The Fly Trap Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the production of environmentally friendly tear gas to be used at riots? What was I supposed to say?
    …
    The man who loved islands was, of course, Lawrence himself, and the story was an allegory about his constant
    wandering among different cultures and philosophies. When I finally got my hands on the book, I was disappointed. Was this all? A man inclined to misanthropy buys an island intending to mould it to his own personality and make it his own world, but agriculture doesn’t pay and his servants cheat him. So he sells the island and moves to a smaller one, with fewer servants and still fewer illusions, stands there in the wind and feels nothing, no joy, no longing, but has a child with the housekeeper’s daughter, whereupon all desire dies within him with such sickening finality that he has to flee again, to a third island, just a rock in the roaring sea, where he loses his mind among lumpish, bleating sheep and finally freezes to death in his primitive shack. One of the man’s final pleasures is that his cat vanishes and never reappears.

Only he still derived his single satisfaction from being alone, absolutely alone, with the space soaking into him. The grey sea alone, and the footing of his sea-washed island. No other contact. Nothing human to bring its horror into contact with him. Only space, damp, twilit, sea-washed space! This was the bread of his soul.

    Frustrated, I stuffed the book back on the shelf and thought, this story is about neither islands nor love.
    A couple of years later, I read it again, and then again, periodically, many times, especially when life on the island grew rigid from the pressure of encircling darkness and tragedy of a kind that the newcomer doesn’t see. My first impression of that text no longer fit. Lawrence had seen something that on certain days I wanted to call true.
Out of the very air came a stony, heavy malevolence. The island itself seemed malicious. It would go on being hurtful and evil for weeks at a time. Then suddenly again one morning it would be fair, lovely as a morning in Paradise, everything beautiful and flowing. And everybody would begin to feel a great relief, and a hope for happiness.
    The parents in the story say that by living on the island they are not doing right by their children. Those who have no children feel they are not doing right by themselves. Yes, that’s how it is, exactly.

    But everything fell into place with the flies. In exercising control over something, however insignificant and apparently meaningless, there is a peaceful euphoria, however ephemeral and fleeting, which Lawrence manages to evoke when he has his alter ego on the islands recover his balance by means of more or less primitive botanical collecting. On the first island he seeks shelter in his well-filled library, where he is absorbed in endless labour on a book about all the flowers mentioned by the Greek and Latin writers of the ancient world. Later, on the second, smaller island, he fills his prison with a sometimes enthralling effort to compile a complete catalogue of all the plants on the island.
    It is only on the third island that he loses all interest in botany. “He was glad. He didn’t want trees or bushes. They stood up like people, too assertive. His bare, low-pitched island in the pale blue sea was all he wanted.”
    “Buttonology” is what it’s called—disrespectful but accurate. As a collector, the man who loved islands is by disposition a classic buttonologist. He compiles catalogues. The idea is to be exhaustive, to include everything. In this way, the buttonologist differs from the mapmaker, whom he resembles and can easily be confused with. But the person who makes maps can never include everything in his picture of reality, which remains a simplification no matter what scale he chooses. Both attempt to capture something and to preserve it. And yet they are very different.

    What bothers me is that on occasion the buttonologist, as in Lawrence’s