A Perfect Vacuum Read Online Free PDF

minute the actual existence of such persons, even though he cannot directly (by touch) substantiate their existence. In turn, he who can boast of a direct acquaintance with such persons will no longer see in them phenomenal paragons of wealth, femininity, power, beauty, etc., because, in entering into contact with them, he experiences—by dint of everyday things—their completely ordinary, normal, human imperfection. For such persons, up close, are not in the least godlike beings or otherwise extraordinary. Beings that are truly at the pinnacle of perfection, that are therefore truly boundlessly desired, yearned for, longed after, must be
remote
even to full unattainability. It is their elevation above the masses that lends them their magnetic glamour; it is not qualities of body or soul but an unbridgeable social distance that accounts for their seductive halo.
    This characteristic of the real world, then, Robinson attempts to reproduce on his island, within the realm of beings of his own invention. Immediately he errs, because he
physically
turns his back on the creation, the Snibbinses, Boomers, et al., and that distance, natural enough between Master and Servant, he is only too willing to break down when he acquires a woman. Snibbins he could not, nor did he wish, to take into his arms; now—with a woman—he only
cannot.
The point is not (for this is no intellectual problem!) that he was unable to embrace a woman not there. Of course he was unable! The thing was to create
mentally
a situation whose own natural
law
would forever stand in the way of erotic contact—and at the same time it had to be a law that would totally ignore the
nonexistence
of the girl. This
law
was to restrain Robinson, and not the banal, crude fact of the female partner’s nonexistence! For to take simple cognizance of her nonexistence would have been to ruin everything.
    And so Robinson, seeing what must be done, sets to work—that is, the establishment on the island of an entire, imaginary society. It is this that will stand between him and the girl; this that will throw up a system of obstacles and thus provide that impassable distance from which he will be able to love her, to desire her continually—no longer exposed to any mundane circumstance, as, for example, the urge to stretch out his hand and feel her body. He realizes—he must—that if he yields but once in the struggle waged against himself, if he attempts to feel her, the whole world that he has created will, in that bat of an eye, crumble. And this is the reason he begins to “go mad,” in a frenzied scramble to pull multitudes out of the hat of his imagination—thinking up and writing in the sand all those names, cognomens, and sobriquets, ranting and raving about the wives of Snibbins, the Hyperborean aunts, the Old Fried Eggses, and so on and so forth. And since this swarm is necessary to him
only
as a certain insurmountable space (to lie between Him and Her), he creates indifferently, sloppily, chaotically; he works in haste, and that haste discredits the thing created, lays bare its incoherence, its lack of thought, its cheapness.
    Had he succeeded, he would have become the eternal lover, a Dante, a Don Quixote, a Werther, and in so doing would have had his way. Wendy Mae—is it not obvious?—would then have been a woman no less real than Beatrice, than Lotte, than any queen or princess. Being completely real, she would have been at the same time unattainable. And this would have allowed him to live and dream of her, for there is a profound difference between a situation in which a man from reality pines after his own dream, and one in which reality lures reality—precisely by its inaccessibility. Only in this second case is it still possible to cherish hope, since now it is the social distance alone, or other, similar barriers, that rule out the chance for the love to be consummated. Robinson’s relationship to