Jukebox and Other Writings Read Online Free PDF

contemptuous pity that comes of creative tiredness: call it sympathy as understanding.
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    But what was so unusual about that gaze? Its special character?
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    I saw—and the other saw that I saw—his object at the same time as he did: the trees under which he was walking, the book he held in his hand, the light in which he was standing, even if it was the artificial light of a store; the old fop along with this light-colored suit and the carnation he was holding; the salesman along with his heavy suitcase; the giant along with the invisible child on his shoulders; myself along with the leaves blowing out of the park; and every one of us along with the sky overhead.
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    Suppose there was no such object?
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    Then my tiredness created it, and in a twinkling the other, who a moment ago had still been wandering about in the void, felt surrounded by the aura of his object … And that’s not all. Because of my tiredness, the thousands of unconnected happenings all about me arranged themselves into an order that was more than form; each one
entered into me as the precisely fitting part of a finely attuned, light-textured story; and its events told themselves without the mediation of words. Thanks to my tiredness, the world cast off its names and became great. I have a rough picture of four possible attitudes of my linguistic self to the world: in the first, I am mute, cruelly excluded from events; in the second, the confusion of voices, of talk, passes from outside into my inner self, though I am still as mute as before, capable at the most of screaming; in the third, finally, life enters into me by beginning spontaneously, sentence for sentence, to tell stories, usually to a definite person, a child, a friend; and finally, in the fourth, which I experienced most lastingly in that day’s clear-sighted tiredness, the world tells its own story without words, in utter silence, to me as well as to that gray-haired onlooker over there and to that magnificent woman who is striding by; all peaceable happening was itself a story, and unlike wars and battles, which need a poet or a chronicler before they can take shape, these stories shaped themselves in my tired eyes into an epic and, moreover, as then became apparent to me, an ideal epic. The images of the fugitive world meshed one with another, and took form.
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    Ideal?
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    Yes, ideal: because in this epic everything that happened was right; things kept happening, yet there was not too much or too little of anything. All that’s needed for an epic is a world, a history of mankind, that tells itself as
it should be. Utopian? The other day I read here on a poster: “La utopia no existe,” which might be translated as “The no-place does not exist.” Just give that a thought and history will start moving. In any case, my utopian tiredness of that day was connected with at least one place. That day I felt much more sense of place than usual. It was as though, no sooner arrived, I in my tiredness had taken on the smell of the place; I was an old inhabitant. And in similar spells of tiredness during the years that followed, still more associations attached themselves to that place. Total strangers spoke to me, perhaps because I looked familiar to them, or perhaps for no particular reason. In Edinburgh, where after looking for hours at Poussin’s Seven Sacraments , which at last showed Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the rest in the proper perspective, I sat radiant with tiredness in an Italian restaurant, feeling self-conscious about being waited on—an exceptional state related to my tiredness; all the waiters agreed that they had seen me before, though each in a different place, one in Santorin (where I have never been), another last summer with a sleeping bag on Lake Garda—neither the sleeping bag nor the lake was right. In the train from Zurich to Biel after staying up all night celebrating the end of the