Vit > Books: a-hundred-of-the-best-novels‎ (100)

…the Excellence of the mental Entertainment consists less in the Subj

…the Excellence of the mental Entertainment consists less in the Subject, than in the Author’s Skill in well dressing it up.

Mr. Partridge acted for some Time on the defensive only; indeed he attempted only to guard his Face with his Hands; but as he found that his Antagonist abated nothing of her Rage, he thought he might, at least, endeavour to disarm her, or rather to confine her Arms; in doing which, her Cap fell off in the Struggle, and her Hair being too short to reach her Shoulders, erected itself on her Head; her Stays likewise, which were laced through one single Hole at the Bottom, burst open; and her Breasts, which were much more redundant than her Hair, hung down below her Middle; her Face was likewise marked with the Blood of her Husband; her Teeth gnashed with Rage; and Fire, such as sparkles from a Smith’s Forge, darted from her Eyes.

‘Dearest Sophia, whatever it costs me, I will renounce you; I will give you up: I will tear all such Hopes from my Heart, as are inconsistent with your real Good. My Love I will ever retain, but it shall be in Silence; it shall be at a Distance from you; it shall be in some foreign Land; from whence no Voice, no Sigh of my Despair, shall ever reach and disturb your Ears.’

So now I am moving among these monuments, trembling phosphorescence in the pale stones beneath lost grey sky. The path descends across the cemetery, and now the few distant visitors and groundskeepers drop out of sight. The path cuts into the ground, and becomes something like a stone-lined trench as I follow it around the base of a low hill. I am thinking of dead men, and the stories that they leave behind for us to repeat. It was to this task that I had proposed to dedicate my life, and now the fiat of someone I’ll never know or see has quashed that purpose.

The lieutenants evidently deserted as well, so their horses are pulling an extra cart. We have three. The entire company, by my estimate, is not more than seventy. This includes the Clappers, who walk in a compact mass toward the rear of the column; they wear jingling apparatus, all manner of bones, wooden and metal things hanging on thongs around their necks, dangling from their brims like bead curtains in front of their faces. When soldiers fight with their bodies the Clappers fight with their spirits by means of complicated interlocking clapping and chants to Eihoi the Wild Horse.

The war is up there on the island, where we’re going to meet it, but there’s no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream… Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside.

We go on now like sleepwalkers following the darkness shed by Makemin’s turned back.
A hollow howling noise, like wind sobbing at the mouth of a mine, rises behind us as we near the city’s brink. There are the landmarks I’d seen in the charm, the road to the cemetery curves off to the right, through irregular, soft ridges, and trees bristle pitch black above them.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.

“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen – Moby Dick – Moby Dick!”

The tundra was now engulfed in deep silence. The shadows, still motionless and noiseless, fell upon the tundra from above, squeezed out the light and dwarfed the open spaces. The winter huntsmen guessed that the sun had set till spring and their hearts missed a beat, the cold blast of a parting, the like of which they had never known, swept over them and an almost tangible feeling of hopelessness gripped them so that although they had been wandering about separately they suddenly decided as one: “We’ll go!”
Then out in the tundra something moved, there was a rustle in the snow, life rippled through the space in front of them, here and there sparkles of light flared up and the sky, which had seemed dark, turbid and empty but a few moments before, suddenly opened wide to let forth flickering crystal-clear light. The lads’ hearts were filled with fear and wonder. They ought to have made off, but they did not have sufficient power over themselves.

The Kasyan kids, as they were called, grew in freedom without restriction or supervision. For them the greatest concern and joy was to survive until spring, until the sun, until the warmth, until fish and the berries, and the whole of Boganida waited for spring as for the mercy of God. Locked in damp, airless hut, which was up to the chimney in drifts and cut off from the rest of the world by snow, the family endured many miserable winter months, which, to the children, seemed like years! And then, at last, some of them in rags, some quite bare-tummied, the children climbed out, dirty, from their soggy, stinking burrow into the world.
Blinded by the bright light, choked by the burning fresh air, the brood of children did not jump or rejoice. Wiping their red, streaming eyes with their little fists, the children looked mistrustfully around, their mouths open, gums bleeding from scurvy, presenting their pallid faces to the life-giving warmth and stretching out their hands to the sun. Their heads swam and the bright light hurt their eyes as they perched on the earthbank by the house…

Did a

Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?

Two aging men confabing with each other, leaders of men, patting each other on the back and looking frantically about to find someone to lead.
Warden had a theory about officers: Being an officer would make a sinner out of Christ himself. No man could swallow so much gaseous privilege and authority without having his guts inflated.

The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truckdrivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their very tonguelessness – so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it.

He was barely recognizable. His broken nose had swollen and was still running blood in a stream. Blood was also flowing out of his mouth, whenever he coughed. His eyes were practically closed. Blows from the grub hoe handles had torn the upper half of both ears loose from his head. Blood from his nose and mouth, and the ears which were not bleeding much, had spotted his chest and the white drawers.

Furthermore my frivolity, the moment I was not alone, made me eager to please, more eager to amuse by chattering than to acquire knowledge by listening, unless it happened that I had gone out into society in search of information about some particular artistic question or some jealous suspicion which my mind had previously been revolving. Always I was incapable of seeing anything for which a desire had not already been roused in me by something I had read, anything of which I had not myself traced in advance a sketch which I wanted now to confront with reality.

And if there is something of aberration or perversion in all our loves, perversions in the narrower sense of the word are like loves in which the germ of disease has spread victoriously to every part.

But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter – which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years – and it opens of its own accord.

I move through a city of voices and words. Voices that set the air in motion and pass through my inner ear to reach the brain transformed into electrical pulses; words that I hear in passing, perhaps if someone stands beside me talking on their phone, or that I read no matter where I turn, on every surface, every screen. Printed words reach me like spoken sounds, like the notes on a musical score; sometimes it is hard to unscramble words that are spoken simultaneously, or to infer those I can’t quite hear because they’re whisked away or lost in a louder noise. The varied shapes of letters give rise to a ceaseless visual polyphony.

De Quincey moves very frequently from city to city. Sometimes he is not sure anymore where he is, or whether he’s awake or dreaming, or if the city around him is really there or just a memory or a fantasy implanted in his starving, sleepless brain by a dose of opium. He walks in order to stay awake but falls asleep even as he continues to put one foot in front of the other. He takes shelter at night in the hollow of a doorway or outside a church but hunger and cold will not let him sleep.

The city is tattooed in words: its bridges, its highway embankments, every bit of space has been inscribed. The city is submerged in a flood of simultaneous words as in a vast cloud of pollution. All the words that people whisper, yell, say to each other, mutter to themselves, speak into their cell phones to be scattered through the air in ceaseless bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Over rooftops and terraces, a constantly expanding array of relay towers that no one can see will send its signals to orbiting satellites and then all over the Earth. The hive of human voices down below merges with a skein of voices wrapping itself around the planet.

Their laughing mouths are stretched painfully wide by a terrifying joy, a fanatical, collective, unanimous euphoria. They are the suicide squads of happiness, its fundamentalists, caught in a gruesome glee that forces them to jump from cliffs and trampolines. Any day can be a party when you have everything you need. They laugh in a circle, looking separately at their phones and at the same time joined by the excitement radiating from each glowing screen. They all laugh: couples, families, friends, mobs of people.

He looks at her round face, her dark skin full of wrin

He looks at her round face, her dark skin full of wrinkles. Her eyes have gotten smaller since he died: they are like two wounds now, small and straight across, which have not healed completely. They never seem to glow now other than when she is filled with the certainty, and not just the memory, that he is dead, bringing on a sudden despair, not unlike madness. But at this instance, not only is there no glow to them, they actually seem blind, inexistent.

Among the trees of the orchard there was a regal lemon tree. The people in the region said that the tree was magical, because it was always full of good lemons, in winter as well as in summer, and it never dried out. It was always in bloom.

He makes his way toward the center of the island: the flattened top of the green knoll. The island stretches out from the center there, spinning in concentric, green circles around it, the edges cramped by a ring of dense water. The island and the water are, in turn, inside another ring, the ring of summer, which is, in turn, inside the larger ring of time.

“This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of – of nerves, let us say. He was the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck – figuratively and professionally speaking.”

“I can easily picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the cavernous place, with the light of the bulk-lamp falling on a small portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the other side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears. I can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the knowledge of an imminent death.”

“It struck me that it is from such as he that the great army of waifs and strays is recruited, the army that marches down, down into all the gutters of the earth. As soon as he left my room, that ‘bit of shelter,’ he would take his place in the ranks, and begin the journey towards the bottomless pit.”

“We have heard so many such stories, and the majority of us don’t believe them to be stories of love at all. For the most part we look upon them as stories of opportunities: episodes of passion at best, or perhaps only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even if they pass through the reality of tenderness and regret. This view mostly is right, and perhaps in this case, too… Yet I don’t know.”

It is to what I have called the Apes of God that I am drawing your attention – those prosperous mountebanks who alternately imitate and mock at and traduce those figures they at once admire and hate. And bringing against such individuals and their productions all the artillery of the female, or bi-sexual tongue, will abuse the object of their envy one day, and imitate him the next: will attempt to identify themselves with him in people’s minds, but in the same breath attempt to belittle him – to lessen if possible the disadvantage for them that this neighbourhood will reveal. I will make them parade before you in their borrowed plumes like mannequins, spouting their trite tags, and you shall judge if my account is true.

Zagreus always has to be in the limelight, he is incredibly vain. – But he definitely has a screw loose.

“Moron is his word – Do you understand moron? – He means a sort of rustic idiot you see.”
(Moron was a nice word! – I am his moron Dan thought, and since he always thought of himself as small – I am Horace’s little moron!)

“The wife knows everything – she is afraid of nothing. She enjoys all that the man hates. She loves the carrion! She loves, it-is-her-breath, the society…
She loves it at breakfast, luncheon, at supper – the hour entlang she will be pleased it is all one. She is for the man the scavenger. It is her business. She represents him – in the market-place, kitchen, the latrine.”

We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough – the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder – one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines.

…the castellan br

…the castellan brought out the book in which he had jotted down the hay and barley for which the mule drivers owed him, and, accompanied by a lad bearing the butt of a candle and the two aforesaid damsels, he came up to where Don Quixote stood and commanded him to kneel. Reading from the account book – as if he had been saying a prayer – he raised his hand and, with the knight’s own sword, gave him a good thwack upon the neck and another lusty one upon the shoulder, muttering all the while between his teeth. He then directed one of the ladies to gird on Don Quixote’s sword, which she did with much gravity and composure; for it was all they could do to keep from laughing at every point of the ceremony, but the thought of the knight’s prowess which they had already witnessed was sufficient to restrain their mirth.

“And if,” said Sancho, “those gentlemen wish to know who the valiant one was who did this to them, your Grace may inform them that he is the famous Don Quixote de la Mancha, otherwise known as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance.”
At this the knight inquired of his squire what had led him to call him by such a title at that particular moment.
“I can tell you,” said Sancho. “I was looking at you for a time by the light of the torch that poor fellow carried; and truly, your Grace now has the worst-looking countenance that I have ever seen, whether due to exhaustion from this combat or the lack of teeth and grinders, I cannot say.”

“One plays the ruffian, another the cheat, this one a merchant and that one a soldier, while yet another is the fool who is not so foolish as he appears, and still another the one of whom love has made a fool. Yet when the play is over and they have taken off their players’ garments, all the actors are once more equal.”
“Yes,” replied Sancho, “I have seen all that.”
“Well,” continued Don Quixote, “the same thing happens in the comedy that we call life, where some play the part of emperors, others that of pontiffs – in short, all the characters that a drama may have – but when it is all over, that is to say, when life is done, death takes from each the garb that differentiates him, and all at last are equal in the grave.”

Even today, in Russia, say, we still see people constantly on the move: carrying bundles by hand, pulling wooden satchels behind them on little wagons or sleds. They roam – are compelled to roam. They are driven. Individual life does not rebel; there is too little of it for rebellion. One soul mingles with another like smoke. For that reason, too, people in those parts are fraternal. Here, as far as the West extends, as far as Rome and Greece reach, a man stands alone between the tended flower beds and the little porticoes of a house from which no one, by law and equity, is entitled to expel him. He stands alone, by himself; the soft blue air is around him; he is unencumbered on all sides, like a statue. This is the only way he knows how to be; only in this way can he be big or little, crooked or straight, good or bad.

In the pattern of our past there repeatedly turns up one incomprehensible strand. Our true past lies in it, wherever we meet it, wherever it happens to crop up. We will never find that strand entwined in the midst of relationships which were once important to us, which make up the obviously significant portions of our life-stories. The true past is always peripheral, I might almost say “marginal” in nature. It is found at the margins of experience. It manifests itself – like another existence which is really ours – through persons whom we have seen for only brief spans of time now and then, or even only once in our lives, at places and in neighborhoods where we never set foot again. At times it almost seems as if we possess a second and as it were retroactive biography.

Metaphors were crashing to the ground, emblems breaking through their false bottoms into reality… The sudden contact with naked reality is fatal. Time-honored lies which play their necessary part in the economy of the psyche cannot suddenly be replaced by truth. Every second reality that is abruptly displaced by first reality leads to death.

In the immensity of the universe, in the solar system, on the earth, in Russia, in Moscow, in the corner house of Sivtzev Vrazhek, in his study, in his armchair, sat the learned ornithologist, Ivan Alexandrovitch. Confined by the lampshade, the light fell on a book and struck the corner of the inkstand, the calendar and a pile of papers. The scholar, however, saw only that part of a page where there was a coloured picture of a cuckoo.

The cosmos? Tanyusha could not grasp it. For was it not the whole sum of things and the crowning of all? Whereas she was but on life’s threshold, hardly yet beyond the confines of chaos from which she had come at her birth. So far she had only just begun to gather up the crumbs of knowledge, being still entirely in the world of problems and first perceptions – all most important, all tottering and contradictory. She strained eagerly towards what was clear – the axiom, casting theory aside, chafing at alternative solutions and experiencing no need of faith.

Beneath the edifices of the diplomatic cemeteries drainage pipes had been laid, along which foul liquid flowed to the central sewer, thence on to irrigate some fields where grew prime cauliflowers. In this way official turpitude and lies were transformed in the last stage and by a process of sedulous cleansing into the purest tears and the beauty of valour. People of limited intelligence talked of mere cheating, which was unjust, since the deception was a most complicated and grandiose affair. People with narrow foreheads became defeatists, therefore, whilst the wise retired from active life, some for many years, others for ever.

Victory was to come to those accustomed neither to thinking, nor weighing, nor valuing, and who had nothing to lose. And they did conquer, too. After some deliberation the people in civilian clothes proclaimed: “We have conquered”; and driving away the real conquerors, filled the places of highest authority in the dead city.

The first foe was man, the second, rats, and the third the pale, malignant louse, from which there was no escape in marketplaces, dens and stations. And to die just then, besides occasioning a lot of trouble to one’s relatives, was hardly less expensive than to go on living.

My beard is a wonder… defiantly heterosexual, unkempt, rabbinical, intellectual, revolutionary. It lets you know I am not interested in fashion, that I am eccentric, that I am serious. It affords me the opportunity to judge you on your judgment of me. Do you shun me? You are shallow. Do you mock me? You are a philistine. Are you repulsed? You are… conventional.

The city is, as is everything now, just more Disneyland. Magic castles. Quaint architecture. That the buildings are authentic somehow does not change the sense of falseness, of fetishization. I grieve for us, a world of tourists, for cities in drag, for our inability to be real in a real place.

Let’s face it, animals make noise. They demand attention. They make more noise than vegetables, which in turn make more noise than minerals. So the animals, especially the humans, are inherently dramatic. They are not more important but believe they are. This is something one learns almost immediately when one studies Linnaeus.

I think about tires, how they’re round and have holes in their centers. It’s analogous to the missing film. Yet the empty space in the center of a tire is useful; it allows the tire to attach to the wheel, which allows it to turn on the axle, which allows the car to move forward. This gives me some hope. Perhaps this missing film will allow me to move forward. Perhaps the missing film is the hole in the tire that is my brain.

Everything is reviewed, analyzed, hated, loved, puked back at us in endless iterations, multiplying, replicating, repeating itself, repeating patterns, echoing…

There is horrible violence, but then we take a break and have dinner. This is life.

Sometimes I think that deep in my personality there are survivals of traits of that primitive race, so poetic, so melancholy, so sensuous and bloody, just as capable of making pacts with demons as of being mystics possessed with mad lyricism, because Bomarzo was saturated with their unknown and fascinating magic…

I have believed and I still believe that some of the beings we call dead are capable of appearing to us under determined conditions. I believe that they are around us constantly. I believe that they are spying on us from the balconies of heaven…

Life and Death, like two allegorical figures, the Naked Woman and the Skeleton, preside in that way by the door that opens into my deepest emotions. Later I will tell how I made use of those symbols in the Wood of Bomarzo.

…when I came into the world something magical, something fabulous had been predicted for me which raised me above my contemporaries and which made of me an individual apart, impregnated with vigilant mystery. And yet I amputated and destroyed my life.

…they all died and their crowns rolled at their feet onto the tattered robes that other princes hastened to put on…

I’ve

I’ve heard rabbits, foxes, and dormice drum. Frogs can drum up a storm. They say woodpeckers drum worms from their casings. And men beat on timpani, cymbals, kettles, and drums. We have eardrums and brake drums, we drum up excuses, drum into our heads, drum out of the corps. Drummer boys do that, to the beat of a drum. Composers pen concerti for strings and percussion. I might mention Tattoos, both minor and major, and Oskar’s attempts up to now…

Things grew almost calm and cozy in our cellar. La Greff lay with increasing composure beneath the three men taking turns, and when one of them had had enough, my talented drummer handed Oskar over to a sweaty, slightly slant-eyed fellow I assume was a Kalmuck. Holding me with his left hand, he buttoned his trousers with his right, and took no offense when his predecessor, my drummer, did the reverse.

In the sun-dappled forest, the still forest of age-old fears, he walked through the tangled branches, handsome and no less noble than Aaron his forebear, brother of Moses, walked on with sudden laughter, the maddest of the sons of man; laughing out of blazing youth and love, suddenly uprooting a flower and biting its head off, suddenly dancing a jig, a great lord in high boots, dancing and laughing in the blinding sun among the branches, dancing with grace, with the two unresisting animals at his heels, dancing with love and triumph while his subjects the forest creatures went heedlessly about their business, pretty lizards living their lives beneath the foliate bowers of huge mushrooms, golden flies tracing geometric patterns in the air, spiders rising out of clumps of pink heather to watch the movements of bugs with prehistoric probosces, ants grooming each other and exchanging signals before returning to their solitary tasks, itinerant woodpeckers taking soundings, lonely toads giving nostalgic tongue, shy crickets chirping, screeching owls strangely awakened now.

…well my ideal would be to have a large estate where I could keep all sorts of animals, starting with a baby lion with great big paws, paws like fluffy-luffy-duffy balls of wool I’d touch them all the time and when he got big he’d never harm me, the secret is to love them, and then I’d have an elephant, a lovely old grandfather jumbo, if I had an elephant I wouldn’t mind having to do the shopping I’d even go and buy vegetables in the market he would carry me on his back and pass me up the vegetables with his trunk and I’d put money in his trunk so he could pay the lady, and I’d also have beavers on my estate I’d have a river put in just for them and they could build their house in peace…

Oh yes, from now on a high-profile social life! New Year cards to all his acquaintances! But not to anybody below member of section! Expensive cards for As and above! And with a short handwritten greeting! It was money in the bank! Contacts, for God’s sake! A man was only as good as his contacts! No: a man was the sum of his contacts! Top priority: rent a villa with cook and valet-cum-butler! Every day, quality guests for lunch and dinner, that was the secret of success! The butler buttling in white gloves! Big spending on these things was money in the bank! Very haute cuisine – more money in the bank!

Sacred, obtuse litany, wondrous canticle, joy of poor human kind doomed to die, love’s sempiternal two-voiced unison, the eternal love-duet which makes the earth to multiply. She told him over and over that she loved him. She asked him, for she knew the miraculous answer, asked him if he loved her. He told her over and over that he loved her. He asked her, for he knew the miraculous answer, asked her if she loved him. Love’s first burgeoning, so tedious to others, so engrossing to those concerned.

I talked, too, and recited some poetry, and laughed, in the gene

I talked, too, and recited some poetry, and laughed, in the general confusion. I came to myself only when Lyuba turned out the chandelier, and the room was filled with the blue, hazy light of dawn. Everyone grew quiet. The blue light mixed with the light from the lamp on a table. Faces looked dull and beautiful.
“The nicest time of all is after a muddled night,” the old man in the student’s jacket said. “Now we can drink our wine calmly. And talk about different things. I love the dawn. It rinses the soul.”

The state was falling to pieces like a handful of wet mud. The provinces and districts of Russia were no longer ruled by Petrograd, and no one knew what they lived on or what was seething inside them. The army at the front was melting fast.
Kerensky swept around the country, trying to paste the nation together with his ecstatic eloquence. For the power of an idea, for conviction, he was trying to substitute fancy phrases, an operatic pose, a grandiose but irrelevant gesture. He harangued thousands of soldiers at the front, in the trenches, without ever noticing how funny he was.

It made good sense that the past should be unrecoverable. I became convinced of this later after I had made two or three attempts to relive what had already been lived through. “Nothing in life ever is repeated,” my father used to love to say, “except our mistakes.” And the fact that nothing in life can ever be lived a second time was one of the reasons for the deep satisfaction in being alive.

The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and w

The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory. This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at another's expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember.

Two buttresses had been built on each side of the central pier which had been splayed out towards the top, so that to right and left of the roadway there were two terraces daringly and harmoniously projecting outwards from the straight line of the bridge over the noisy green waters far below. The two terraces were about five paces long and the same in width and were bordered, as was the whole length of the bridge, by a stone parapet. Otherwise, they were open and uncovered. That on the right as one came from the town was called the sofa. It was raised by two steps and bordered by benches for which the parapet served as a back; steps, benches and parapet were all made of the same shining stone. That on the left, opposite the sola, was similar but without benches. In the middle of the parapet, the stone rose higher than a man and in it, near the top, was inserted a plaque of white marble with a rich Turkish inscription, a tarih, with a carved chronogram which told in thirteen verses the name of the man who built the bridge and the year in which it was built. Near the foot of this stone was a fountain, a thin stream of water flowing from the mouth of a stone snake. On this part of the terrace a coffee-maker had installed himself with his copper vessels and Turkish cups and ever-lighted charcoal brazier, and an apprentice who took the coffee over the way to the guests on the sofa. Such was the kapia.
On the bridge and its kapia, about it or in connection with it, flowed and developed, as we shall see, the life of the townsmen. In all tales about personal, family or public events the words ‘on the bridge’ could always be heard. Indeed on the bridge over the Drina were the first steps of childhood and the first games of boyhood.

…it would have been hard to find two worse negotiators or more unsuited contestants. Nothing more could have been expected of them than increasing general anxiety and the creation of one quarrel the more. That was to be regretted, but there was nothing to be done about it, for such moments of social upset and great inevitable change usually throw up just such men, unbalanced and incomplete, to turn things inside out or lead them astray. That is one of the signs of times of disorder.

Outside the window, the world rages – a twilight zone of glass and concrete. Rain falls solemnly. The buildings are so colorlessly gray that they vanish in the drizzle. This city is condemned to live in an eternal fog, in an everlasting in-between season that dares not speak its name. No wonder that the local myths of immortality, the Wagnerian dramas that draw the masses to the opera houses, are so sluggish and top-heavy. Their strength lies in muscular power, in heroic courage and mysterious anonymity; they have nothing in common with the sheer madness of the Greek heart. If Orpheus had been German he would have entered the underworld with a drawn sword instead of a lyre with broken strings.

We firmly believe that the world in which we live is ultimately comprehensible. Yet the only reason why we hold on to this absurd notion is that little flesh machine lodged inside our skulls; it’s hooked on meaning and cohesion. Something clicks between the synchronicity waves of our neuronal fields and certain harmonic structures in our perception. That is all. The world is an illusion.

There is nothing moral about a biography, there is nothing ethical about history: It’s all a naked sequence of bare facts. Events happen the way they happen to those they happen to. To say otherwise is to take away human freedom; it denies the existence of stupid bad luck or simple good fortune.

Time is not a circle. Time is a nautilus. Are we traveling on the spiral that leads inward, or on the spiral that take us outside?