David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

Obviously, your ordinary book about art is quite tall.

So in fact who is to argue, now, that quite possibly there might not have once been just as many books about art on these shelves as there were books in foreign languages, until such time as somebody grew exactly as weary of having a house full of books that were forced to lie flat as he did of having a house full of books he was not able to read?

Downstairs they go, every last one of the troublesome things.

Which is to say that quite possibly there are just as many books about art in those cartons as there are books in German, and all I did was open the wrong one by which to be made aware of this.

As a matter of fact it is not even impossible that every solitary remaining book in that basement is a book about art.

Nor does the simple happenstance of my having found no such books in the one carton I did open in any way eliminate this possibility, surely.

As a matter of fact I could go back down there at this very instant and check.

Nor would I even be required to move the lawnmower again, come to think about it, what with not having put back the lawn-mower once I did move it.

I have no intention whatsoever of going back down there to check.

At this very instant or at most likely any other.

And especially since I have still not even come close to resolving the question as to why I went down there yesterday to begin with.

Even if I did not go downstairs to the basement yesterday.

To tell the truth it has actually already gotten to be the day after tomorrow.

Or even more probably the day after that.

Moreover it is raining.

In fact it has been raining since the morning on which I threw out my red roses, which I did not put in either.

By either, of course, I mean also not having put in the days.

Either.

Well, I believe it was some time ago that I indicated that I sometimes indicate them and I sometimes do not.

Possibly it began to rain on the day after the day after I went to the basement.

On the day before the day after the day after I went to the basement I was still typing.

I think.

In any case what I have also not put in is that the first day's rain broke a window.

Or rather it was the wind that did that, that night.

Such things can happen.

Oh, dear, the wind has just broken one of the windows in one of the rooms downstairs, having doubtless been all I thought.

This would have been right after I had heard the glass, naturally.

And while I was upstairs.

Actually, a certain amount of the rain is still coming in. Not much, any longer, but some.

Well, most of the wind actually died down again quite quickly, as it turned out.

So that now the whole notion of a warm steady rain is quite agreeable, even.

Even if I am finally convinced that the pain in my shoulder is arthritic after all.

The same thing would hold true for the pain in my ankle, presumably.

Possibly I have not mentioned my ankle in some time.

This would be the ankle I broke when I unexpectedly got my period in the middle of carrying a nine-foot canvas up the main central staircase in the Hermitage and fell, that I am talking about.

Then again the ankle may not have been broken but merely sprained.

The next morning it was swollen to twice its normal size nonetheless.

One moment I had been halfway up the stairs, and a moment after that I was making believe I was Icarus.

In fact very probably it would have been a wind which caused that too, since there were similarly all sorts of broken windows in the museum on its own part, by then.

Although what I had actually just done was shift the way in which I was standing, naturally, so as to close my thighs.

Forgetting for the same instant that I was carrying forty-five square feet of canvas, on stretchers, up a stone stairway.

And naturally all of this had occurred with what seemed no warning whatsoever, either.

Although doubtless I had been feeling out of sorts for some days, which I would have invariably laid to other causes.

At any rate it is that ankle that I mean.

And outside of which I would most likely not mind the rain in the least, as I started to say.

With the exception of missing my sunsets, perhaps.

Although what I have basically been doing about the rain is ignoring it, to tell the truth.

How I do that is by walking in it.

I did not fail to notice that those last two sentences must certainly look like a contradiction, by the way.

Even if they are no such thing.

One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it.

In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.

Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring that rain.

Then again, doubtless it is rather easier to ignore it in my own particular manner of doing so if one happens to have no clothes on at the time.

Well, or no more than underpants.

Although as a matter of fact I stepped out of those on the front deck each time I decided to walk, also.

Well, doubtless I had already gotten soaked while I was out there deciding about the walk in either case.

So that by then it would have scarcely made any difference whether I kept on my underpants or not.

Although what I am more likely admitting by all this is that I may very well have been coincidentally aware of needing a bath, as well. Or at least on the first of those occasions.

Normally I bathe at the spring, of course. Well, or summers as now, in any case.

Oh. And I have finally stopped staining, incidentally, which had begun to look like forever.

And in either event it was actually an amusing diversion, soaping myself and then walking that way until I was rinsed.

Even if for a minute I believed I had lost my stick while I was at it.

When I looked back there it was, however, standing upright.

Which is to say that the stick was already not lost even before I had begun to worry that it might be.

So to speak.

Not that there would have been any point in trying to write anything with it in the rain to begin with, on the other hand.

Well, not that anything I ever write is still there when I go back in any case.

Then again, perhaps it might have been interesting to see one's messages beginning to deteriorate even before they were finished being written after all.

Like Leonardo da Vinci doing The Last Supper, one might have felt.

Well, one rather doubts that one would have felt quite like Leonardo.

Even by writing left-handed.

Or backwards, so that one would have needed a mirror to read it.

Meaning that the image of what one was writing would have been more real than the writing itself.

So to speak.

Have I ever mentioned that Michelangelo practically never took a bath in his life, by the way?

And even wore his boots to bed?

On my honor, it is a well known item in the history of art that Michelangelo was not somebody one would particularly wish to sit too close to.

Which on second thought could very well change one's view as to why all of those Medici kept telling him don't bother to get up, as a matter of fact.

Although come to think about it even William Shakespeare himself was terribly tiny, which is something I did once mention.

I mean so long as one would appear to be getting into this sort of thing.

Well, and for that matter Galileo would never even ever shake another person's hand, once he had discovered germs.

Not that a solitary other soul would believe that there were such things, of course. Even though Galileo kept insisting he had seen them.

In some water, I believe this was.