The Great Weaver From Kashmir Read Online Free PDF Page A

powerful and strong by sacrificing burnt offerings upon the altar of lust within the so-called temples of matrimony, the masters in Tibet would fall to their knees before red-cheeked chastity imps, and the saints and martyrs would fawn like buffoons on lewd doxies in décolleté negligé. It is horrendous to be betrothed to a woman: one can’t go for a refreshing walk in the cool of evening, like the Lord, without having a whole side of female meat hanging on to one. And what’s more, a man has to endure this infectious carcass in his bed at night, lying over him, smacking her lips and groaning in her sleep, puffing and snuffling. Marriage is an ignominious capitulation.” 9
    â€œSteinn, shame on you! I suppose you think that a woman doesn’t have a soul like a man, you cad?”
    He answered without hesitating:
    â€œOh, it could very well be that a woman has a soul; when did I say that a woman doesn’t have a soul? It just doesn’t matter at all whether she has a soul, and anyway no one has ever cared a whit about that up until now. It would be worse if a man had to marry a soul. As if any man has ever at any time since the days of Adam looked at a woman because she had a soul – what nonsense! If anyone brought me a woman’s soul in a glass jug, I would immediately have the jug taken down to the cellar and put into the little closet where my father keeps the empty bottles.”
    The girl tried to run out into the lava, but he grabbed her, held her by the arm, made her follow him whether she wanted to or not, and poured from the cornucopia of his eloquence out over her wordlessness.
    â€œDiljá, don’t you have the nerve to watch as my heart is openedand the naked truth steps forth? Or do you think that I’m standing here in front of you, trying to talk sense, for the fun of it? No, Diljá, no one does such a thing for fun. Diljá, stand still here for just a moment and look at me as one human being to another, and not like a Spiritualist looking at an ectoplasm. Consider once who I am without wrapping my image in a foolish shroud of sanctity. You mustn’t believe that I speak like a master because I have sipped from nirvana! No, I speak like a bombastic poetaster from the days of Klopstock, because doggerel has been my life.”
    He made her stop on the road to look at him and he pointed again at his chest:
    â€œI forbid you once and for all to look at me like a photographer who fixes and refixes his overhead lights, his ground lights, and his prop lights on his test subject. Look here!” – and he again pointed at his chest:
    â€œHere is where sin dwells! Here dwells the chief foe, the archenemy, that untiring torturer of the soul, who eternally seeks to cajole my spirit out into damnation: cupiditas carnis. Since I was a child at least half of all my spiritual strength has been pushed this way and that by passion and lust, has revolved around debauchery and pornography, the female body and copulation. There aren’t any sexual misdeeds that I haven’t become more cordially acquainted with than I have ever prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Now it’s been six years since I lost my virginity in the arms of a disgusting, stinking slut in the laundry room in the basement at home. That same summer and the following winter I joined in, as a rule, with several older chums in the drinking binges we held whenever we had the chance. We sat around with girls far into the night and acted as if we werepossessed by devils. If I didn’t come home until the next day, I pretended to have been with the Væringjar boys 10 in Hafnarfjörður, or out at Rauðavatn, or here at Þingvellir. If it seemed better to tell a different lie, I told a different lie.
    â€œAt home I’ve always been worshipped like an idol, since I never lied to any other individual so openly or so unscrupulously as my mother. She is the one person to whom I have never