An Honest Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

landless, wifeless. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment. I Google it. How quickly the mind swivels in response to what it learns.
    I found myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.
    All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears. That’s the ego.
    Convinced life is meaningless, I lack the courage of my conviction.

14.
    An ambulance hurries to a home on a hilltop. The crimes sparkle in the moonlight.
    If only I could commit a crime, and be done with it. My intentions are better than anything else about me. So much for “naturalness.” In this sense, we are all artists, or death- artists.
    “I’ll teach you a thing or two, you little prick!” That’s a pledge from the very bottom of my heart.
    David laughed gleefully. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. “Such as …?” That indeed is the question. “There is happiness in doubting, I wonder why.” Tilting his head back, he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. “Please, do not be evasive! We all live in a chattering crowd, each of us waiting for a chance to be heard. Do you know any compliments?”
    “Nothing is got for nothing,” I said. The writer does not ‘wrest’ speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligibility which pre-exists him, for he comes into a world full of language, and there is no reality not already classified by men: to be born is nothing but to find this code ready-made and to be obliged to accommodate oneself to it. Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. After all, it has taken several degrees of contusion to create a jaundice as pervasive as mine. I was a very, very bad kid. Punish me, please.”
    “You are quite Voltairean!” he murmured. “Things can always get worse.”
    “Ah.”
    Longing for sweeter grass, he wanders away. “I don’t care for children.”
    Very ingenious, one feels, but how much better not to have said it! And since, on occasion, he quotes Levinas, people take him for a great mind.
    A moment later the engine roared and the tires squealed out of the driveway.
    When I was left alone in his house, looking around the library, which was, in some mysterious way, the incarnation both of his absence and his presence, I asked his spirit (it was, of course, a rhetorical question) why things had turned out as they had for us. There was no denying it was interesting, but would it be enough to sustain a long-term relationship? It was fascinating, it was empty and spectacular, but after a few days it also got a bit boring. I work better alone. I forbade myself to go on brooding about it.
    Leafing through a pile of books, I have been wondering if there has ever been in America a novelist with a point of view toward the taking and giving of pleasure even vaguely resembling Colette’s, an American writer, man or woman, stirred as deeply as she is by scent and warmth and color, someone as sympathetic to the range of the body’s urgings, as attuned to the world’s every sensuous offering, a connoisseur of the finest gradations of amorous feeling, who is nonetheless immune to fanaticism of any sort, except, as with Colette, a fanatical devotion to the self’s honorable