Tokyo Fiancee

Amelie Nothomb

Between the two words, koi and ai, there is no variation of intensity, but an essential incompatibility. Can one fall in love with a person one has a liking for? Unthinkable. One falls in love with a person one cannot stand, a person who represents an unbearable danger. Schopenhauer saw in love the ruses of our reproductive instincts: I cannot express the horror this theory inspires in me. I see, in love, the ruses of my instinct not to assassinate another person: when I feel the need to kill a specific individual, some mysterious mechanism--an immune reflex? phantasm of innocence? fear of being sent to jail?--causes me to crystallize around that person. And so it has transpired that, to the best of my knowledge, I have, to date, never murdered a soul.

Engagement contains the idea of a gage, a pledge, I added, to plead my cause. The fiancee pledges her troth. It's lovely, don't you think? Whereas the meaning of the word marriage is filled with platitudes, just like the contract that defines it.

Hateful and selfish.

The Vagrants

Yiyun Li

They were at the mercy of strangers, as always.

He saw the joy of being able to read, in his wife’s eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students—his wife and his daughter—had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn’t been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses.

And idiocy seemed to be one of the rare crimes for which one could never get enough punishment. A robber or a thief got a sentence for a year or more for a crime, but the tag of idiot, just as counterrevolutionary, was a charge against someone’s very being, and for that reason Bashi did not like his fellow townsfolk.

The city came to life in the boy’s baffled gaze, some people more prepared than others for this important day. A fourth grader found to her horror that her silk Young Pioneer’s kerchief had been ripped by her little brother, who had bound it around his cat’s paw and played tug-of-war with the cat. Her mother tried to comfort her—didn’t she have a spare cotton one, her mother asked, and even if she wore the silk kerchief, nobody would notice the small tear—but nothing could stop the girl’s howling. How could they expect her, a captain of the Communist Young Pioneers in her class, to wear a plain cotton kerchief or a ripped one? The girl cried until it became clear that her tears would only make her look worse for the day; for the first time in her life, she felt its immense worthlessness, when a cat’s small paw could destroy the grandest dream.

Li provides a look at a host of little people, tiny (meaningless) in their ant-like travails against the machine of the masses or the public (fate). Great crowds of people eager like panting dogs to scent the wind and see which way it will blow that they too might turn with it and not stick out--this is a crushing force, a force that grinds down our humanity, a force that is the source of much pain and misery. But it is also one of the most primal human forces. We wouldn't be human if we weren't part of the masses. In isolation a human becomes something different.
But Li follows a tale of a city through a host of these little people, blown by the winds. No one of them is particularly heroic or good or holy or evil or anything other than strikingly like the people we know: capable of good and evil, often times surprising and rarely as box-like as we would imagine. She places before us the challenge of truly comprehending another's pain. It is one thing to recognize that the whole world is a mass of suffering wounds, that all of us are in the same boat, bearing pain and cuts and bruises from our tumble through this life--truly this is hard enough to actually recognize and know within ourselves. But how much more difficult is it to comprehend a fellow being's pain? That is something that few people attain. The Vagrants come close sometimes to revealing moments where two wounded souls recognize the shape of the cuts on those next to them. For the most part though, it is a sad tale of people missing each other's pain completely for the pain of their own wounds. It's a sad story, I won't lie. But not a dark story. There is something good glowing inside it.
Respect must be shown to Li also for her choice of epigraph. Li could not have chosen better than the sixth stanza of T H Auden's "The Shield of Achilles."

   She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

K2: The Savage Mountain

Ed. Robert H Bates

Just fine, he would say. Just fine. And his mouth would smile. He never showed a moment’s fear or the slightest lack of confidence, but he realized of course that he had been stricken by something that was likely to be fatal, that his condition was getting worse, and that he was 9,000 feet above Base Camp in a terrible monsoon storm. The nearest tent, at Camp VI, was 2,000 feet below. He knew that we could not carry him down the tricky route we had come up, and that we must go only where we could lower him. Even in perfect weather with all men in top physical condition, the task might prove impossible—yet Art Gilkey could smile, and his smile gave us strength.

Pete Schoening!

Slaughterhouse - Five

Kurt Vonnegut

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.

Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

Billy closed that one eye, saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden. There were only four men in that squad. Billy had heard that one man in each firing squad was customarily given a rifle loaded with a blank cartridge. Billy didn’t think there would be a blank cartridge issued in a squad that small, in a war that old.

If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die. He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go. So it goes.

I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.
I suppose, said O’Hare.

The knack of enjoying one's self in the moment one has is not unlike Vonnegut's Tralfamadorian conception of time: all points exist always and at once, so ignore the bad and enjoy the good. If you are delayed in a journey and are forced to wait somewhere, should not these moments of waiting be moments of deep and flowing peace? Why must we find waiting so frustrating? We musn't. Or this much I will exhort: the art of patience, the art of waiting seems to have been lost, but there is not really a good that comes out of this. To wait is to be like the one we are tying to be like.

2666

Roberto Bolano

Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

When you know something, you know it, and when you don’t, you’d better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? He asked himself.

Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breathe, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying. As you can imagine, there were no more questions.

It was a golden age for dentists in America. Black folks, of course, were always smiling. White folks smiled. Asian folks. Hispanic folks. Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a smile. Or to put it another way, we don’t trust anybody, least of all the people who smile, since we know they want something from us. Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they’re good people, that they’d never hurt a fly? No again. The truth is they don’t’ want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they ask for in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that’s all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshiped.

Reading this Bolano book feels like being dipped in a vat of particularly sticky, particularly unhealthy, foul-smelling goo that somehow seeps into your skin and makes you feel like garbage. And yet it is a good book. This feeling I have felt with other South American authors. I think that 2666 will be the end of my South American kick, at least for a while. From Garcia-Marquez to Borges to Allende to Bolano, with several others in between, I have found these Spanish-writing authors to be good, but very dark and sticky, like molasses. I am not sure what has driven so many of them to dirty their hands like they do, but it seems to be a trend. I think thus far, Borges was my favorite.
Standing where we are, we look. We see from our eyes, we see a world spinning around us, almost incomprehensible. Although, we feel comprehension. We recognize, as if dimly in the dust or fog, things we have felt in ourselves. But what is it to truly see from another's eyes? It is rare, that much is sure.
Bolano lets us do this rare thing. From the protagonist's eyes, you think you know a character. You think this man has these motives, these thoughts, does these things, he is known by this name, but the truth is there is no such man, rather there is an interaction, a relation.
In storytelling, all the faces of characters are interactions, or you might call them relations. Bolano had a character named Archimboldi. He is a writer. But there never is any Archimboldi. There are Amalfitano-Archimboldi and Haas-Archimboldi and Bubis-Archimboldi. The story goes and we meet one of these relations, but later we meet another, and even though half or some portion (not all relations are birelational) of the relation is the same, it really is nothing at all like the other relation. And it is the experience of meeting these many and varied relations that allows our minds to slip out of the cages that so commonly hold them and run about in a world where glimpses through other people's eyes are possible. It takes five novels slowly dancing about some invisible date to even bring this thought up close to the surface of the water.
I wanted to apply this sort of thought to life, to say that we don't exist as individuals but as relations, but that isn't always true. I think in many cases we mostly exist as relation, but there are times when perhaps we truly are individuals. In writing however, because of the added dynamic of the reader, no character is ever anything but a relation. Perhaps, even, that is the definition of a character, a relationship between the mind of the reader and the words of the page. You could almost believe that a character is not the same character when we are looking at different relations of that character.

House of Spirits

Isabel Allende

And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand the existence of Colonel Garcia and the others like him, as I understand my grandfather and piece things together from Clara’s notebooks, my mother’s letters, the ledgers of Tres Marias, and the many other documents spread before me on the table. It would be very difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages while I wait for Miguel, while I bury my grandfather, whose body lies beside me in this room, while I wait for better times to come, while I carry this child in my womb, the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter.

The best thing to say is what another has already said, be it echo or bridge:

Every brave man will think so, he told me. He will not want to live by passing on the wrath. A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition. So, a fellow throws himself in the sea of blows saying he do not believe it is infinite. In this way many courageous people have died. --Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

This is power. Look at it.
This is the great domino strain of pain and hurt. It's coming towards you. Towering ivory block after towering ivory block slams another and then the ground making the one that looms over you tremble. They are engraved with the images of people screaming. Some are silent, some are loud, some are tortured, and all are miserable. Who stands strong enough not to fall?

You have a lot to do, so stop feeling sorry for yourself, drink some water, and start writing, Clara told her granddaughter before disappearing the same way she had come.