Read & Listen
to 1,754
Curated
Short Stories

That shit in the background has been there for a long time – she said in a letter to Elisa – I didn’t invent it, just as I didn’t invent the horrible onset of AIDS, the neglect and first victims, the transvestites in my neighbourhood with their conversations, tears, laughter and silences, the couples burdened with the full weight of their addictions, the cradles of the poor where sobbing, fleas and urine flourished, the howl of class struggle echoing out of sirens, the dank cinemas where you trod on semen, cigarette butts, drunks and needles, and I didn’t invent the people who wanted to treat me as an artist when I was just someone from the streets and rooms in my photographs, i.e.: someone who didn’t feature in the great pimp’s hegemony. I didn’t invent a theme, Nan said, and I certainly didn’t invent the abhorrent academy which expected despatches from the apocalypse; or hell, even though that apocalypse or hell was just a thirty minute taxi drive from their offices

If they kill me, he mused, or if I expire here, nothing will be left of me. Who was I? Someone who read a few articles by German philologists that inspired him to set off on a journey. Isn’t that proof of the power of philology? Or of my own weakness. How stupid. The people holding me here have never even heard of such a person as Abulafia. Adam and Eve certainly didn’t talk in their language. Abulafia finally proclaimed himself the Messiah. But nothing changed after his death. And even less will change after mine. Nothing at all

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough