Black Spring Read Online Free PDF

labeled and docketed, already sealed, stamped and watermarked. They run in series, my ideas, like electric coils. To live beyond illusion or with it? that’s the question. Inside me a terrifying gem which will not wear away, a gem which scratches the windowpanes as I flee through the night. The cattle are lowing and bleating. They stand there in the warm stench of their own dung. I hear again now the music of the A Minor Quartet, the agonized flurries of the strings. There’s a madman inside me and he’s hacking away, hacking and hacking until he strikes the final discord. Pure annihilation, as distinguished from lesser, muddier annihilations. Nothing to be mopped up afterwards. A wheel of light rolling up to the precipiceand over into the bottomless pit. I, Beethoven, I created it! I, Beethoven, I destroy it!
    From now on, ladies and gentlemen, you are entering Mexico. From now on everything will be wonderful and beautiful, marvelously beautiful, marvelously wonderful. Increasingly marvelously beautiful and wonderful. From now on no more washlines, no suspenders, no flannel underwear. Always summer and everything true to pattern. If it’s a horse it’s a horse for all time. If it’s apoplexy it’s apoplexy, and not St. Vitus’s Dance. No early morning whores, no gardenias. No dead cats in the gutter, no sweat and perspiration. If it be a lip it must be a lip that trembles eternally. For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it’s always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what’s dead is dead and no feather dusters. You lie on a cement bed and you sleep like an acetylene torch. When you strike it rich it’s a bonanza. When you don’t strike it rich it’s misery, worse than misery. No arpeggios, no grace notes, no cadenzas. Either you hold the clue or you don’t hold the clue. Either you start with pure melody or you start with listerine. But no Purgatory and no elixir. It’s Fourth Eclogue or Thirteenth Arrondissement!

A Saturday Afternoon
    This is better than reading Vergil.
    It is a Saturday afternoon and this Saturday afternoon is distinct from all other Saturday afternoons, but in no wise like a Monday afternoon or a Thursday afternoon. On this day, as I ride toward the Neuilly Bridge past the little island of Robinson with its temple at the far end and in the temple the little statue like a cotyledon in the mouth of a bell, I have such a sense of being at home that it seems incredible that I was born in America. The stillness of the water, the fishing boats, the iron stakes that mark the channel, the low lying tugs with sluggish curves, the black scows and bright stanchions, the sky never changing, the river bending and twisting, the hills spreading out and ever girdling the valley, the perpetual change of panorama and yet the constancy of it, the variety and movement of life under the fixed sign of the tricolor, all this is the history of the Seine which is in my blood and will go down into the blood of those who come after me when they move along these shores of a Saturday afternoon.
    As I cross the bridge at Boulogne, along the road that leads to Meudon, I turn round and roll down thehill into Sevres. Passing through a deserted street I see a little restaurant in a garden; the sun is beating through the leaves and spangling the tables. I dismount.
    What is better than reading Vergil or memorizing Goethe (alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, etc.)?` Why, eating outdoors under an awning for eight francs at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Pourtant je suis a Sevres. No matter. I have been thinking lately of writing a journal d’un Fou which I imagine to have found at Issy-les- Moulineaux. And since that fou is largely myself I am not eating at Sevres, but at Issy-les-Moulineaux. And what does the fou say when the waitress comes with the big canette of beer? Don’t worry about errors when you’re writing. The biographers will explain all errors. I am thinking of my friend Carl who has spent the last four days