William Gaddis - The Recognitions

The snow had hardened into reefs along his path and he narrowly avoided falling a number of times, even though he looked nowhere now but there where he walked. Schizophobic, how near the edge can he approach? how much longer disdain simple ruses? — Give me force and matter, and I will refurbish the world! Blame Descartes, then! resisting with some fortitude the purchase of a bowler hat, and wearing a cigar, and even then preferring perhaps a dry Brazil-filled, Java-bound, Sumatra-wrapped panatella: but soggy all-Havana is more weighingful, and; temptation to stop along the way, weary, damned weary, damned weary of it passing the campfires so many tents pitched with such care to the pegs insisting permanence when (God blind me) by their nature they are tents and Lord love me by the nature of things they will blow away, by the nature of force and matter blown away and the God-damned Cartesian with them. Mauled by luxuries, asking now no more than some well-chronicled illness to stir the viscera into affirming its existence within, the member without. Caveat: —On which side do you dress, Job? Mauled by luxuries, Oh doctor Æsculapius found out the hard way lightningstruck. Reality defined by the (luxury) gratuitous crime. Peace by (luxury) war. Love by (luxury) mugging, rape, Senta retires with Sabine smile of satiety, Thankyou ma'am. — E ucciso da una donna! M'hai tu assai torturato?! Su! Parla! Odi tu ancora? Guardami!. . Son la Tosca! Son la Diva!. .

Arsk Saint Bernard about women, their face is a burning wind, he'll tell you, arsk him, their voice the hissing of serpents, he'll tell you.

(fa un ultimo sforzo:) Soccorso!. .

In rehearsal: Chrysippus. Cleanthes. Zeno. Pyrrho. Again, the story of Hipparchia's courtship, spare no details (the dress of Telephus and Crates then the groom are especially amusing) but one: —Kissed on the cheek after years, was it? A,M,D,G, sequence of unsurprise (Lao-tse's 84-year gestation), right Nicodemus? right? under a burning bush (I lost my wife) Ad Mariam Dei Genetricem, dixlt, pinxlt.

Sang, — Varé tava soskei. . soskei. . Mermaid mahn stole my heart away.

(verso:) Ti soffoca il sangue?. . il sangue?. . Configuring shapes and smells (damnation) sang — Yetzer hara, in the hematosé conspiracy of night When they shout gfckyrslf Come equipped her morphidite.

Arse Alexander VI for a loan of his concave emerald, watching the rape of (Christian) girls through it. — Ah! è morto!. . Or gli perdono!. . E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!

Then he fell. He fell twice. The first time, a stone turned under his foot as he reached a slope of the east lawn of the parsonage. He went down on one knee, got up immediately and three steps later he slipped again. The ground was hard, and he caught himself on the back of a hand, and remained, down, for a good half-minute, looking at the back of his hand where he'd torn it, not badly but enough to bring blood. He sat until he'd got his breath; and the bull on the ground, its gold dull in the dull light, held his eyes, glistening themselves no more than the dulled jewels of its collar. For the first time, the sharp edge of the air startled him deeply, cutting his lungs as he breathed it. The hand with the blood to mark it he reached to the bull and rested it there; and his other he rubbed over his dry face, then to his bare head. That hand stopped there and the fingers drew together against the skull as though to wring out the occupant brain. He had a bad headache. It seemed to have been going on for some time, throbbing with permanence. His hand reached the back of his neck and closed again there, squeezing the muscles and tendons in its hold. They were sore. He spat on the ground. Then he coughed. The air was still. Cold came to him evenly. Again he hastened to get up, for his body was drawing the cold right up out of the earth.

His expression, which all this time had been one of confusion, drew gradually together as he rose, bringing the gold bull up with him, and under his arm. As the diffused look of bewilderment left him, his features lay in a concentration of anxiety, staring up toward the house. The sun had just touched the peak there and begun to descend; and again, for the first time, the sounds which he distinguished seemed to have been going on for some time. As long, that is, as he might have been within earshot: a regular ka-klack, ka-klack, ka-klack was the least sound, coming apparently from the house itself, and an irregular series of hammer blows from beyond. It was the voice, however, which arrested him. It was neither sharp nor loud, but lingered, and was gone, and rose again on this cold air, leaving off and rising like the smoke of a boat gone under a bridge, and emerging.

— Jupiter. Ammon. Adonis. Chemosh. Hercules. Osiris. Dionysus. Phoebus, Bacchus, Moloch, Baal…

The light of the sun spread over the face of the house, and its margin verged steadily lower toward the figure exposed on the open porch. The words lingered and were gone, leaving an emptiness which the silence rushed from all directions to fill. Then when he went on speaking his voice was lower, a tone of admonition which the silence retired before, but no great distance, as it had before the names of the sun. Now the silence withdrew barely to the point where the figure approached up the slope of the lawn, advancing with him, but hesitant, before then behind him, breaking the stream of the words, — man or woman. . wickedness. . transgressing his covenant, And hath gone and served other gods, and worshiped them, either the sun, or the moon, or any of the host of heaven. .

Then as he climbed nearer the silence no longer infringed, but followed and closed in behind on the cold air, — And lest thou shouldst lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God. .

Reverend Gwyon was a big man. And, as the increscent light of the sun reached him and covered him, and he broke off speaking and stood exalted in the light, the sunlight and the silence seemed to augment him, actually to make him larger, standing alone up on the porch. Abruptly he cried out to the figure approaching him, — Turn around. There, turn around!

The sun stood emerged, glowing its great belly, motionless with the effort of emersion accomplished, paused, over the earth's rim, in confident prospect of the journey of the day. Suddenly breaking his own pattern of stillness Reverend Gwyon clattered down the porch steps, and stopped where he could get a full view of the sky. — A bad time of it, he muttered scanning the sky from one end to the other and back, east to west, to east and the sun itself. — A bad time of it today.

— Bad time of… what?

— Why there, the dirty sky, Gwyon said flinging a hand up. — He has a dirty path before him today. As he spoke he lowered his eyes, and what might, on a smaller face, have passed as a look of surprise, settled upon his own as one of curious, even inquisitive abstraction, a look which summoned every battery of history to bear simultaneously upon the immediate problem at hand.

Reverend Gwyon was a tall man; but it was his stance made him appear indomitable, that and the sense of a full meter of silence surrounding him which only he could penetrate, or roll back with the invitatory ardor of his own curiosity. His face was heavily lined, but lines in nowise the fortuitous tracings of disgruntled weariness with which one after another generation proclaims abrogation of responsibility for the future, and liability for the past. Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn the course of youth groping among the obstacles erected, dutifully, by its own hands earlier, along the way of that sublime delusion known as the pursuit of happiness.