On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Read Online Free PDF

unbearable.
    Then something happened to his face. . . .
    His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at ab-domen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.
    This passage is impossible to overpraise . . . an example of total control: get the feel of it, Miss . . . a man's cane in a crowd
    . . . a length of cold fat stripped from a pig . . . a dead bird falling to empty field . . . she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.
    When a character will not oblige by using a truncheon as a penis, the author must manage the shift himself. Flaubert directs our eyes to the room in which E m m a Bovary commits her adul-teries, and has the sense, so often absent in his admirers, to be content with that.
    The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its grey ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chim-ney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.
    A muff, a glove, a stocking, the glass a lover's lips have touched, the print of a shoe in the snow: how is it that these simple objects can receive our love so well that they increase it? I answer: because they become concepts, lighter than angels, and all the more meaningful because they began as solids, while the body of the beloved, dimpled and lined by the sheeted bed, bucks, sweats, freezes, alters under us, escapes our authority and powers, lacks every dimension, in that final moment, but the sexual, yet will not remain in the world it's been sent to, and is shortly complaining of an ache. The man with his fetish, like a baby with its blanket, has security—not the simple physical condition (with locks on the doors who is safe?) but the Idea itself. Those pink shells, the curtain-rods ending in arrows, the great balls of the lire-dogs: how absurd they would be in reality, how meaningless, how lacking in system, all higher connection. It's not the word m j d e flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
    'Lea. Give me your pearls. Do you hear me, Lea? Give me your necklace.'
    And shortly this remarkable book has begun, like a head between breasts, to surround us with Colette's unsurpassed sensuality.
    There was no response from the enormous bed of wrought-iron and copper which shone in the shadow like a coat of mail.
    'Why don't you give me your necklace . . . ?'
    As the clasp snapped, the laces on the bed were roused and two naked arms, magnificent, with thin wrists, lifted two lovely lazy hands.
    'Let it alone, Cheri. .
    The images are chosen as the pearls were: the bed, the light, the sheets, the pearls, the laces which rouse . . .
    In front of the pink curtains barred by the sun he danced, black as a dainty devil on a grill. But as he drew near the bed he became white again in silk pyjamas above doe-skin mules.
    There is anger in the eyebrows knotted above his nose, a muti-nous mouth, the deep bed like a w a r m pond . . .
    He opened his pyjamas on a chest chat was lusterless, hard and curved like a shield: and the same pink high-light played on his teeth, on the whites of his black eyes and on the pearls of the necklace.
    Not a