Black Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

getting started on a description of the woman he’s writing about. “I can’t do it! I can’t do it! ” he says. Very well, says the fou, let me do it for you. Begin! That’s the principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take Van Norden-he’s another case. He has been trying for two months to get started with his novel. Each time I meet him he has a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening. Yesterday he said: “You see what my problem’s like. It isn’t just a question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the whole book. Now here’s a start I made the other day: Dante wrote a poem about a place called H H-dash, because I don’t want any trouble with the censors.”
    Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which mustn’t offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a poem he writes: “I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health! … I am afoot with my vision…. I dote on myself…. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding… . Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs…. Here or henceforward it is all the same to me…. I exist as I am, that is enough….”
    With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon. If the woman be hard to describe he admits it and stops at the third line. Next Saturday, the weather permitting, he may add a missing tooth, or an ankle. Everything can wait, can bide its time. “1 accept Time absolutely.” Whereas my friend Carl, who has the vitality of a bedbug, is pissing in his pants because four days have elapsed and he has only a negative in his hand. “I don’t see any reason,” says he, “why I should ever die-barring an untoward accident.” And then he rubs his hands and closets himself in his room to live out his immortality. He lives on like a bedbug hidden in the wallpaper.
    The hot sun is beating through the awning. I am delirious because I am dying so fast. Every second counts. I do not hear the second that has just ticked off -I am clinging like a madman to this second which has not yet announced itself…. What is better than reading Vergil? This! This expanding moment which has not defined itself in ticks or beats, this eternal moment which destroys all values, degrees, differences. This gushing upward and outward from a hidden source. No truths to utter, no wisdom that can be imparted. A gush and a babble, a speaking to all men at once, everywhere, and in all languages. Now is the thinnest veil between madness and sanity. Now is everything so simple that it mocks one. From this peak of drunkenness one rolls down into the plateau of good health where one reads Vergil and Dante and Montaigne and all the others who spoke only of the moment, the expanding moment that is heard forever… . Talking to all men at once. A gush and a babble. This is the moment when I raise the glass to my lips, observing as I do so the fly that has settled on my pinkie; and the fly is as important to this moment as my hand or the glass it holds or the beer that is in the glass or the thoughts that are born of the beer and die with the beer. This is the moment when I know that a sign reading “To Versailles,” or a sign reading “To Suresnes,” any and all signs pointing to this or that place, should be ignored, that one should always go toward the place for which there is no sign. This is the moment when the deserted street on which I have chosen to sit is throbbing with people and all the crowded streets are empty. This is the moment when any restaurant is the right restaurant so long as it was not indicated to you by somebody. This is the best food, though