The Passion According to G.H. Read Online Free PDF

— I’d read the newspaper, stretched out on the sofa, and probably fall asleep. If the telephone didn’t ring.
    Better yet, I decided to take the phone off the hook and that way I was sure nothing would disturb me.
    How can I say now that I’d already begun to see what would only become evident afterward? without knowing it, I was already in the entrance to the room. I was already starting to see, and didn’t know it; I had seen since I was born and didn’t know, I didn’t know.
    Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak — reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier.
    Having decided to begin with the maid’s room, I crossed the kitchen that leads to the service area. At the end of the service area is the hallway to the maid’s room. First, though, I leaned against the wall in the hallway to finish a cigarette.
    I looked down: thirteen floors fell away from the building. I didn’t know that all this was already part of what was about to happen. A thousand times before this the movement must have started and then was lost. This time the movement would go all the way though, and I didn’t see it coming.
    I looked around the courtyard, the backs of all the apartments from which my apartment too looked like a back. On the outside my building was white, with the smoothness of marble and the smoothness of surface. But the courtyard was a heap of frames, windows, riggings and blackened watermarks, window straddling window, mouths peering into mouths. The belly of my building was like a factory. The miniature of the grandeur of a panorama full of gorges and canyons: smoking there, as if on a mountaintop, I was looking at the view, probably with the same inexpressive look I had in my photographs.
    I saw what it was saying: it was saying nothing. And I was taking this nothing in attentively, I was taking it in with what was inside my eyes in the photographs; only now do I know that I was always receiving the mute signal. I looked around the courtyard. Everything was of an inanimate richness that recalled that of nature: there too one could mine uranium and from there oil could gush.
    I was seeing something that would only make sense later — I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have always been my negative way of sensing the meaning? it had been my way of participating.
    What I was seeing in the monstrous insides of that machine, which was the courtyard of my building, what I was seeing were made things, eminently practical things and with a practical purpose.
    But something of the terrible general nature — which I would later experience within myself — something of inescapable nature would inescapably leave the hands of the hundred or so practical workmen who had labored on the drainpipes, entirely unaware that they were erecting that Egyptian ruin that I was now regarding with the gaze of my beach pictures. Only later would I know that I’d seen; only later, when I saw the secret, would I realize I’d already seen it.
    I threw my lit cigarette over the edge, and stepped back, slyly hoping none of the neighbors would connect me with the act forbidden by the administrators of the Building. Then, carefully, I stuck out just my head, and looked: I couldn’t even guess where the cigarette had landed. The precipice had swallowed it in silence. Was I there thinking? at least I was thinking about nothing. Or maybe about whether some neighbor had seen me commit that forbidden act, which above all didn’t match the polite woman I