Wittgenstein's Mistress Read Online Free PDF

came up only to the tops of my sandal straps.
    Still, the entire experience terrified me.
    I am aware that I have just said it had not frightened me in the least.
    As a matter of fact what happened was that it did not frighten me until it was over.
    Once I had climbed back onto the embankment, and could see the car upside down in the water, it frightened me rather impressively.
    I cannot say with any certainty that I had been masturbating when I failed to notice the collapsed embankment.
    Or whether I had been driving toward Savona, or had already passed Savona.
    What is fairly certain is that I was driving into Italy, and not out, since in driving into Italy along that coast one would have the sea at one's right hand, which is the side I went into it from.
    Even if I have no recollection whatsoever of ever having driven into Italy from the direction I am talking about.
    Doubtless it is partly age, which blurs such distinctions.
    When one comes down to it, I could actually be well past fifty.
    Again, the mirror is of no real help. One would need some kind of yardstick, or a field of comparison.
    There was a tiny, pocket sort of mirror on that same table beside my mother's bed, those final weeks.
    You will never know how much it has meant to me that you are an artist, Kate, she said, one evening.
    There are no painting materials in this house.
    Actually there was one canvas on a wall, when I came. Directly above and to the side of where this typewriter is, in fact.
    A painting of this very house, although it took me some days to recognize that.
    Not because it was not a satisfactory representation, but because I had not happened to look at the house from that perspective, as yet.
    I had already removed the painting into another room by the time I did so.
    Still, I believed it was a painting of this house.
    After I had concluded that it was, or that it appeared to be, I did not go back into the other room to verify my conclusion.
    I go into those rooms infrequently, and have closed those doors.
    There was nothing extraordinary in the fact of my closing them. Possibly I closed them only because I did not feel like sweeping.
    Leaves blow in, and fluffy cottonwood seeds.
    This room is quite large. There is a deck outside, constructed on two sides of the house so that it faces both the forest and the dunes.
    Two of the five closed doors are upstairs.
    None of this is counting the bathroom, where the mirror is.
    In fact there could well be additional paintings in those other rooms. I could look.
    There are no paintings in the closed rooms. Or at least not in the three closed rooms that are downstairs.
    Though I have just replaced the painting of the house.
    It is agreeable to have some art about.
    In my mother's living room, in Bayonne, New Jersey, there were several of my own paintings. Two of those were portraits, of her and my father.
    Never was I able to find the courage to ask her if she wished me to remove that mirror.
    One afternoon the mirror was no longer there, however.
    To tell the truth, I rarely did portraits.
    Those of my mother and father are now at the Metropolitan Museum, in one of the main painting galleries on the second floor.
    Well, all of my paintings are now in those galleries in the Metropolitan Museum.
    What I did was stand them between various canvases in the permanent collection, wherever there was sufficient wall space.
    Some few overlapped those others, but only at their lower corners, generally.
    Very likely a certain amount of warp has occurred in mine since, however.
    From having been leaning for so many years rather than being hung, that would be.
    Well, and a number of them had never been framed, either.
    Then again, when I say all of my paintings I am speaking only about the paintings I had not sold, naturally.
    Though in fact some few were in group shows, or out on loan, also.
    One of those I saw by sheer chance when I was in Rome, as a matter of fact.
    Actually I had almost forgotten about it. And