Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (55 page)

(
Suite
)

Individuals like Goethe must not have abounded in experiences of this kind. By aptitude or decision (genius lies in choosing to be a genius and
in being right
) they have their pseudopods stuck out as far as they will go in all directions. They encircle with a uniform diameter, their limit is their skin projected spiritually to great distances. It does not seem that they have need to desire what begins (or continues) beyond their enormous spheres. That’s why they’re classics, hey.

The unknown approaches the amoeba
uso nostro
from all sides. I can know a lot or live a lot in a given sense, but then
the other
thing moves up on the side where I have my lacks and scratches my head with its cold nail. The worst is that it scratches me when there is no itching, while just when it does itch—when I ought to want to know—everything surrounding me is so set, so located, so complete and solid and labeled, that I begin to think that I was dreaming, that I’m fine this way, that I can take care of myself all right and that I shouldn’t let myself be carried away by my imagination.

(
Final suite
)

Imagination has been praised to excess. The poor thing cannot move an inch away from the limits of its pseudopods. In
this direction, great variety and vivacity. But in the other space, where the cosmic wind that Rilke felt pass over his head blows, Dame Imagination does not go.
Ho detto.

(–
4
)

LIVES which end like literary articles in newspapers and magazines, so pompous on page one and ending up in a skinny tail, back there on page thirty-two, among advertisements for secondhand sales and tubes of toothpaste.

(–
150
)

THE people in the Club, with two exceptions, maintained that it was easier to understand Morelli from the quotes he used than from his personal meanderings. Wong insisted until his departure from France (the police refused to renew his
carte de séjour
) that it wasn’t worth the trouble champollionizing the old man’s rosettas, once you found the two following quotations, both from Pauwels and Bergier:

Perhaps there is a place in man from where the whole of reality can be perceived. This hypothesis seems delirious. Auguste Comte declared that the chemical composition of a star would never be known. The following year Bunsen invented the spectroscope.

Language, just like thought, proceeds from the binary arithmetical functioning of our brain. We classify by yes and no, by positive and negative. (…) The only thing that my language proves is the slowness of a world vision limited to the binary. This insufficiency of language is obvious, and is strongly deplored. But what about the insufficiency of binary intelligence itself? Internal existence, the essence of things, escapes it. It can discover that light is continuous and discontinuous at the same time, that a molecule of benzine establishes between its six atoms dual relationships which are nevertheless mutually exclusive; it accepts it, but it cannot understand it, it cannot incorporate into its own structure the reality of the profound structures it examines. In order to do that, it would have to change its state, machines other than the usual ones would have to start functioning in the brain, so that binary reasoning might be replaced with an analogical consciousness which would assume the shapes and assimilate the inconceivable rhythms of those profound structures…

Le Matin des magiciens

(–
78
)

IN 1932, Ellington recorded
Baby When You Ain’t There
, one of his least praised numbers and one to which the faithful Barry Ulanov does not give any special mention. With a curiously dry voice Cootie Williams sings the lyrics.

Why is it so necessary at certain times to say: “I loved that”? I loved some blues, an image in the street, a poor dry river in the north. Giving testimony, fighting against the nothingness that will sweep us all away. That’s how in the air of the soul little things like that will linger, a sparrow that belonged to Lesbia, some blues that in the memory will fill the small space saved for perfumes, stamps, and paperweights.

(–
105
)

“HEY, if you move your leg like that I’m going to stick this needle in your ribs,” Traveler said.

“Keep on telling me about that business of colored in yellow,” Oliveira said. “With my eyes bandaged it’s like a kaleidoscope.”

“Colored in yellow,” Traveler said, rubbing the thigh with a piece of cotton, “is under the jurisdiction of the national corporation of commission agents for the corresponding species.”

“Animals with yellow fur, vegetables with yellow flowers, and minerals with a yellow look,” Oliveira recited obediently. “Why not? After all, Thursday is the fashionable day here, one doesn’t work on Sunday, the metamorphoses between Saturday morning and afternoon are extraordinary, people so easy-going. You’re hurting something awful. Is that some metal with a yellow look, or what?”

“Distilled water,” Traveler said. “So you’ll think it’s morphine. You’re quite right, Ceferino’s world only appears strange to guys who believe in their own institutions to the exclusion of those outside. If you thought about everything that changes as soon as you leave the edge of the sidewalk and take three steps into the street …”

“Like going from colored in yellow to colored in pampa,” Oliveira said. “This thing is making me a little sleepy.”

“Water is a soporific. If I had my way I’d shoot you up with nebiole and you’d be more wide awake.”

“Explain me something before I fall asleep.”

“I don’t think you’re going to fall asleep, but go ahead.”

(–
72
)

THERE were two letters from Juan Cuevas, attorney, but the order in which they should be read was material for a polemic. The first was the poetical exposition of what he called “world sovereignty”; the second one, also dictated to a stenographer at the Santo Domingo gate, took its vengeance on the required modesty of the first:

The following figured among the stones:

Oh chivalrous lawyer! The fierce enemy of Kant, he insisted on “humanizing the current philosophy of the world,” to which purpose he decreed:

Abandoning for a few minutes a considerable dialectical arsenal, he peeped into the kingdom of world religion:

A poet, and a good one.

Suddenly the archetypal vision invades and spreads out:

And then,

The worst was that suddenly,

But did it make any difference? Ecstasy again in the following line:

And the letter went on to its close in a flowery way, although with some curious last-minute grafts:

(–
53
)

HE went around thinking in those days, and the bad habit of ruminating about everything at length inevitably made things hard for him. He had been revolving about the great affair, and the inconvenience in which he was living because of La Maga and Rocamadour made him analyze with increasing violence the intersection where he felt he was stuck. In cases like that Oliveira would grab a sheet of paper and write down the grand words over which he went slipping along in his ruminations. He wrote, for example: “The great whaffair,” or “the whintersection.” It was enough to make him laugh and feel more up to preparing another
mate.
“Whunity,” whrote Wholiveira. “The whego and the whother.” He used this
wh
the way other people used penicillin. Then he would get back to the matter more slowly and feel better. “The whimportant thing is not to become whinflated,” Wholiveira would say to whimself. After moments like this he would feel able to think without having the words play dirty tricks on him. Little more than methodological progress, because the great affair was still invulnerable. “Who would have told you, kid, that you’d end up as a metaphysician?” Oliveira would ask himself. “You have to resist the clothes-closet with three bodies, conform to the night-table of every day’s insomnia.” Ronald had come by to suggest to him that he accompany him in some vaguely political activities, and all night long (La Maga had not yet brought Rocamadour from the country) they had argued like Arjuna and the Charioteer, about action and passivity, the reasons for risking the present for the sake of the future, the blackmail side of every action that has a social end, the degree to which the risk taken serves at least to palliate an individual guilty conscience, the swinish personal behavior of everyday life. Ronald had ended up leaving with his
head bowed down, not having been able to convince Oliveira that action was needed in support of the Algerian rebels. Oliveira had had a bad taste in his mouth all day because it had been easier to say no to Ronald than to himself. He was fairly certain of only one thing, and it was that he could not give in without betraying the passive hope by which he had lived since coming to Paris. Ceding to facile generosity and going out to paste up clandestine posters on the street seemed like a mundane explanation to him, a settling of accounts with friends who would appreciate his boldness, more than a real reply to great questions. Measuring the thing from the temporal and the absolute, he felt that he was wrong in the first case and right in the second. He was wrong in not fighting for Algerian independence, or against anti-Semitism or racism. He was right in rejecting the simple stupefaction of collective action and remaining alone once more next to his bitter
mate
, thinking about the great affair, turning it around like a ball of yarn in which you cannot see the end or where there are four or five ends.