The Brief History of the Dead by Brockmeier, 2006

When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand. First he had died, he said, and then — snap! — the desert. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. Showers of red grit fell from his beard. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face. Then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow points of sand striking his skin, that he truly realized he was dead…

*  *  *

Recently a friend told me about Textermination, a 1992 novel by Christine Brooke-Rose, in which a bunch of fictional characters gather at a convention to figure out how to keep themselves from dying off. The premise is that these characters live in the imaginations and memories of their readers. If people stop reading the books, then the characters contained in those books stop existing. So I was surprised the other day while browsing the library shelves to find this novel by Brockmeier. After you die you live on in people’s memories: surely you’ve heard that supposedly reassuring alternative to a real afterlife. Brockmeier’s story populates this sort of afterlife in his story: you go there after you die, and you stay for as long as there’s someone still alive who remembers you. After everyone who remembers you is dead, then you disappear from this particular afterlife.

The premise is intriguing, and the first chapter is engaging, but my thought when I reached chapter two was that there wasn’t enough here on which to build a whole novel. I did find the novel disappointing, and it turns out that the first chapter had previously won awards as a stand-alone short story — maybe that should have been the end of it. Having finished, though, I no longer regard the premise as intrinsically limiting.

Thoughts on the Latest Stock Market Panic

So… Private industry wants to maximize profits. How? Increase revenues; decrease costs. This basic strategy has been going great for US companies: for the past year or so profits have reached record highs.

One of the biggest costs to private industry is employee wages. Keeping costs down means keeping wages down. But lower wages means less money to buy things, which reduces corporate revenues. What’s to be done?

Get people to spend money they haven’t earned; i.e., instead of paying them more wages, encourage them to borrow more.

People borrowed more and more, secured by the rising value of their houses, in order to keep buying. A few years ago this source of spending money dried up: real estate prices stopped going up; wages went down and jobs went away; mortgagees began defaulting. While the crisis to the lenders was immediate — and fixed via government bailout — the crisis to mortgagees has gotten worse. Prices of houses continue to go down; wages are still declining; unemployment has doubled since the housing crisis began.

So now the private sector loses its best strategy for keeping spending high while keeping wages low. What to do? Find another source of consumer borrowing. It’s the government. The government increases its borrowing, paying workers and contractors money they can spend on private-sector products. Meanwhile the private sector continues to keep its own labor costs low while keeping sales up.

Now the financial industry starts getting nervous. What if the governments start defaulting on their loans, just as the home buyers did? And isn’t the government, which on average pays higher wages than the private sector, becoming a problem for private employers that want to drive wages even lower in order to reduce costs? Isn’t it time to put a limit on government borrowing?

So now the companies get nervous. Both of the big sources of money for keeping spending up — real estate borrowing, government borrowing — are drying up. The rich have more money than ever, accounting for 50% of domestic spending. But because of widespread privatization in government, much of the government’s borrowing is spent on private-sector contractors rather than on government employees. So reducing government spending has a direct effect on reducing private revenues, which threatens to reduce the wealth of the very rich who drive spending.

No wonder the stock market is jittery. The only way to keep people buying the products without paying them more is to keep them spending borrowed money. But now both big sources of borrowing — first private, then public — are drying up. It seems inevitable that companies are going to have to spend some of those record profits on higher wages. At least in the short term, costs will go up before revenues do. That means corporate profits are likely to go down. And so their stock prices go down.

Maybe companies will hire more American workers now. If they do, unemployment has been so high for so long that people will likely be willing to go back to work at much lower rates of pay than they formerly earned. Or else companies will continue to shift jobs from the still relatively high-priced American workforce to other cheaper sources of labor. But in order to keep revenues up on a global scale, they’ll have to raise prices in other parts of the world to make up for declining sales and margins in the US. But since other countries’ governments aren’t borrowing either, than means raising the pay scale for those other countries’ low-wage workers, so they can afford to buy more of what they’re producing. Either way, the companies — and their rich investors — are going to have to spend money to make money. I expect they’ll find a way.

ADDENDUM: The latest budget showdown in Washington yielded only one tangible result that I know of: they raised the debt ceiling. Possible austerity measures for reducing government spending were mostly deferred, having been assigned to some special commission to figure out later. I wouldn’t be surprised if that commission eventually decides to impose only the smallest spending cuts. Keep borrowing, keep spending, keep corporate sales up and wages low. Maybe raise interest rates on Federal bonds a point or two to make the investment bankers happier and richer.

New Book by Patrick Mullins

I’d like to draw readers’ attention to the sui generis, romantically solipsistic, oddly compelling prose-poetic art book that is Patrick Mullins’ newly-published Illegal Dances of New York City. It’s his third, following Deep Tropical Ciné-Musique, which I wrote about here and here, and Day of Ciné-Musique, which I reviewed here.

In issuing this announcement I’m reminded that five years ago I launched Ktismatics as a “platform” for promoting a book that I had just finished writing. It was my third, a non-fiction, the first two being novels. Somewhere I’d read that it’s easier to get nonfiction published than fiction, especially if you’ve already built up an audience. So I went ahead and wrote a nonfiction in order to draw attention to the fiction, which is where my real writing passion lay. I hoped that six months of blogging would generate a groundswell of enthusiasm for the ideas behind my nonfiction book. Once I had established this online platform of potential buyers, I would be able to secure the attention of an agent and a publisher for the book. And once that book got published, then the fictions would get published too.

So: I began writing a blog in order to get my nonfiction book published, which I wrote in order to get my fiction books published. Interspersed with other related material I posted excerpts from the book and elaborations on its themes. I offered to send an electronic version of the nonfiction book, free of charge of course, to anyone who asked. I was astounded that no one ever did. After six months of blogging I sent packets of inquiry, including a detailed summary and excerpt, to six agents, all of whom represented authors of recently-published books addressing topics similar to my own. Within a week all six agents had sent me boilerplate rejection letters.

I’ve found other reasons to keep writing the blog even after it no longer served its original purpose. Eventually I rewrote the book I’d originally pitched: shortened it a lot, expanded its scope, turned it into a fiction. Though the original version was good, I’m even more pleased with the rewrite. A year and a half ago I announced its completion on the blog, featuring some Youtube clips of me reading aloud from the beginning of the text. Again I offered free e-copies of the book to anyone who asked, though this time I would have been surprised had anyone taken me up on the offer. I wasn’t surprised.

I’m pleased that over the past five years a few Ktismatics readers have asked to read my other books. There were three for the first novel, all of whom said they liked it. I sent my second novel to someone who tossed it aside as a piece of crap after reading maybe a quarter of it. One blog reader has asked for my fourth book, which I finished a few months back. I’ve not forgotten: I will send it to you eventually.

I don’t know whether my prior write-ups of Patrick’s earlier titles generated a spurt of customer demand, but then again Patrick never put up his own self-promoting blog before. Since I’ve been writing Ktismatics I’ve witnessed the publication of a number of books written by other bloggers. As far as I’m aware only a few of these bloggers’ online associates have written reviews of their books. I wonder if those reviews, or other forms of blogging recommendation, generated many sales.

I have found that I’m a more credible salesman of other people’s books than of my own. There’s this friend of mine: he’s read my latest novel, and I’ve also discussed with him the psycholinguistic works of Michael Tomasello. This friend has recommended Tomasello to several of his other friends and associates, but as far as I know he’s not recommended my book to anyone.

So: follow the link, buy Patrick’s book, and enjoy. I might resent you if you do, but only if I find out about it (winky smiley).

Some Hope by St. Aubyn, 2003

“Do you have any politics?” Princess Margaret asked Sonny.

“Conservative, ma’am,” said Sonny proudly.

“So I assumed. But are you involved in politics? For myself I don’t mind who’s in government so long as they’re good at governing. What we must avoid at all cost is these windscreen wipers: left, right, left, right.”

Sonny laughed immoderately at the thought of political windscreen wipers.

“I’m afraid I’m only involved at a very local level, ma’am,” he replied. “The Little Soddington bypass, that sort of thing. Trying to make sure that footpaths don’t spring up all over the place. People seem to think that the countryside is just an enormous park for factory workers to drop their sweet papers on. Well, those of us who live here feel rather differently about it.”

“One needs someone responsible keeping an eye on things at a local level,” said Prince Margaret reassuringly. “So many of the things that get ruined are little out-of-the-way places that one only notices once they’ve already been ruined. One drives past thinking how nice they must have been once.”

“You’re absolutely right, ma’am,” agreed Sonny.

“Is it venison?” asked the Princess. “It’s hard to tell under this murky sauce.”

“Yes, it is venison,” said Sonny nervously. “I’m awfully sorry about the sauce. As you say, it’s perfectly disgusting.” He could remember checking with her private secretary that the princess liked venison.

She pushed her plate away and picked up her cigarette lighter. “I get sent fallow deer from Richmond Park,” she said smugly. “You have to be on the list. The queen said to me, ‘Put yourself on the list,’ so I did.”

“How very sensible, ma’am,” simpered Sonny.

“Venison is the one meat I rr-eally don’t like,” Jacques d’Alantour admitted to Caroline Porlock, “but I don’t want to create a diplomatic incident, and so…” He popped a piece of meat into his mouth, wearing a theatrically martyred expression which Caroline later described as being “a bit much.”

“Do you like it? It’s venison,” said Princess Margaret leaning over slightly toward Monsieur d’Alantour, who was sitting on her right.

“Really, it is something absolutely mar-velous, ma’am,” said the ambassador. “I did not know one could find such cooking in your country. The sauce is extremely subtle.” He narrowed his eyes to give an impression of subtlety.

The princess allowed her views about the sauce to be eclipsed by the gratification of hearing England described as “your country,” which she took to be an acknowledgement of her own feeling that it belonged, if not legally, then in some much more profound sense, to her own family.

In his anxiety to show his love for the venison of merry old England, the ambassador raised his fork with such an extravagant gesture of appreciation that he flicked glistening brown globules over the front of the princess’s blue tulle dress.

“I am prostrated with horr-rror!” he exclaimed, feeling he was on the verge of a diplomatic incident.

The princess compressed her lips and turned down the corners of her mouth, but said nothing. Putting down the cigarette holder into which she had been screwing a cigarette, she pinched her napkin between her fingers and handed it to Monsieur d’Alantour.

“Wipe!” she said with terrifying simplicity.

Me & You & Everybody We Know

From The Analysis of Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (1971) by Heinz Kohut, Chapter 1:

The patient will describe subtly experienced, yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression… [H]e has the impression that he is not fully real, or at least that his emotions are dulled; and he may add that he is doing his work without zest, that he seeks routines to carry him along since he appears to be lacking in initiative…

[U]pward swings are generally short-lived. They tend to become the cause of uncomfortable excitement; they arouse anxiety and are then soon again followed by a chronic sense of dullness and passivity, either experienced openly or disguised by long hours of mechanically performed activities… A rebuff, the absence of expected approval, the environment’s lack of interest in the patient, and the like, will soon again bring about the former state of depletion…

It must be stressed again that the overt manifestations presented by the narcissistic personality disorders are not a reliable guide toward the answer to the crucial diagnostic question: whether or not to treat the patient psychoanalytically. Yet, having expressed the warning, I shall… enumerate some of the syndromes encountered in those cases where the psychopathology of the narcissistic personality is expressed in more circumscribed and colorful syndromes. In such instances the patient may voice the following complaints and present the following pathological features:

(1) in the sexual sphere: perverse fantasies, lack of interest in sex;

(2) in the social sphere: work inhibitions, inability to form and maintain significant relationships, delinquent activities;

(3) in his manifest personality features: lack of humor, lack of empathy for other people’s needs and feelings, lack of a sense of proportion, tendency toward attacks of uncontrolled rage, pathological lying; and

(4) in the psychosomatic sphere: hypochondriacal preoccupations with physical and mental health, vegetative disturbances in various organ systems.

Enabling Homelessness?

I previously wrote a post about the homeless people who live in my town. Here’s a policy question: in providing overnight shelter for homeless people, is the city government establishing a codependency relationship that enables the homeless to continue whatever lifestyle choices they’re making that keep them homeless? In order to minimize codependency, is it good policy to insist that no individual or family can stay more than 90 nights in the overnight shelter over the course of the year? Is it good policy to close the overnight shelter during the summer in order to encourage the homeless to use their initiative to fend for themselves? Is this still a good policy even though the empty shelter remains fully staffed all summer, and even though the city has made it illegal to sleep outdoors on public property? To limit codependency still further, is it best practice to close the shelter during the daytime in order to force the homeless people to get off their asses and out the door, looking for jobs and houses or even something to eat rather than just hanging around at the shelter all day — even if these people have to haul all of their worldly possessions around with them wherever they go? Is it good policy to extend longer-term shelter only to those homeless people who are demonstrably on the path to having their own private homes; i.e., who have a job or other source of income to pay the rent, who are not substance dependent, who are not too impaired (cognitively, emotionally, or physically) to take care of their own home?

I didn’t think so.

On the face of it, the codependency argument seems fatuous. As far as I know, neither the city government nor the homeless shelter can offer any tangible empirical evidence supporting their position. Isn’t it far more likely that the city government, acting on behalf of local businesses and homeowners, intends to make it as hard as possible for homeless people to stay in this town? I guess it’s no longer cool to have the police rough them up a little, then give them one-way bus tickets out of town.

Flotilla Dream

I was standing by the ocean. Through dense fog I could see the vague contours of something big just offshore, moving rapidly across the water from right to left. I looked harder: it was a destroyer, flat grey, its gun turrets pointed obliquely toward the land. Following the destroyer came another boat, moving at the same speed and on the same trajectory, carrying on its flat deck a helicopter. Third and last in this procession came another helicopter, this one flying about twenty feet above the surface of the water. The helicopter was towing a vast network of fibers, linked together at nodes that looked like white marbles. I estimated that there were at least ten thousand nodes in this loose structure, which extended for perhaps a hundred yards behind the helicopter. The fibers holding it together must have been more rigid than they looked, because the array retained a complex three-dimensional shape as it was being pulled through the air instead of collapsing on itself into a long clumpy strand. I understood that this thing was a piece of scientific apparatus, to be launched into space as part of a zero-G experiment on neural networks.

Here Be Plague

You can imagine my chagrin when, on my afternoon run, I saw a sign just like this one posted at the trailhead:

The suspected culprits are these guys:

It’s been my understanding that the local prairie dog population has been riddled with plague for as long as we’ve lived here. I don’t know what’s happened to warrant the new scare tactics — maybe somebody’s pet cat ate a prairie dog and got sick. I went ahead and ran the trail anyway. One of the little critters was lying prone right in the middle of the trail as I approached, but he managed to get himself out of the way before I had to take evasive action.

The Illusionist by Burger, 2006

By coincidence, Anne brought this DVD home from the library the day after I experienced the optical illusion I described in my last post. She thought she had reserved the 2010 animated feature by Chomet, but this earlier film with the same title was delivered instead. It’s a pretty good movie, but it could have been a better one. The issue that was set up by the story, but that the writer-director failed to explore adequately, was this:

The unbridgeable gap between upper and lower classes, and between ruler and ruled, is grounded in illusion. What is the most effective strategy for bridging the illusory gap? Should the reality behind the illusion be revealed, as well as the techniques used by  those in power to conceal that reality? Or should an even more powerful illusion be constructed so as to overwhelm the original illusion?

Inferential Perception

My morning walk took me on a mesa overlooking a cow pasture. In the corner of the pasture is a pond and, this morning, in the pond was a… what? The first feature I could distinguish was the head, lifting out of the water on a longish neck. The torso was spotted black and white. Four legs could be discerned. Not a cow, surely: too skinny for that. A horse? It had the triangular head for it. But there was something funny about the head: bright white, nearly gleaming; triangular like a horse’s, but if anything too triangular, like a poorly-drawn head of a horse, and seemingly too big for the body supporting it. And the legs: why could I see all four of them extended, as if the horse was floating on its side? But surely it wasn’t dead, since the first feature I had seen was the head, stretched up and out of the water on its long neck. My attention was momentarily distracted by cars moving along the road beyond the far edge of the pond. Looking back to the pond I suddenly realized that the horse was actually larger than the cars, maybe twenty feet long — far too big to be a horse. And the pattern of black and white spots had shifted, and was in fact still shifting as I continued to walk at an oblique angle to it. The pond, in contrast, retained its consistent flat grey-green color. Then, suddenly, I realized that I had it all wrong. What I’d been looking at wasn’t an object in the pond. It was a part of the pond’s surface, the only part not covered by pond scum. What I had taken to be the mottled pelt of an animal turned out to be a reflection of the partly cloudy sky behind it, its pattern changing with the wind and with my movement relative to the reflective patch of pond surface.

Smaller, more intricately patterned in light and shadow, more irregularly shaped than its background, this patch of clear pond carried all the visual signals by which one typically distinguishes figure from ground, object from context. Trying to discern what sort of thing this anomalous object actually was — during those two or three seconds of confusion I had engaged in an act of conscious attention and categorization and inference, whereby I repeatedly compared the features and the whole of what I was seeing with abstracted representations compiled in my memory from other specific objects I’d previously encountered and for which I had names. But the initial perception of this shape as a 3D object backgrounded against the 2D surface of the pond: that was nearly instantaneous, preconscious. But it wasn’t a direct perception. What hit my retinas as I looked at the pond was a 2D array of light in varying colors and luminances. Nearly instantaneously and unconsciously, I had transformed this luminance array into a perceptual representation of the 3D landscape I was looking at, assembled not only from the immediate sensory input extracted from the world but also from memory-driven unconscious inferences for making sense of the sensory input. It’s how perception works all the time.

*  *  *

In his clear and thorough and excellent post about concepts, Pete Wolfendale describes, via Kant and Brandom, the iterative process by which people revise their judgments about the world based on experience of the world. “This is,” says Pete, “the theoretical role of reason in constituting a unified account of nature.” Pete endorses what he calls “thick practices” of discerning reality:

“The causal features of the objects themselves act as constraints upon the development of our dispositions to respond to them in perception and action, and via them upon our dispositions to reason about them.”

Our “dispositions to respond” iteratively and inferentially to the world need not be stated explicitly, in the form of rules for understanding the world and for sorting its objects into categories. Usually the norms are implicit, to be inferred from patterns of  practice in engaging the world. Making norms explicit, in the form of statements communicated via language, is essential if humans are going to help one other recognize errors in their idiosyncratic subjective understandings of the world, and if they are going to learn new truths about the world discovered by others. But it’s also the case that an individual in isolation can correct an erroneous understanding of the world through activating the iterative practice of comparing features of the world with dispositions for interpreting those features.

While it’s possible to describe the iterative processes underlying perception propositionally, there is no reason to assert that the practice is intrinsically linguistic. Cognitive processes can operate without ever coming into conscious awareness. Conscious thinking is a relatively slow process, requiring focused attention on a relatively small number of features extracted from the world or from memory. In perceiving one’s immediate environment it’s more efficient, and more thorough, to rely on distributed, unconscious cognitive operations for iterating between sensory input and representations of prior perceptual arrays stored in memory. Perceptual inference need not rely on implicit reason or propositional logic, as evidenced for example by the observation that many other mammalian species improve through experience their abilities to navigate environments, not just by following a few well-defined trails but by staking out new paths and shortcuts they’ve never taken before.

The contention that inferential processes for understanding the world need not be conscious or even rational does not obviate Pete’s ideas about the importance of concepts and propositions in achieving a better understanding of what the world is really like. Though human reasoning and language are qualitatively different from and arguably better than the cognitive capacities of other animals, these abilities didn’t just come out of nowhere. The ability iteratively to compare concepts with the objects they represent evolved incrementally from similar comparative practices that don’t rely on concepts. And, like other mammalian species, we still deploy these non-conceptual iterative practices whenever we are actively perceiving the world we live in.

The Interrogative Mood by Powell, 2009

Would you rather be beaten with a board or a chain? Does any particular person strike you as the most intelligent you have seen or known? Have you ever participated in a cakewalk? What do you take on popcorn? Do you know what is meant by high explosive? What term would most accurately oppose the term “rigorous argument”? Would you rather spend an hour driving a hot rod or talking to a whore? If you could elect to find yourself in a Mahogany Chris-Craft powerboat on Lake Michigan in 1930 and then live out the life of that person in that time without returning to your life in this time, would you? Have you ever bred mice? Do you like tar? Do you know much about plate tectonics? Do you regard yourself as redeemed, redeemable, or irretrievably lost? Do you find that the flavor butter pecan, as in butter-pecan ice cream, sounds better than it tastes? What is the loudest noise you have ever heard? Have you done any mountain climbing? Would you eat a monkey? What broke your heart?

When the going gets tough, are you one of the tough that gets going? Have you ever dreamed you had apartments you were only sometimes aware you had? Do you have any ballet training, and if not, would you like some? Have you ever seen Newton’s Optiks? I have a vision of Debbie Marsden in a light blue dress saying somewhat proudly as we did the dishes that we would not do the flatware because “Mommie scalds these”; have you ever heard of someone boiling the silverware in her own household? Do you think Debbie Marsden might have become maladjusted somehow? Do you think there is any statistical merit to the possibility that quiet shy girls stand a chance higher in proportion to that of more robust girls of turning nymphomaniac?

Dog Jog

Here’s something I’d never seen before: a woman and her seeing-eye dog out for a run.

After we passed each other I turned to watch their approach to the next intersection. The dog looked around and behind, presumably checking traffic (there was none), then the two of them proceeded across the road without slowing down.

Salem’s Lot by King, 1975

His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but there was still enough time to set things to rights.

“Son?” Henry Petrie asked softly. “Are you awake?”

“I guess so,” Mark answered sleepily.

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“I… think so. I don’t remember.”

“You called out in your sleep.”

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry.” He hesitated and then spoke from earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket-suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable. “Do you want a drink of water?”

“No thanks, Dad.”

Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to understand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still — a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.

“Mark, is anything wrong?”

“No, Dad.”

“Well… g’night then.”

“Night.”

“The door shut softly and his father’s slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction.  An adult might have had hysterics at this point, as a slightly younger or older or child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting — not for the first time — on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can’t get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hopes of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still clasped loosely in his right hand like a child’s rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.

The Land at the End of the World by Antunes, 1979

Do you fancy another Drambuie? Talking about elixirs always makes me long for syrupy, amber-yellow liquids in the vain hope that, through them and the gentle, cheerful dizziness they provoke, I might discover the secret life of people, an emotional squaring of the circle. Sometimes, by the sixth or seventh glass, I feel that I’m almost there, that I’m about to grasp it, that the clumsy tweezers of my understanding are about to pick up, with surgical caution, the delicate nucleus of the mystery, but then I immediately sink into the formless glee of inarticulate idiocy from which I only extricate myself the following day, by dint of aspirin and antacids, stumbling over my slippers on the way to work, carrying with me the hopeless opacity of my existence, as thick with the mud of enigmas as the half-dissolved sugar in my morning cup of coffee.

. . .

Whenever you examine people closely, they begin, imperceptibly, to take on not so much a familiar aspect but a kind of posthumous profile, which we dignify with our fantasy about their future disappearance. Fondness, friendship, even a degree of tenderness all become easier, being pleasant becomes effortless, idiocy takes on the amiably seductive quality of ingenuousness.

. . .

Like this bar and its Art Nouveau lamps in dubious taste, its customers, heads together, whispering delicious banalities, caught up in the sweet euphoria of alcohol, the background music lending to our smiles the mysterious depth of feelings we have never had: another half bottle of wine and we’ll think ourselves Vermeer, as skilled as he was at translating, through the domestic simplicity of a gesture, the touching, inexpressible bitterness of our condition.

. . .

I had become a man: a kind of sad, cynical greed made up of lascivious despair, egotism, and an eagerness to hide from myself had replaced forever the fragile pleasure of childish joy, of open, unreserved laughter, embalmed in purity, and which at night, when I’m walking home down a deserted street, I still seem to hear echoing at my back like a mocking cascade.

. . .

Why the hell doesn’t anyone talk about this? I’m beginning to think that the one million five hundred thousand men who went to Africa never existed and that I’m just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart — one-third bullshit, one-third booze, one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing — just so that we can cut to the chase more quickly and end up watching the dawn together in the pale blue light that seeps through the shutters and rises up from the sheets, revealing the sleeping curve of a buttock, the profile of someone facedown on the mattress, our bodies fused in an entirely unenigmatic torpor.

. . .

Sitting on the back seat of the taxi, with the sound of the ticking meter pulsing like suppressed throbs in my throat, I was trying desperately to recognize my city through the windows covered in pimples of water that slid down the glass, slow as glycerin, but all I could see, in the precarious tremor of the headlights, were the swift profiles of trees and houses that seemed to me swathed in the atmosphere of devout, solitary widowhood that I associate with certain provincial towns when the parish hall isn’t showing some pious film bemoaning the lack of candidates for the priesthood.