Old Acquaintance Read Online Free PDF

village. The same streets are sent ahead and set up for our arrival. We see what we want to see. We spend our life going down the same street, having the same adventures.
    He was disappointed. He had hoped to meet interesting people back there, courtesans on cothurni, boy cardinals, anda G.I. or two, himself at always twenty, and a man with bird-cages on his back. It was his theory that everyone who had ever wandered backstage was still there, caught like flies in amber. He had only wanted to join them. Everything we have ever lost is back there, everyone we have ever loved. But he couldn’t see them. And what was worse, he couldn’t touch them either.
    Those who love us are stagier. They are not back there, but ranting out in front. Those weren’t the people he was searching for.
    Ever since that trip to Vicenza, he had always thought of the past, and himself entering it, as a trudge uphill through a Roman arch, over splintered boards, through a diminished town, into a world of lovely mustn’t touch. The world is nothing else but lovely mustn’t touch, like Mr. Wilde’s fruit: touch it, and the bloom is gone.
    He was glad to be alone these days. We can be affectionate only by learning our roles and keeping an appropriate distance. In a way he wished he had never walked up, he wished he did not still continue to walk up, on the present like a treadmill, slipping behind us, that Bibiena street.
    The present theatre had no scena. It had only a proscenium encrusted with white plaster cherubs.
    Well, that’s the way things go. The lights grow dim in the Cosmic Opera House, in this case the rather tatty nineteenth-century theatre the duke had provided. Once, no doubt, real people, at any rate, relatively real, had occupied this stage, to sing of very unreal passions. But now, instead, the space was occupied by a large, white, which is to say silver, screen, across which, this afternoon, a group of essentially foolish people would watch themselves flitter like solarized shadows through heartwarming human drama and, in one or two cases, the very best photography that art and hokum could provide.
    At least in the theatre at Vicenza real people had once conducted the rites, whereas here all one could do was sit in darkness, eat popcorn, and watch the better part of Peter Schlemihl at one’s leisure.
    We all know what film festivals are.
    There is the magnificent Czech film which probably is magnificent, if you could just see it, for all the red filter photography. The negative has been stored in a barn for twelve years. Still, it is very moving, very intense. It will get the prize, unless the Polish film wins instead. The Polish film is exactly the same, except that it takes place in a sewer. At the end of the Polish film the hero emerges from the sewer, takes a look around, and then goes back down again. In Central Europe it is always groundhog day. All you see is the lid fitting back on again, in the middle of an empty street. This represents life. If the Poles are feeling cheerful this year, a water truck goes by. This represents hope and shows the eternal continuity of things.
    There is the technically proficient costume drama from the U.S., and in daring years, a musical. The U.S.S.R. has sent along a film completely free of propaganda, but you won’t see it, because at the last moment it was withdrawn because it was completely free of propaganda. Japan has entered two films, one about a prostitute who thinks a lot, the other a horse opera about a horse who doesn’t, but it is adapted from a classic, so it must mean something, and the color shots of water weeds under a burning castle are well worth watching, though not perhaps for quite that long. They represent the tangledness of life. It was a flop in Tokyo but a smash hit in London.
    There is the second film to be made in Paraguay, though with foreign technicians. The second film to be made in Paraguay, like the first, is almost inevitably about bandits. The heroine