Paul Boccaccio

No doubt it is easy to imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least respect certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, the pursuit of dissonance, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that has occurred before. This is because everything that went before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has converted it into a substance that is varied of course but, taken as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo is juxtaposed with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking disparities we should find, if we did not take account of the future and the changes that it must bring, in a horoscope of our own riper years cast for us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its beauty introduces into our judgement something as conjectural, and consequently as barren of interest, as any prophecy the non-fulfillment of which will in no way imply any inadequacy of the prophet’s part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.

—Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange’s, whose grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.

Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would have called ‘real people.’ But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a ‘real’ person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of ‘real’ people would be a decided improvement. A ‘real’ person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

The new Lieutenant Commander bowed and withdrew from the Great Commander-in-Chief’s presence. He returned to his column and looked up at the blue sky where the stars of the Great Major should be.

“Oh, Great Major! May this world be the place where one doesn’t have to kill those one cannot hate. If this could be realized, I wouldn’t mind my body being torn many a time.”

—Kenji Miyazawa, “The Crow and the Great Major,” from Ihatov Fairy Tales: A Restaurant with Many Orders”

The old lady, silly twit, listens with her mouth open and smiles dreamily, looking at me. She shouldn’t stare at me. I stick out my tongue. Maryvanna, shutting her eyes in shame, whispers hatefully, “Hideous creature!”

That night she’ll read her uncle’s poetry to me again:

Nanny, who screamed so loudly outside,
Flashing past the window,
Creaking the porch door,
Sighing under the bed?

Sleep, don’t worry,
God will watch over you,
Those were ravens calling,
Flying to the cemetery.

Nanny, who touched the candle,
Who’s scratching in the corner,
Who’s stretched in a black shadow
On the floor from the door?

Sleep, child, don’t worry,
The door is strong, the fence is high,
The thief won’t escape the block
The axe will thud in the night.

Nanny, who’s breathing down my back,
Who’s invisible and climbing
Ever closer up my crumpled bed sheet?

Oh child, don’t frown
Wipe your tears and don’t cry.
The ropes are pulled tight,
The executioner knows his job.

Well, after hearing a poem like that, who’d be brave enough to lower her feet from the bed, to use the potty, say? Everybody knows that under the bed, near the wall, is the Snake: in lace-up shoes, cap, gloves, motorcycle goggles, and holding a crook in his hand. The Snake isn’t there during the day, but he coagulates by night from twilight stuff and waits very quietly: who will dare lower a leg? And out comes the crook! He’s unlikely to eat you, but he’ll pull you in and shove you under the plinth, and you’ll fall endlessly, under the floor, between the dusty partitions. The room is guarded by other species of nocturnal creatures: the fragile and translucent Dry One, weak but terrible, who stands all night in the closet and in the morning goes into the cracks. Behind the peeling wallpaper are Indrik and Hindrik: one is greenish and the other gray, and they both run fast and have many feet. And in the corner on the floor is a rectangle of copper grating, and under that a black abyss: “ventilation.” It’s dangerous to approach even in the daytime; the Eyes stare out, without blinking. Yes, the most horrible is the nameless one who is always behind me, almost touching my hair (Uncle knows!). Many times he plans to reach out, but he keeps missing his chance and slowly, sadly, lowers his incorporeal hands. I wrap myself tight in the blanket, only my nose sticking out—they don’t attack from the front.

Having frightened me with her uncle’s poems, Maryvanna goes back to her place in a communal apartment, where, besides her, live Iraida Anatolyevna with her diabetes, and dusty Sonya, and the Badylovs, who were deprived of parental rights, and the hanged uncle… And she’ll be back tomorrow if we don’t get sick. We often are.

—Tatyana Tolstaya, Loves Me, Loves Me Not, translated by Antonina W. Bouis and Jamey Gambrell