The Naughty Bits Read Online Free PDF

used a Pound to tighten up his wasteland, Roughhouse definitely has its moments. My favorite was the crafted jewel that follows, as tight and nuanced a 123-word story as you’re likely to find anywhere— even in the Norton Anthology.
    I went with a girl to a lake. We walked on boulders that lined the shore. She stood on a rock a few feet above the water, put her hands behind her back and said, “If my hands were tied, you could push me in.”
    I looked at her hands for a moment, then took off a sneaker lace and wrapped it around her wrists.
    “You can untie me now,” she said.
    I made no move to release her.
    “I’m going to ask my mother if this is normal,” she said.
    I took off my other lace and wrapped it around her ankles.
    “No,” she said, then said my name.
    As time passed, her voice got louder. I did not push her in.

from Pan
     
    KNUT HAMSUN
    It is customary to think of madness as a desert, where solitude, isolation, and monomania join forces to turn the mind away from the world and into itself. Madness might also be thought of as a wood, where the constant hum and rustle of multiplicitous forest life intrudes on the sanctity of thinking, denying it peace, preventing rest. What would happen if the hum of the everyday suddenly became a bit louder? The continual hum of passersby, the buzz of the refrigerator, the dull rumble of each and every thing is normally audible only if you think about it. But if you started to think about it, weren’t able not to think about it, it would drive you crazy within a day. A day, then madness.
    Consciousness is all about creating filters, sieves to reduce the too much of which we are ultimately given too little. Fine grit to polish down the edges of the too rough, the too raw, the too direct. I think of all this when I think of the writers who’ve gone mad, of those who’ve turned to suicide or alcohol. In the film Barton Fink, the aging, Faulkner-based character explains: “Writing is peace”; otherwise drink. Later in the film his lover elaborates, “We all need to be understood.”
    Among memorable chronicles of the onset of madness—Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo —Knut Hamsun’s fin-de-siècle Pan is the most environmental. The dark, living woods of northernmost Norway mirror the teeming fullness of the mind of Glahn, the solitary hunter. Having grown accustomed to his hermitage, he suddenly finds himself falling in love with the daughter of his only neighbor. And he begins to slip. He attends parties at her father’s house across the lake, and his animal nature both intrigues and grates against the society she represents. Then one night, he takes her shoe and hurls it into the lake. It is an unexplainable act, patently absurd. He is lost.
    In the passage that follows, Glahn, in his loneliness, imagines a sexual encounter with mythic forest-goers Diderik and Iselin. Immediately after, he is found by a village girl who, having heard rumor of the barbarity in his eyes, wants to know what’s behind them. Glahn, losing the superego, becomes a primal enactment of the id.

    A few days passed as best they might; my only friend was the forest and the great solitude. Dear God, I had never known such solitude as on the first of these days. It was full Spring; I found wintergreen and yarrow in the fields, and the chaffinches had arrived; I knew all the birds. Sometimes I took a couple of coins from my pocket and chinked them together to break the solitude. I thought: what if Diderik and Iselin came along!
    Soon there began to be no night; the sun barely dipped his face into the sea and then came up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. How strangely affected I was sometimes these nights; no man would believe it. Was Pan sitting in a tree watching to see how I would act? And was his belly open; and was he crouching so that he seemed to sit and drink from his own belly? But all this he did