The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) Read Online Free PDF

with a prosthetic arm; to refine the simile, it would be more like a man discovering, while celebrating his silver wedding anniversary, that his wife was Chinese. Was that possible? Unfortunately, I had to respond in the affirmative. It was possible. In this case, evidence didn’t help; the strength of the unexpected destroyed it.
    Nor did it help me to consider this as one of those blanks we all have in our education and that are sometimes as scandalous and as shocking as the one I was confronting at this moment. It had happened to me before, that I believed I knew something without knowing it because as a child I had adopted an erroneous idea about it, which worked well enough to never have felt the need to revise it or put it to the test. Due to extremely long concatenations of happenstance, one might never come across certain subjects, even when in possession of an alert mind and universal curiosity. This is possible because there are so many. Sometimes it is a question of pure laziness. For example, I know that there is an explanation for the fact that stagecoach wheels in Westerns appear to be turning backwards when the vehicle is moving quickly forward; I have even seen it written up and illustrated with diagrams, but I never bothered finding out about it in more detail. To have one of these gaps of comprehension or information is the most common thing in the world; however, this didn’t do me any good here, because the difference between fiction and reality was not an isolated issue that could reside in a blind spot; it was instead an oil spill, which spread over everything, even over what surrounded everything.
    Someone less generous or more aggressive might have been pleased to discover that a friend of his was stupid. It would make him feel superior, safe in his narcissistic integrity, more intelligent than he thought: in a word, the winner. This was not the case for me. I felt depressed and distressed, like someone on the verge of losing something of great value. In reality, that feeling lasted a few seconds, the time that elapsed between one remark and another in an animated dialogue. In bed at night, I wondered: can depression last a few seconds? Apparently, this was not a true depression but rather its conceptual nucleus, suitable to expand upon in memory, and I tried, almost as if it were a game, to do so in order to delight in its contemplation. As my memory already knew that there was no reason to be depressed, I did so in “fictional” mode, establishing a bridge between the subject and its development.
    As I said, my friend’s reply was unexpected; he had been champing at the bit and bringing to bear all his patience so as not to interrupt me. He showed no sign of lack of comprehension or confusion; on the contrary: he was determined to free me from my error.
    He started by saying something that I took as a somewhat marginal generalization. According to him, actor and character could coexist, and the movie we had both watched proved this; if I had really watched it, he added with a touch of sarcasm, because the scope of my error made him doubt that I had. In order for them to coexist, neither a suspension of skepticism nor any other psychological or metaphysical operation was necessary, as I had proposed in my ravings, but only a bit of ingenuity. Ingenuity in invention, occupational ingenuity, perhaps not a lot, only the usual for this kind of artistic-
commercial production; he was not sufficiently familiar with what was currently going on in Hollywood to evaluate what we had seen: it could be a product off the movie assembly line, no different from the hundred or thousand others churned out each year by the dream factory, or it could be a movie that just happened to turn out really good.
    On the same subject, he made a digression in order to explain that he did not feel comfortable in the discussion on which we had embarked. His mind, trained in philosophy, could be applied only with violent effort