The Beautiful and the Damned

 FSF

‘Shakespeare was a Bilphist,” she assured him through a fixed smile. “Oh, yes! He was a Bilphist, its been proved.” 

At this Dick would look a bit blank. 

“If you’ve read ‘Hamlet’ you can’t help but see.” 

“Well, he—he lived in a more credulous age—a more religious age.” 

But she demanded the whole loaf: 

“Oh, yes, but you see Bilphism isn’t a religion. It’s the science of all religions.” She smiled defiantly at him. This was the bon mot of her belief. There was something in the arrangement of words which grasped her mind so definitely that the statement became superior to any obligation to define itself. It is not unlikely that she would have accepted any idea encased in this radiant formula—which was perhaps not a formula; it was the reductio ad absurdum of all formulas. 

&

Muriel Kane had originated in a rising family of East Orange. She was short rather than small, and hovered audaciously between plumpness and width. Her hair was black and elaborately arranged. This, in conjunction with her handsome, rather bovine eyes, and her over-red lips, combined to make her resemble Theda Bara, the prominent motion picture actress. People told her constantly that she was a “vampire,” and she believed them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did her utmost under all circumstances to give the impression of danger. An imaginative man could see the red flag that she constantly carried, waving it wildly, beseechingly—and, alas, to little spectacular avail. She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the latest songs—when one of them was played on the phonograph she would rise to her feet and rock her shoulders back anq forth snap her fingers, and if there was no music she might accompany herself by humming. Her conversation was also timely: “I don’t care » would say, “I should worry and lose my figure” She again: “I can’t make my feet behave when I hear the tune. Oh, baby!” Her finger-nails were too long and ornate, polished te a pink and unnatural fever. Her clothes were too tight, too stylish, too vivid, her eyes too roguish, her smi too coy. She was almost pitifully overemphasized from head to foot. 

&

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal. 

Along the shelves of Anthony’s library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Thérése of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thais, Salome, and Cleopatra. 

&

“I’m sorry.” 

“Oh, don’t say you’re sorry | If you can’t think anything better than that, just keep quiet!”

“I love you.” 

“I don’t care.” 

There was a pause. Anthony was depressed, . At length Gloria murmured: 

“I’m sorry I was mean.” 

“You weren’t. I was the one.” 

Peace was restored—the ensuing moments were go much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expressionyet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving. 

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration. She must have known it—for three weeks Gloria had seen no one else—and she must have noticed that this time there was an authentic difference in her daughter’s attitude. She had been given special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed, the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still rather warm—

—Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself immensely pleased; she doubtless was

&

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night—a sheet was enough for comfort—and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made. From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissclving soundsomething the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in jittle parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness—and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman’s laughter. It began low, incessant and whining—some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought—and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance. ‘Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words—a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man’s voice, then begin again—interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream—then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had grown smothery He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound. 

“Oh, my God” he cried, drawing in his breath sharply. Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day. 

&

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world. But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love in gered—by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, way of deep and intimate kindnesses they devel toward each other, by way of their laughing at the absurdities and thinking the same things noble and same things sad.

&

  I shall tell you the story of my education" continued Maury, “under these sardonic constellations,” 

“Do! Please!” 

“Shall I, really?” 

They waited expectantly white he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon. 

“Well,” he began, “‘as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred ‘Now I lay me’s.’ ” 

“Throw down a cigarette,” murmured some one. 

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command: 

“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.” 

Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. ‘The voice resumed: 

“I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out ‘My God!’ when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteea years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: ‘There’s the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.’ They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.’ 

“‘And so I turned, canny for my years, from the pro fessors to the poets, listening—to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shake speare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo, I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty—enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth—and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition. ... 

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming. 

“The transition was subtle—the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With me? NoI didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife—nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the businessit is the dress that passion wears. I became bored—that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand ?—I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.” 

Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony’s lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt. 

“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts, But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the aneer was the highest form of self-expression but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism—and_ behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think—I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth. 

“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life—and of being beaten and bewildered just the same. 

“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.” 

He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation —after a moment he yawned and resumed. 

“I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware—if, indeed, there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, ‘We’re going to play football and nothing but football. If you don’t want to play football you can’t play at all ? 

‘What was I to do—the playtime was so short! 

““You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, sav, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don’t think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive. 

“For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature—nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher—or, let us say, her more amusingthough still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white—in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity. 

“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leperand presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in that, let him Stand forth.” 

““There’s only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement. 

“What’s that ?’”’ demanded Maury sharply. 

‘That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.” 

......

“You're crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some expericnce by trying.” 

“Trying what?” cried Maury fiercely. “Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube——” 

“Have you?” 

Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon. 

“Not I,” he said softly. ‘I was born tired—but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria —to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.” 

In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steamdriven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform. “Not one jot!’”? Again Maury’s voice dropped down to them as from a great height. ‘‘What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the aniverse——why, intelligence never built a steam engine { Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. 

“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour—but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France—” He hesitated, and then added: “‘But all I know—the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself—these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else. - 

“Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn’t I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen—as the wisest men have done since—oh, since the failure of a certain matter—a strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they were far-sighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep. 

“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief, But i¢ wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: “‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compileta deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword foe laughter the world over—and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there? be no more nonsense in the world. 

“‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a wit~ ness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’ 

‘So the men did, and they died.

“But the book lived always, so beautifully hhadit been written, and so astounding the quality of iimagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.” 

Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. 

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The Netanyahus

 There is no waiting for revelation, no waiting for a miracle. By contrast with religion, the discipline seems reliable. History makes no promises or covenants beyond telling how something from back there arrives at here. At us in the present. The front of the room, where the teacher is. But history, I have to tell you the bad news, is not always reliable. And Jews, whose life was the communication of God’s words from generation to generation, and from faith to faith, knew this better than most. This was because they lived under foreign rulers. Their history in Christian lands was a Christian hiscory; their history in Muslim lands was a Muslim history; written by non-Jews under the patronage of despots who insisted on being flattered, or at least who insisted on the centrality of their roles. It was the Jews who first understood the impossibility ofa truth shared by all people. They were the first who understood that all that was possible was a truth shared by the dominant people, the group or subgroup or family in power. Universal truth, if it could exist, could only be found in the Bible, whose claim to divine provenance and authority demanded its accurate preservation. This realization resulted ina firm distinction being made in Jewish culture between preservation and interpretation, which is the psychic adumbration of the trauma that results from a fanaticism of accuracy. Once the Bible had been commended to other faiths, it’s the interpretation that interested the Jews. Interpretation was, in many ways, their only freedom. This interpretative capacity allowed them to remain outside history and dwell in myth, which instructed about morals and ethics and structured the calendar and community life. The Jewish preference for the instructive and aesthetic story over the accurately documented history was a direct outgrowth of the circumstances of Diaspora, in which Jews were exiled and oppressed and denied the right of self-rule. In exile, where non-Jews made the history that Jews had to suffer, could the details matter? Why care about the facts, when you can’t create them? What would be the point of recording the name and coordinates of every city that kicked you out and the exact specific date of your every misery and slaughter? When it came to chronicling Jewish life, what difference could there be between Rome and Greece and Babylon? Weren't they all just ultimately variations on Egyptian bondage, and all of their rulers essentially incarnations of the Pharaoh? Through this process of repeatedly relating the Bible to the present, history was negated; the more these stories were repeated—every weekly recurrence of the Sabbath, every annual recurrence of a holiday—the more the past was brought into the present, until the past and present were essentially collapsed and each next year was rendered identical to the last, with all occurrences made contemporary. This collapsing of time imparted a certain messianic quality both to the daily lives of individual Jews and to the collective spiritual life of the Jewish people. In other words, through interpretation these preservers of God's word were preserved themselves. Take, for instance, Zion, a historical kingdom that in its destruction was transmuted into myth, becoming in the Diaspora a story and poetic trope that reigned supreme in the Jewish imagination for millennia. The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. But Zion, because it was remembered not as written history butas interpretable story, was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the  Poetic was returned to the practical. This is the 1st example ever in human civilization in which this happened in which a story became real it became a real country with a real army real essential services real treaties and real trade packs real supply chains and real sewage. Now that Israel exists however the days of The Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish questions still remains to be answered it's whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.

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Ferdinand and Isabella .....their own union of 1469, their chief opposition was nobiliary, the princes, grandees, and hidalgos who resisted having to cede their local authority. What resulted was a struggle in which the monarchy attempted to systematically impoverish and disempower the nobility, but because a direct attack on the nobility was inadvisable and tantamount to civil war, the monarchy decided that the best approach would be a sort of proxy: They'd get at the nobles by oppressing the Jews, who managed the nobles’ estates and farmed their taxes. Having decided upon this method, they realized that full subdual of the nobility could only be accomplished by oppressing the Jewish converts to Christianity too, because while so many had changed their religion, they'd retained their familial professions and ties in the realm of international finance. At the same time, the monarchy sought to arouse the intrinsic anti-Semitism of the commoners and parlay it into anti-converso sentiments as well, instigating libels and riots that disrupted civic order and depleted the resources of any nobility that sought to quell them. 

Depriving the nobility of the services of the Jews was easy: the Jews could always just be slaughtered. But depriving the nobility of the services of the conversos was a different matter, because the conversos were, officially, Christians, and any attempt to disenfranchise them and invalidate their conversions would have threatened the integrity of the Church. The Spanish Inquisition was founded to provide a way out of this bind, and a justification for conversooppression. It did so through offering the monarchy a simple redefinition: Judaism had always been defined, and defined itself, primarily as a religion—as a set of tenets, and a set of practices—but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race, with the implication that even a convert to Christianity, even a fervent new Christian, was still a Jew at heart, because Judaism inhered in dhe blood. Once these new Christians were racialized back into s Jewish identity, they could once again be oppressed: they could be exorbitantly taxed; they could have their property and assets seized; snd, with the nobility rendered too impotent to protect them, they could be expelled from the country entirely. 

That was Netanyahu’s thesis, in reckless synopsis: that Iberian Jewry was perennially caught between a native host populace that rarely changed and an absentee host rulership that changed consantly with conquests. Whenever tensions arose between these bodies politic, they were taken out on the nobility-enabling Jews, whose oppression restored civic balance. The main requirement of this process was merely that the Jews stayed Jewish, which was why when they began to convert—willingly, for the first time in their history—they were punished and admonished that they could never be other than what they originally were. 

.....The revolutionary influence of this redefinition must be insisted upon—Netanyahu insisted, launching himself into this new mode with a podium-slap. The Spanish Inquisition, he claimed, introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change or be changed, but was in fact defined and determined by corporeal factors, by how many degrees tainted they were from that prelapsarian or just pre-miscegenated state the Spanish called Limpieza de sangre: blood purity. In promulgating this idea, the Spanish Inquisition became the first institution in world history to treat Judaism primarily as a race, as a sanguinary quantum and heritable trait that could not be lost or abrogated; setting the precedent for subsequent genocidal and quasi-genocidal regimes so numerous and notorious, he said, that I don’t have to name them. And then he named them: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Arab Ummah, the lattermost of which had expelled nearly all of its Jewish population in only the last decade, sending refugees coursing from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt into Israel. 

Thinking about this turn of rhetoric now, I find it poignant, though at the time it struck me as strident. And I knew, somehow I knew, that this new pitch he was making in this new firebrand style was the one he'd perfected in countless “addresses” and “orations” and “public chats” in heartland synagogues and chapels and schools on Jabotinsky’s tent-revival circuit—that the only way out of gentile history was through Zion. 

He banged the dais full-fisted, leaned over it, and with all the gross abstraction of fanaticism spoke of Poland, where he was born and grew up during the first of the century's two great European wars, at a time of fracturing empires. The decline of Austro-Hungary caused, or was caused by, or both—in his frenzy, he seemed to say both—provincialism, parochialism, and a rise in desire for nationstate autonomies. This was always the case with marginal identities in the context of empire: identity on the racial or ethnic or religious or merely linguistic level is what you revert to after the transnational project fails; only after you can no longer conceive of yourself as a citizen of Austro-Hungary, and as having been dignified and elevated by that citizenship, can you begin conceiving of yourself as, say, a Pole, a Czechoslovak, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, or a Zionist Jew. Now, after the second of the century’s wars, with the new European empire being Asiatic-Soviet, the same thing would eventually occur, sooner than anyone thought: socialism, communism, woul fragment back into its tribal constituencies. This was also why an Arab League would never survive, because no people were more clannish than the Arabs, whose basal loyalties weren’t even sectarian but familial. It was the function of empires to furnish a common identity to disparate peoples and whenever they couldn't, they failed. This would even be true with America, where everyone if they're asked who they are answers Irish, or Italian, or preposterously three-quarters Scottish, half-Belgian-Dutch, and at most one-drop Mexican black, anything but American. If the American empire couldn't persuade allegiance to democracy over origin, it would fail. He said that while staring at me, unblinking: It would fail. He might even have been pointing at me: You will. What was true for Europe at the emergence of Zionism will one day be true for America too, once assimilation is revealed as a fraud, or once it’s revealed that the country contains nothing to assimilate to—no core, no connate heart-—not just for the Jews, but for everyone. This, at least, was his implication, the text behind the text of his lecture, which he continued to speak to me with his hooded steppe eyes even after his prepared remarks were finished and he was making his acknowledgments and bowing to the light, deferential, and relieved applause: This is what I chink of America—nothing. This is what I chink of American Jews—nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism—nothing. Your chances for survival—none at all You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife—who’s tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan isn’t merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufhciency of options for educated women in this country; it’s more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn’t just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it’s more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that’s been thrust at her—from what college to choose to what career to have—is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example—whom she’s been condemned to babysit —will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, Jaugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils... 

&

He told me about his childhood on the Grand Concourse and first reading the poetry of Moyshe Leib Halpern and Jacob Gilaestein: the fish would come from the market wrapped in newspapers (che Forverts, the Morgen Frerbeit), and he'd unwrap it and sometimes the ink would have run and lines of poems would be imprinted on the side of the fish and he'd try to read them; he'd try to read the fish and guess the author, from backwards Yiddish impressed onto wee iridescent scales. He told me about first reading the New Testament in Yiddish in a free copy brought to his door by intrepid missionaries (“I remember Jesus was Yeshua, but all the shlikhim [apostles] called him rebbe [rabbi]”); and about his earliest encounters with the Romantics (“The name, the epithet, continues to attract me”). There were stories about writers he’d known; about Bernard Malamud, who used to clean Harold out in poker; about Saul Bellow, who preferred Allan Bloom to Harold and had a kleptomaniacal streak when it came to bowties; and about Philip Roth, who created the protagonist of Sabbath’s Theater by asking himself, “what if Harold, instead of making his parents proud and going to the Ivy League, had gone to seed in the Village in the ’50s?”—this by Roth's own admission, apparently. Harold told me about fighting a bat infestation in a summer cottage he'd shared with John Hollander; a car crash he'd gotten into with Paul de Man; skinnydipping with Jacques Derrida (“he was quite fit”); croquet with Delmore Schwartz (“quite crazy and inviting of parody but never a self-parody”); and tippling with Dwight MacDonald (“a sincere Trotskyite—though one can't imagine an insincere Trotskyite—who was never sober”). There were anecdotes about T. S. Eliot (“it was unfortunate, his rejection of Milton”); Northrop Frye (“the rare colleague of mine who did not believe that Eliot was Christ’s terrestrial vicar”); Susan Sontag; Camille Paglia; Toni Morrison; and Cynthia Ozick; and disquisitions on anti-Semitism at Cornell, where he was educated, and at Yale, where he was the first Jew ever tenured by the English Department. What else? Arguments with Anthony Burgess over limbo and purgatory (“as a lapsed Catholic, Burgess was going to hell, whereas I am still here and going nowhere”); chess with Nabokov (“it astonished no one that I did not emerge the winner”); and conversations with Don DeLillo (“I conversed, he didn’t”), Cormac McCarthy (“he would call me on the telephone while soaking like a cowboy in the bath”), W. G. Sebald (“gentle, maybe too gentle”), and Gershom Scholem, “who when I'd visit him in Jerusalem at his apartment on Abravanel Street would invariably speak of himself in the third person...so a typical English sentence would be, “The judgment of so-and-so on this-and-that is such-and-such, but Scholem says’...a habit he shares with our current president, who likes to say, ‘Nobody has done more for Israel than Donald Trump’... In literature, referring to yourself in the third person is called illeism.’ On my bachelorhood: “I urge you, dear Joshua, to reconsider”; on bachelorhood in general: “on the whole, dear Joshua, the literature on the subject does not recommend it”; on the homosexuality of Jewishness; on the Jewishness of homosexuality; on the intelligence of former students employed by The New Yorker, and on the incongruity of that intelligence with the mediocrity of The New Yorker; on John Ashbery: “I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that / Of Avignon’; on Hart Crane: “Migrations that must needs void memory, / Inventions that cobblestone the heart.” What else? Feuds over identity politics (which he called “resentment politics,” and of which he said, 

The Fugitive

I was not in fact entirely mistaken; the specific for curing an unfortunate event (and three events out of four are unfortunate) is a decision; for it has the effect, by a sudden reversal of our thoughts, of interrupting the flow of those that come from the past event and prolong its vibration, and breaking it with a counter-flow of thoughts from the outside, from the future. But these new thoughts are most of all beneficial to us.

&

My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so tenacious, it was because people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to love, the curiosity which people arouse dies before they themselves are dead. Thus I would no longer have taken a single step to find out with whom Gilberte had been strolling on a certain evening in the Champs-Elysées. Now, I was well aware that these two forms of curiosity were absolutely identical, had no value in themselves, were incapable of lasting. But I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of this transient curiosity, although I knew in advance that my enforced separation from Albertine, by the fact of her death, would lead me to the same indifference as had resulted from my voluntary separation from Gilberte. 

&

 Some moments after the shock, my intelligence, which like the sound of thunder travels less rapidly, produced the reason for it. Charmont had made me think of the Buttes-Chaumont, where Mme Bontemps had told me that Andrée used often to go with Albertine, whereas Albertine had told me that she had never seen the Buttes-Chaumont. After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap. 

&

 But even the importance which this desire must have for her and the reserve with which she surrounded it could not reveal to me what it was qualitatively, still less how she referred to it when she spoke of it to herself. In physical suffering, at least we do not have to choose our pain ourselves. The malady determines it and imposes it on us. But in jealousy we have, so to speak, to try out sufferings of every shape and size, before we arrive at the one which seems to fit. And how much more difficult this is in the case of a suffering such as that of feeling that she whom we loved is finding pleasure with beings who are different from us, who give her sensations which we are not capable of giving her, or who at least by their configuration, their aspect, their ways, represent to her something quite different from us! Ah, if only Albertine had fallen in love with Saint-Loup, how much less, it seemed to me, I should have suffered! 

It is true that we are unaware of the particular sensibility of each of our fellow-creatures, but as a rule we do not even know that we are unaware of it, for this sensibility of other people is a matter of indifference to us. So far as Albertine was concerned, my misery or happiness would have depended upon the nature of this sensibility; I was well aware that it was unknown to me, and the fact that it was unknown to me was painful in itself. 

&

...life, had been subjected merely to the play of my memories, to the actions and reactions of a psychology applicable to immobile states, and had not been drawn into a vaster system in which souls move in time as bodies move m space. 

As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of Time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting—forgetting, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction with it. And I really ought to have discovered sooner that one day I should no longer be in love with Albertine. When I had realised, from the difference that existed between what the importance of her person and of her actions was to me and what it was to other people, that my love was not so much a love for her as a love in myself, I might have drawn various conclusions from this subjective nature of my love and in particular deduced that, being a mental state, it might survive the person for some time, but also that, having no real connexion with that person, having no support outside itself, it must, like every mental state, even the most lasting, find itself one day obsolete, be “replaced,” and that when that day came everything that seemed to attach me so sweetly, indissolubly, to the memory of Albertine would no longer exist for me. It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one’s own mind. For this very reason one bases upon them projects which have all the fervour of thought; but thought languishes ang memory decays: the day would come when I would readily admit the first comer to Albertine’s room, as I had without the slightest regret given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts that I had received from Gilberte. 

&

....the course of conversation, words to which one cannot even give one’s whole attention because one isn’t alone!” Besides, it took me at a serious disadvantage, as I had exhausted myself with Andrée. Really, I would have liked to have more strength to devote to a truth of such magnitude; it remained extraneous to me, but this was because I had not yet found a place for it in my heart. We would like the truth to be revealed to us by novel signs, not by a sentence, a sentence similar to those which we have constantly repeated to ourselves. The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than another thought. There is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite. 

In any case, if it was true, it was by this time the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress that rises up from the depths and reveals itself when we can no longer have any use for it. Then, thinking doubtless of Albertine did not rise again for me with the resurrection of her body. And when I realised that I felt no joy at the thought of her being alive, that I no longer loved her, I ought to have been more shattered than a man who, looking at his reflexion in a mirror, after months of travel or sickness, discovers that he has white hair and a different face, that of a middle-aged or an old man. This is shattering because its message is: “the man that I was, the fairhaired young man, no longer exists, I am another person.” And yet, was not the impression that I now felt the proof of as profound a change, as total a death of my former self and of the no less complete substitution of a new self that former self, as the sight of a wrinkled face topped with a white wig instead of the face of long ago? But one is no more distressed at having become another person, after a lapse of years and in the natural sequence of time, than one is at any given moment by the fact of being, one after another, the incompatible persons, malicious, sensitive, refined, caddish, disinterested, ambitious which one can be, in turn, every day of one’s life. And the reason why one is not distressed is the same, namely that the self which has been eclipsed—momentarily in this latter case and when it is a question of character, permanently in the former case and when the passions are involved—is not there to deplore the other, the other which is for the moment, or from then onwards, one’s whole self; the caddish self laughs at his caddishness because one is the cad, and the forgetful self does not grieve about his forgetfulness precisely because he has forgotten. 

I should have been incapable of resuscitating Albertine because I was incapable of resuscitating myself, of resuscitating the self of those days. Life, in accordance with its habit which is, by unceasing, infinitesimal labours, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine’s death: “Become another person,” but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost everything in me, with the result that my mind was already accustomed to its new master—my new self—when it became aware that it had changed; it was to this new master that it was attached. My feeling for Albertine, my jealousy, stemmed, as we have seen, from the irradiation, by the association of ideas, of certain pleasant or painful impressions, the memory of Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain, the precious good-night kisses that Albertine used to give me on the neck. But in proportion as these impressions had grown fainter, the vast field of impressions which they coloured with a hue that was agonising or soothing reverted to neutral tones. As soon as oblivion had taken hold of certain dominant points of suffering and pleasure, the resistance offered by my love was overcome, I no longer loved Albertine. I tried to recall her image to my mind. I had been right in my presentiment when, a couple of days after Albertine’s flight, I was appalled by the discovery that I had been able to live for forty-eight hours without her. It had been the same as when I wrote to Gilberte long ago saying to myself: “If this goes on for a year or two, I shall no longer love her.” And if, when Swann asked me to come and see Gilberte again, this had seemed to me as embarrassing as greeting a dead woman, in Albertine’s case death—or what I had supposed to be death—had achieved the same result as a prolonged breach in Gilberte’s. Death merely acts in the same way as absence. The monster at whose apparition my love had trembled, oblivion, had indeed, as I had feared, ended by devouring that love. Not only did the news that she was alive fail to revive my love, not only did it enable me to realise how far I had already proceeded along the road towards indifference, it at once and so abruptly accelerated that process that I wondered retrospectively whether the opposite report, that of Albertine’s death, had not, conversely, by completing the effect of her departure, rekindled my love and delayed its decline. Yes, now that the knowledge that she was alive and the possibility of our reunion made her suddenly cease to be so precious to me, I wondered whether Francoise’s insinuations, our rupture itself, and even her death (imaginary, but believed to be real) had not prolonged my love, to such an extent do the efforts of third persons, and even those of fate, to separate us from a woman succeed only in attaching us to her. Now it was the contrary process that had occurred. Anyhow, I tried to recall her image and perhaps because I had only to raise a finger for her to be mine once more, the memory that came to me was that of a somewhat stout and mannishlooking girl from whose faded features protruded already, like a sprouting seed, the profile of Mme Bontemps. 

...what I had anticipated on the basis of my love for Gilberte, after obliging me to make so long and painful a detour, had ended too, after having proved an exception to it, by succumbing, like my love for Gilberte, to the general law of oblivion. But then I thought to myself: I used to value Albertine more than myself; I no longer value her now because for a certain time past I have ceased to see her. My desire not to be parted from myself by death, to rise again after my death—that desire was not like the desire never to be parted from Albertine; it still persisted. Was this due to the fact that I valued myself more highly than her, that when I loved her I loved myself more? No, it was because, having ceased to see her, I had ceased to love her, whereas I had not ceased to love myself because my everyday links with myself had not been severed like those with Albertine. But if my links with my body, with myself, were severed also . . . ? Obviously, it would be the same. Our love of life is only an old liaison of which we do not know how to rid ourselves. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality. 

&

The next day, I set out in quest of my beautiful nocturnal piazza, following calle after calle which were exactly like one another and refused to give me the anallese piece of information, except such as would lead me fusther astray. Sometimes a vague landmark which I seemed to recognise led me to suppose that I was about to see appear, in its seclusion, solitude and silence, the beautiful exiled piazza. At that moment, some evil genie which had assumed the form of a new calle made me unwittingly retrace my steps, and I found myself suddenly brought back to the Grand Canal. And as there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality, I finally wondered whether it was not during my sleep that there had occurred, in a dark patch of Venetian crystallisation, that strange mirage which offered a vast piazza  Surrounded by romantic palaces to the meditative eye of the moon.