I’m the soul in the body
of the man named Nijinsky.
Gaunt, I eat little, only
what the spirit feeds me.
I hate having a bloated
stomach. It inhibits dancing.I’m afraid of crowds,
of dancing for them—
they demand a joyful jig
but joy is death. They feel
nothing but want
my life to match theirs.
—Liu Xia, from Rant, translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern, published by PEN America
WITH SORROW IN MY HEART
AND
MUCH PITY FOR THE WEAK
WHO PUT STUMBLING BLOCKS IN MY PATH
AND
WISHED MY LIFE A PERPETUAL
SLOUGH OF DESPOND,
I RESPECTFULLY DEDICATE THIS VOLUME
THE AUTHOR
—Sue Greenleaf, dedication of Liquid from the sun’s rays
Declared or not, the prejudice, sweetened by different vocabularies and adopted by successive dialectics, is the prejudice of realism. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, the guarantee of its ideology, assumes a reality outside the text, outside the literalness of writing. Everything about it, about its vast grammar upheld by culture, the guarantee of its ideology, assumes a reality outside the text, outside the literalness of writing. That reality, which the author must limit himself to expressing, translating, directs the movement of the page, its body, its languages, the substance of writing. The most naïve readers assume this is the reality of the “world around us,” the reality of events; more astute readers displace that deceit in order to propose an imaginary entity, something fictitious, a “fantastic world.” But it is all the same: pure realists—socialists or not— and “magical” realists promulgate and refer to the same myth. A myth rooted in logocentric, Aristotelian knowledge, in the knowledge of an original, or something primitive and true that the author supposedly brings to the blank page.
[…]
The text’s apparent exteriority, its surface, its mask deceives us, “for if there is a mask there is nothing behind it; a surface that hides nothing more than itself; a surface that prevents us from considering it surface because it leads us to assume there is nothing behind it. The mask leads us to believe there is depth, but what the mask masks is itself: the mask simulates dissimulation in order to dissimulate that it is only simulation.”
[…]
Those planes of intersexuality are analogous to the planes of intertextuality that make up the literary object. They are planes conversing in the same exterior, answering and completing, exalting and defining each other: that interaction of linguistic textures, of discourses, that dance, that parody, is writing.
—Severo Sarduy, Escrito sobre el cuerpo [Written on a body], translated by Carol Maier
After his expulsion from the [Communist] party in 1909, he founded a Utopian school for workers on the island of Capri, but became deeply apolitical around this time, serving in World War One as a doctor, and having an elliptical impact on Soviet Russian politics and philosophy after the War. It is clear that his experiments in blood transfusions—one of which eventually killed him—were designed to explore the possibility of achieving Immortality; and it is rumoured that, given Lenin’s brain (after his death) to study, he hoped to resuscitate him, with the ultimate hope of making the Bolshevik rulers of the USSR immortal.
—Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Alexander Bogdanov
One summer, Sophia was suddenly afraid of small animals, and the smaller they were, the more afraid she was. This was altogether new. Ever since the first time she trapped a spider in a matchbox in order to make it her pet, her summers had been full of caterpillars, tadpoles, worms, beetles, and similar uncompanionable creatures, whom she provided with everything they could want from life, including, eventually, their freedom. Now everything was changed. She walked about with cautious, anxious steps, starting constantly at the ground, on the lookout for things that crept and crawled. Bushes were dangerous, and so were sea grass and rain water. There were little animals everywhere. They could turn up between the covers of a book, flattened and dead, for the fact is that creeping animals, tattered animals, and dead animals are with us all our lives, from beginning to end. Grandmother tried to discuss this with her, to no avail. Irrational terror is so hard to deal with.
One morning, they found a strange bulb washed ashore on the sand. They decided to plant it outside the guest room. Sophia put her spade in the ground to make a hole, the spade cut an angleworm in two, and when she saw the two halves writhing on the black earth, she threw down the spade, backed up against the wall of the house, and screamed.
“They’ll grow out again,” Grandmother said. “They really will. They’ll grow out again. It’s all right, believe me.” She continued to talk about angleworms as she planted the bulb. Sophia calmed down, but she was still very pale. She sat silently on the veranda steps with her arms around her knees.
“You know,” Grandmother said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever taken a sufficient interest in angleworms. Someone who’s really interested ought to write a book about them.”
That evening, Sophia asked whether “some” was spelled with an o or a u.
“O,” said Grandmother.
“I’ll never get anywhere with this book,” said Sophia angrily. “How can I think if I have to worry about spelling all the time? I lose my place, and the whole thing’s a mess!” The book consisted of a lot of blank pages sewn together at the spine. She threw it on the floor.
“What’s it called?” Grandmother asked.
“A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. But I’ll never get it written!”
“Sit down somewhere and dictate,” Grandmother said. “I’ll do the writing, and you tell me what to write. We’ve got lots of time. Now where did I put my glasses?”
It was a particularly good evening to begin a book. The setting sun threw plenty of light through the window, and Grandmother opened to the first page, which already carried an illustration of an angleworm in two parts. The guest room was cool and quiet, and Papa sat working at his desk on the other side of the wall.
“I like it when he’s working,” Sophia said. “I always know he’s there. Read what I wrote.”
“Chapter One,” Grandmother read. “Some people fish with worms.”
“Space,” Sophia said. “Now go on: I won’t say what their names are, but it’s not Papa. Now take your scared worm—it will pull itself together to…How much does it pull itself together?”
“To, say, one-seventh of its length, which makes it little and fat and easy to stick a hook through, which is not what it had in mind. But now take your smart worm. It makes itself as long as it can so there’s nothing to stick a hook through, and then it comes apart. Science does not yet know if it just breaks, or if the worm is being clever, because you can’t always tell, but…”
“Wait a minute,” Grandmother said. “How about if I put ‘…whether this is from overstretching or shows real intelligence’?”
“Put anything you want,” said Sophia impatiently. “Just so they’ll understand. Now don’t interrupt. It goes on like this: The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts. And we don’t know, either, if the worm is afraid it’s going to hurt. But anyway, it does have a feeling that something sharp is getting closer and closer all the time. This is instinct. And I can tell you this much, it’s no fair to say it’s too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that’s why it doesn’t hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second. Now take the smart worm that made itself long and came apart in the middle, that may have been like pulling a tooth, for example, except it didn’t hurt. When it had calmed its nerves, it could tell right away it was shorter, and then it saw the other half right beside it. Let me make this a little easier to understand by putting it this way: Both halves fell down to the ground, and the person with the hook went away. They couldn’t grow back together, because they were terribly upset, and then, of course, they didn’t stop to think, either. And they knew that by and by they’d grow out again, both of them. I think they looked at each other, and thought they looked awful, and then crawled away from each other as fast as they could. They they started to think. They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.”
Sophia lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought. It was getting dark in the guest room, and Grandmother got up to light the lamp.
“Don’t,” Sophia said. “Don’t light the lamp. Use a flashlight. Listen, is ‘presumably’ right?”
“Yes,” Grandmother said. She turned on the flashlight and put it down on the night table and waited.
“Presumably, everything that happened to them after that only seemed like half as much, but this was also sort of a relief, and then, too, nothing they did was their fault any more, somehow. They just blamed each other. Or else they’d say that after a thing like that, you just weren’t yourself anymore. There is one thing that makes it more complicated, and that is that there is such a big difference between the front end and the back end. A worm never goes backwards, and so for that reason, it has its head only at one end. But if God made angleworms so they can come apart and then grow out again, why, there must be some sort of secret nerve that leads out in the back end so that later on it can think. Otherwise it couldn’t get along by itself. But the back end has a very tiny brain. It can probably remember its other half, which went first and made all the decisions. And so now,” said Sophia, sitting up, “now the back end says, ‘Which way should I grow out? Should I make a new tail, or should I make a new head? Should I go on following and never have to make any important decisions, or should I be the one who always knows best, until I come apart again? That would be exciting.’ But maybe he’s so used to being the tail that he just lets things go on the way they are. Did you write everything I said?”
“Every word,” Grandmother said.
“Now comes the end of the chapter: But maybe the front end thinks it’s nice not having anything to drag around behind it, but who knows, because it’s hard to tell. Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment. But no matter what you think, you should never fish with worms.”
“There,” said Grandmother. “End of book, and the end of the paper, too.”
“That’s not the end at all,” Sophia said. “Now comes Chapter Two. But I’ll work on that tomorrow. How do you think it sounds?”
“Very persuasive.”
“I think so, too,” Sophia said. “Maybe people will learn something from it.”
They continued the following evening under the heading “Other Pitiful Animals.”
“Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He’d given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themselves, and then they fly right back again. It can’t be instinct, because that isn’t the way it works. They just don’t understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they’re dead. Did you get all that? Does it sound good?”
“Very good,” Grandmother said.
Sophia stood up and shouted, “Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won’t let you help! Did you write that?”
“Yes, I’ve got it.”
“Now come daddy-longlegs. I do a lot of thinking about daddy-longlegs. You can’t ever help them without breaking two of their legs. No, write three of their legs. Why can’t they pull in their legs? Write: When little kids bite the dentist, it’s the dentist who gets hurt. Wait a minute.” Sophia thought for a moment with her face in her hands. “Write ‘Fish,'” she said. “And then a space. Little fish die slower than big fish, and yet people aren’t nearly as careful about the little fish. They let them lie around on the rocks for a long time and breathe air, and that’s like holding somebody’s head under water. And the cat…” Sophia went on. “How do you know it starts from the head? The cat might be tired, and maybe the fish doesn’t taste good, and so it starts from the tail, and that makes me scream! And I scream when you salt them, and when the water’s so hot it makes them jump! I won’t eat fish like that, and it serves you right!”
“You dictate too fast,” Grandmother said. “Shall I put, ‘it serves you right!’?”
“No,” Sophia said. “This is a book. Stop after ‘it makes them jump.'” She was silent for a while, and then she went on. “Chapter Three. Space. I will eat crayfish, but I don’t want to watch when they’re cooking them, because crayfish are awful when they’re being cooked, so you have to be very careful.”
“That’s true,” said Grandmother, and giggled.
“Jesus,” Sophia burst out. “This is serious. Don’t say anything. Write: I hate field mice. No. Write: I hate field mice, but I don’t like it when they die. They make tunnels in the ground, and then they eat up Papa’s bulbs. And they teach their children to make tunnels and eat bulbs. And at night they all sleep with their arms around each other. They don’t know they’re unfortunate creatures. Is that a good word?”
“Excellent,” said Grandmother, writing as fast as she could.
“And then they get poison corn, or else they get their hind legs caught in a trap. That’s good that they get caught, or their stomachs get poisoned and explode! But what are we supposed to do? Write: What are we supposed to do, since we can’t ever punish them until they’ve already done something, and then it’s too late, anyway. It’s a hard problem. They have more children every twenty minutes.”
“Every twenty days,” Grandmother muttered.
“And they teach their children. Not just field mice—all the little animals that teach their children. And there get to be more and more of them, and they all teach their children, and so they’re all brought up wrong. And the worst ones are the ones that are so small they’re all over the place, and you can’t see them till you’ve already stepped on them. And sometimes you don’t even see them, but you know, so you have a bad conscience anyway. Whatever you do, it’s just as bad, and so the best thing is not to do anything at all, or else think about something else. The End. Is there enough room for an illustration?”
“Yes,” Grandmother said.
“You draw it,” Sophia said. “How does it all sound?”
“Shall I read it?”
“No,” Sophia said. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t have time right now. But you can save it for my children.”
—Tove Jansson, “Of Angleworms and Others”, from The Summer Book
For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche’s great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.
—Albert Camus, from his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize
In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy… whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.
—first sentence of E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay, orig. Précis de decomposition, tr. Richard Howard. PDF
A few years ago, while visiting a friend, I saw a poster on which the following sentence had been translated into English and diagrammed.
Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire, jusqu’à la découverte du crime; sans situation qu’instable, comme pour le poète la veille fêté dans tous les salons, applaudi dans tous les théâtres de Londres, chassé le lendemain de tous les garnis sans pouvoir trouver un oreiller où reposer sa tête, tournant la meule comme Samson et disant comme lui: “Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté”; exclus même, hors les jours de grande infortune où le plus grand nombre se rallie autour de la victime, comme les juifs autour de Dreyfus, de la sympathie – parfois de la société – de leurs semblables, auxquels ils donnent le dégoût de voir ce qu’ils sont, dépeint dans un miroir, qui ne les flattant plus, accuse toutes les tares qu’ils n’avaient pas voulu remarquer chez eux-mêmes et qui leur fait comprendre que ce qu’ils appelaient leur amour (et à quoi, en jouant sur le mot, ils avaient, par sens social, annexé tout ce que la poésie, la peinture, la musique, la chevalerie, l’ascétisme, ont pu ajouter à l’amour) découle non d’un idéal de beauté qu’ils ont élu, mais d’une maladie inguérissable; comme les juifs encore (sauf quelques-uns qui ne veulent fréquenter que ceux de leur race, ont toujours à la bouche les mots rituels et les plaisanteries consacrées) se fuyant les uns les autres, recherchant ceux qui leur sont le plus opposés, qui ne veulent pas d’eux, pardonnant leurs rebuffades, s’enivrant de leurs complaisances; mais aussi rassemblés à leurs pareils par l’ostracisme qui les frappe, l’opprobre où ils sont tombés, ayant fini par prendre, par une persécution semblable à celle d’Israël, les caractères physiques et moraux d’une race, parfois beaux, souvent affreux, trouvant (malgré toutes les moqueries dont celui qui, plus mêlé, mieux assimilé à la race adverse, est relativement, en apparence, le moins inverti, accable celui qui l’est demeuré davantage), une détente dans la fréquentation de leurs semblables, et même un appui dans leur existence, si bien que, tout en niant qu’ils soient une race (dont le nom est la plus grande injure), ceux qui parviennent à cacher qu’ils en sont, ils les démasquent volontiers, moins pour leur nuire, ce qu’ils ne détestent pas, que pour s’excuser, et allant chercher comme un médecin l’appendicite l’inversion jusque dans l’histoire, ayant plaisir à rappeler que Socrate était l’un d’eux, comme les Israélites disent de Jésus, sans songer qu’il n’y avait pas d’anormaux quand l’homosexualité était la norme, pas d’anti-chrétiens avant le Christ, que l’opprobre seul fait le crime, parce qu’il n’a laissé subsister que ceux qui étaient réfractaires à toute prédication, à tout exemple, à tout châtiment, en vertu d’une disposition innée tellement spéciale qu’elle répugne plus aux autres hommes (encore qu’elle puisse s’accompagner de hautes qualités morales) que de certains vices qui y contredisent comme le vol, la cruauté, la mauvaise foi, mieux compris, donc plus excusés du commun des hommes; formant une franc-maçonnerie bien plus étendue, plus efficace et moins soupçonnée que celle des loges, car elle repose sur une identité de goûts, de besoins, d’habitudes, de dangers, d’apprentissage, de savoir, de trafic, de glossaire, et dans laquelle les membres mêmes, qui souhaitent de ne pas se connaître, aussitôt se reconnaissent à des signes naturels ou de convention, involontaires ou voulus, qui signalent un de ses semblables au mendiant dans le grand seigneur à qui il ferme la portière de sa voiture, au père dans le fiancé de sa fille, à celui qui avait voulu se guérir, se confesser, qui avait à se défendre, dans le médecin, dans le prêtre, dans l’avocat qu’il est allé trouver; tous obligés à protéger leur secret, mais ayant leur part d’un secret des autres que le reste de l’humanité ne soupçonne pas et qui fait qu’à eux les romans d’aventure les plus invraisemblables semblent vrais, car dans cette vie romanesque, anachronique, l’ambassadeur est ami du forçat: le prince, avec une certaine liberté d’allures que donne l’éducation aristocratique et qu’un petit bourgeois tremblant n’aurait pas en sortant de chez la duchesse, s’en va conférer avec l’apache; partie réprouvée de la collectivité humaine, mais partie importante, soupçonnée là où elle n’est pas, étalée, insolente, impunie là où elle n’est pas devinée; comptant des adhérents partout, dans le peuple, dans l’armée, dans le temple, au bagne, sur le trône; vivant enfin, du moins un grand nombre, dans l’intimité caressante et dangereuse avec les hommes de l’autre race, les provoquant, jouant avec eux à parler de son vice comme s’il n’était pas sien, jeu qui est rendu facile par l’aveuglement ou la fausseté des autres, jeu qui peut se prolonger des années jusqu’au jour du scandale où ces dompteurs sont dévorés; jusque-là obligés de cacher leur vie, de détourner leurs regards d’où ils voudraient se fixer, de les fixer sur ce dont ils voudraient se détourner, de changer le genre de bien des adjectifs dans leur vocabulaire, contrainte sociale, légère auprès de la contrainte intérieure que leur vice, ou ce qu’on nomme improprement ainsi, leur impose non plus à l’égard des autres mais d’eux-mêmes, et de façon qu’à eux-mêmes il ne leur paraisse pas un vice.
Translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff:
Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.
Measures against power
[…]
And Mr. Keuner told the following story:
One day, during the period of illegality, an agent entered the apartment of Mr. Eggers, a man who had learned to say no. The agent showed a document, which was made out in the name of those who ruled the city, and which stated that any apartment in which he set foot belonged to him; likewise, any food that he demanded belonged to him; likewise, any man whom he saw, had to serve him.
The agent sat down in a chair, demanded food, washed, lay down in bed, and, before he fell asleep, asked, with his face to the wall: “Will you be my servant?”
Mr. Eggers covered the agent with a blanket, drove away the flies, watched over his sleep, and, as he had done on this day, obeyed him for seven years. But whatever he did for him, one thing Mr. Eggers was very careful not to do: that was, to say a single word. Now, when the seven years had passed and the agent had grown fat from all the eating, sleeping, and giving orders, he died. Then Mr. Eggers wrapped him in the ruined blanket, dragged him out of the house, washed the bed, whitewashed the walls, drew a deep breath and replied: “No.”
The question of whether there is a God
A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.”
Good turns
As an example of the right and proper way to do friends a good turn, Mr. K. related the following story. “Three young people came to an old Arab and told him: ‘Our father has died. He left us seventeen camels and stated in his will that the oldest son should get half, the second a third, and the youngest a ninth of the camels. Now we cannot agree on the division; please make the decision for us!’ The Arab thought for a while and said: ‘As I see it, in order to share out the camels properly, you are one short. I myself have only a single camel, but I put it at your disposal. Take it and then divide up the camels, and only bring me what is left over.’ They expressed their thanks for this good office, took the camel away, and then divided up the eighteen camels, so that the oldest got half—that is, nine—the second a third—that is, six—and the youngest a ninth—that is, two camels. To their astonishment, when they had led their own camels aside there was one camel left over. This one they brought back, with renewed thanks, to their old friend.”
[An aristocratic stance]
Mr. Keuner said: “I, too, once adopted an aristocratic stance (you know: erect, upright, and proud, head thrown back). I was standing in rising water at the time. I adopted this stance when it rose to my chin.”
—Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, via Monoskop
I never type in the morning. I don’t get up in the morning. I drink at night. I try to stay in bed until twelve o’clock, that’s noon. Usually, if I have to get up earlier, I don’t feel good all day. I look, if it says twelve, then I get up and my day begins. I eat something, and then I usually run right up to the race track after I wake up. I bet the horses, then I come back and Linda cooks something and we talk awhile, we eat, and we have a few drinks, and then I go upstairs with a couple of bottles and I type — starting around nine-thirty and going until one-thirty, to, two-thirty at night. And that’s it.
—Charles Bukowski, from Brainpicker.
Compare to Murakami’s daily routine, while working.
Brainpicker has also excerpted accounts from Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, E. B. White, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, Benjamin Franklin, William Gibson, Maya Angelou, Anaïs Nin, and Kurt Vonnegut, if you’re interested.