Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange, to say I felt at home in such seemingly uncongenial surroundings? But the poverty, you see, the dullness and lack of emphasis, these might have been a form of subtlety, after all. Drama was the last thing I wanted, unless it be seagulls wheeling above oaks, or a boat stuck on a sandbank, or a woebegone band of strangers struggling up the dunes one day and spying an old house standing on the side of a hill.
    From my copious reading – what else had I to do, in those first days of so-called freedom, except to read and dream? – I gleaned the following: I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that lam leading a posthumous existence. I had burned my boats, the years were strewn like ashes on the water. I was at rest here, in the calm under the great wave of the world. Yes, I felt at home – I, who thought never again to feel at home anywhere. This does not mean I did not at the same time feel myself to be an outsider. The place tolerated me, that’s all. I had the impression of a certain disdain, of everything leaning carefully away from me with averted gaze. The house especially had a frowning, tight-lipped aspect. Or perhaps I am wrong, perhaps what I detected was not contempt, or even disapproval, but something quite other: tactfulness, for instance – inanimate objects seem ever anxious not to intrude – or just a general wish to preserve the forms. Yet wherever I went, even when I walked into an empty room, I had an uncanny sense of things having fallen silent at my approach. I know, of course, that this was all foolishness, that the place did not care a damn about me, really, that I could have vanished into the air with a ping! and everything would have gone on in its own sweet way as if nothing had happened. Yet I could not rid myself of the conviction that somehow I was – how shall I put it? – required.
    And I was alone, despite the presence of the others. How to be alone even in the midst of the elbowing crowd, that is another of those knacks that the years in captivity had taught me. It is a matter of inward stillness, of hiding inside oneself, like an animal in cover, while the hounds go pounding past. Oh, I know only too well how this will seem: that I had retreated into solitude, that I was living in a fantasy world, a world of pictures and painted figures and all the rest of it. But that is not it, no, that is not it at all. It is only that I was trying to get as far away as possible from everything. I had tried to get away from myself, too, but in vain. The Chinese, or perhaps it was the Florentines of Dante’s day – anyway, some such fierce and unforgiving people – would bind a murderer head and toe to the corpse of his victim and sling this terrible parcel into a dungeon and throw away the key. I knew something of that, here in my oubliette, lashed to my ineluctable self, not to mention … well, not to mention. What I was striving to do was to simplify, to refine. I had shed everything I could save existence itself. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it is a mistake: perhaps I should be shouldering the emcumbrances of life instead of throwing them off? But no, I wanted not to live – I would have others to do that for me – but only to endure. True, there is no getting away from the passionate attachment to self, that I-beam set down in the dead centre of the world and holding the whole rickety edifice in place. All the same, I was determined at least to try to make myself into a – what do you call it? – a monomorph: a monad. And then to start again, empty. That way, I felt, I might come to understand things, in however rudimentary a fashion. Small things, of course. Simple things.
    But then, there are no simple things. I have said this before, I shall say it again. The object splits, flips, doubles back, becomes something else. Under the slightest pressure the seeming unit falls into a million pieces and every piece into a million more. I was myself no unitary