew!’
It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly opened up in front of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here’s an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It was a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around in it and sliding over monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in which could be seen the dark recesses of two further fearful caves, which …
Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he was looking at his own mouth, when his attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.
He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.
When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.
The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of a large section of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blankness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog kennel.
And the voice spoke to him again.
‘Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent,’ it said. ‘I dare you to tell me it was a coincidence!’
‘It was a coincidence,’ said Arthur quickly.
‘It was not!’ came the answering bellow.
‘It was,’ said Arthur, ‘it was…’
‘If it was a coincidence, then my name,’ roared the voice, ‘is not Agrajag!!!’
‘And presumably,’ said Arthur, ‘you would claim that that was your name.’
‘Yes!’ hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft syllogism.
‘Well, I’m afraid it was still coincidence,’ said Arthur.
‘Come in here and say that!’ howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.
Arthur walked in and said that it was coincidence, or at least, he nearly said it was coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing toward the end of the last word because the lights came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.
It was a Cathedral of Hate.
It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
It was huge. It was horrific.
It had a statue in it.
We will come to the statue in a moment.
The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had been carved out of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was precisely what it had been carved out of. It seemed to Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.
It was black.
Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colors with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colors, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Brunt Hombre and Gan Green on the way.
The unspeakable details that these colors picked out were gargoyles that would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.
The gargoyles all looked inward from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, toward the statue, to which we will come in a moment.
And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles’ faces that the statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren’t, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn’t.
Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.
The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow that had been slaughtered, and of which Arthur had happened to eat a fillet steak, would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish that Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn’t like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point.
And what was most disturbing about all this, apart from the statue, to which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again.
And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.
In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.
And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression in the statue in the center of all this monstrosity that was a statue of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet tall if it was an inch, there was not an inch of it that wasn’t crammed with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of thing would be enough to make any subject feel bad. From the small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish cut of his dressing gown, there was no aspect of Arthur Dent that wasn’t lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.
Arthur appeared as a gorgon, and evil, rapacious, ravening, bloodied ogre, slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.
With each of the thirty arms that the sculptor in a fit of artistic fervor had decided to give him, he was either braining a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea out of his hair, or doing something that Arthur at first look couldn’t quite identify.
His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.
Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness of things.
And when he opened his eyes again, there in front of him stood the figure of the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he had supposedly been persecuting all this time.
‘HhhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!’ said Agrajag.
He, or it or whatever, looked like a mad fat bat. He waddled slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.
‘Look…!’ protested Arthur.
‘HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!’ explained Agrajag, and Arthur reluctantly accepted this on the grounds that he was rather frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.
Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.
His bat wings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were than if they had been strong muscular beaters of the air. The most frightening thing was probably the tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical odds.
He had the most astounding collection of teeth.
They looked as if each came from a completely different animal, and they were ranged around his mouth as such bizarre angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew anything he’d lacerate half his own face along with it, and possibly put an eye out as well.
Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about as sane as a fish in a privet bush.
‘I was at a cricket match,’ he rasped.
This seemed on the face of it such a preposterous nothing that Arthur practically choked.
‘Not in this body,’ screeched the creature, ‘not in this body! This is my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get it too.’
‘But…’
‘I was at,’ roared Agrajag, ‘a cricket match! I had a weak-heart condition, but what, I said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I’m watching, what happens?
‘Two people quite maliciously appear out of thing air just in front of me. The last thing I can’t help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?’
‘Yes,’ said Arthur.
‘Coincidence?’ screamed the creature, painfully thrashing its broken wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer examination, such as he’d been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag’s face was covered with ragged strips of black Band-Aids.
He backed away, nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to discover that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s just fate playing silly buggers with you. With me. With us. It’s a complete coincidence.’
‘What have you got against me, Dent?’ snarled the creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.
‘Nothing,’ insisted Arthur, ‘honestly, nothing.’
Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.
‘Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you’ve got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I’d also call it a lie!’
‘But look,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m very sorry. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I’ve got to go. Have you got a clock? I’m meant to be helping save the Universe.’ He backed away still farther.
Agrajag advanced still farther.
‘At one point,’ he hissed, ‘at one point, I decided to give up. Yes. I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?’
Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that he had no idea and didn’t want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by who knew what Herculean effort into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own horrendously parodied image towering above him. He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.
‘I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world,’ pursued Agrajag, ‘as a bunch of petunia. In, I might add, a bowl. This particular happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you’d be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.’
He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.
‘On the way down,’ he snarled, ‘I couldn’t help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent. Coincidence?!!’
‘Yes!’ yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept that leaped easily to the eye.
‘I must go,’ insisted Arthur.
‘You may go,’ said Agrajag, ‘after I have killed you.’
‘No, that won’t be any use,’ explained Arthur, beginning to climb up the hard stone incline of his carved bedroom slipper, ‘because I have to save the Universe, you see. I have to find a Silver Bail, that’s the point. Tricky thing to do dead.’
‘Save the Universe,’ spat Agrajag with contempt. ‘You should have thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! What about the time when you were on Stavromula Beta and someone…’
‘I’ve never been there,’ said Arthur.
‘…tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who do you think the bullet hit? What did you say?’
‘Never been there,’ repeated Arthur. ‘What are you talking about? I have to go.’
Agrajag stopped in his tracks.
‘You must have been there. You were responsible for my death there, as everywhere else. An innocent bystander!’ He quivered.
‘I’ve never heard of the place,’ insisted Arthur. ‘I’ve certainly never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I go there later, do you think?’
Agrajag blinked slowly in a king of frozen logical horror.
‘You haven’t been to Stavromula Beta … yet?’ he whispered.
‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘I don’t know anything about the place. Certainly never been to it, and don’t have any plans to go.’
‘Oh, you go there all right,’ muttered Agrajag in a broken voice, ‘you go there all right. Oh, zark!’ He tottered, and stared wildly about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. ‘I’ve brought you here too soon!’
He started to scream and bellow, ‘I’ve brought you here too zarking soon!’
Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.
‘I’m going to kill you anyway!’ he roared. ‘Even if it’s a logical impossibility I’m going to zarking well try! I’m going to blow this whole mountain up!’ He screamed, ‘Let’s see you get out of this one, Dent!’
He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to be a small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down from his vantage place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.
He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity crashing down on top of the altar.
Agrajag screamed again, thrashing wildly for a brief moment, and turned a wild eye on Arthur.
‘You know what you’ve done?’ he gurgled painfully; ‘you’ve gone and killed me again. I mean, what do you want from me, blood?’
He thrashed again in a brief apoplectic fit, quivered and collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.
Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to have done, and then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly shattered the air to announce some clamoring emergency. He stared wildly around him.
The only exit appeared to be the way he had come in. He pelted toward it, throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he did so.
He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze; he seemed to be pursued more and more fiercely by klaxons, sirens, flashing lights.
Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light in front of him. It wasn’t flashing. It was daylight.”
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2500th member give or take 3

[zorT Kitty]

[The Master]

I was going to post this in the poetry section, because that is what I consider this, but I guess now this is a better place for it. I literally went back and reread this passage immediately upon completing. Tom Robbins is the man!
Excerpt from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins:
They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.
Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes -- and you'll never catch February in stocking feet -- it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.
However more abbreviated than it's cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off it's mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.
Febuary is pitiless, and it's boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no acident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.
Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within" February is as useless as the extra r in it's name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui holding both progress and contentment at bay.
James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings, although worse at knowing when to stop.
If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

Did I mention that Tom Robbins is the fucking man?
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"napalm is nature's toothpaste"

[The Master]

Here is another form Robbins's Villa Incognito:
All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a plane higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magicians handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, recycling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from the contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glorymonger, this alchemist in a jar.
The mystery of mayonnaise -- and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this -- is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grin-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and out-right majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palte, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy dispostion. Cholestorol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.


Anyone who takes that much time and effort to praise a condiment is wonderful. I cannot wait for August 30th, the day of his next book! Ouais.
_________________
"napalm is nature's toothpaste"

[Chuck]

He obviously gets paid by the word.

[Lauritz Melchior]

[kevinatilusa]

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
---
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse's mane, or maybe tied to the horse's ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, or two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books by Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter's night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn't only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newnewss, which, having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let's see how it begins.

Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you're elbowing your neighbors; apoligize, at least.

Or perhaps the bookseller didn't wrap the volume; he gave it to you in a bag. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you're blocking traffic.

You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it; the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited.

But doesn't this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, for for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong--willingly or unwillingly--to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermitten temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.

In other words, it's better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It's not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thurst toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recongize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let's see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won't work. But then you go on and realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author. It's the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.