Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

That was exactly the problem, the problem that kept him awake late at night, that woke him up early, and that nevertheless made him long for sleep as he longed for nothing else—profound, profound nothingness and annihilation of sleep, complete and harmonious escape. Yes, that was the problem: to find and name this worm that gnawed at his brain. What on earth was this new obsession for—this horror of shaving? He had had it now for three days and three nights, and his nights it had made hideous; for his thoughts kept reverting to the new razor, and whenever he saw it, in his mind’s eye, lying there on the shelf in all its bright sheerness, he felt a spastic contraction of the chest. He had lain awake for two hours, the first morning, wondering whether he would dare to shave with it. In a sinister way it had seemed to be connected, as with steel wires, to his jangled nerves, and gradually he had become convinced that as soon as he touched it some obscure impulse would turn the blade against his flesh. He had conquered his terror—had managed to shave, trembling a little, and noting with astonishment the pallor of his face, and the narrow intensity of his pupils.… Well, obviously, it was too late in the day for any mere timidity about shaving to develop! It was something deeper than that. Whatever the worm was, it had bored into the very center, and his brain was honey-combed with galleries—hollow enough to float—its specific gravity markedly impaired.

He sat down on a wet bench, and as he did so the sun came out and made a pale sparkling brightness of the grass. This was refreshing; it gave a change of scene. He was not exactly sure where it put him. He was barefooted, that was clear, and he was exquisitely conscious of the cool, dispersed wetness of the grass under his sensitive feet, and of the sharpness of twigs. Coarse, thick, ropy spider’s webs glistened on the dingy box-hedge, and at the bottom of every silken funnel he could see a vigorous spider with curved claws. The smell of wet leaves was like early morning. Then there was some question of nasturtiums, matted snakily together by a heavy rain in the night—acrid; he liked the yellow ones best.… The warm smell of burning leaves came again over him, and the thought of the razor, with its sinister bracketing of edge and flesh. He began to compose a letter to Sara. Should he address her by her “pet” name—Sahara—the name originally suggested by the fact that she pronounced her name to rhyme with the desert? Too flippant at this crisis.

“My dear Sara: Why is it that you are made of flesh—why, indeed, if God, as it is reported, created you in His image, did He not dispense for once with the common straw and clay and dip His hands into the clear brightness of the ether? I cannot, no, I have made up my mind on the point, reconcile myself to the fact that your mouth, which I once in a vision saw as a flower without function, exists really for the taking in of food and of men; that you have an alimentary canal, liable at the most inopportune moments to utter its obscene borborygmi—or as Jake coarsely puts it, its bubbling of the gut—amid harmonies seemingly more ethereal; that you have kidneys, and liver, and ductless glands, all plying at all times their little secret juicy trades. It is no good retorting, as I hear you angrily retort (between mouthfuls of the best beef), that all this holds just as well of me. Of course. To be sure. Certainly. That’s precisely why I should like to find in some hallowed corner of this dingy universe a creature of a beauty and texture more translucent—compounded, let us say, of air and fire. You will say that this is an unreasonable demand. But if it is really unreasonable why does it occur to me—is it only a disease of the flesh that enables flesh to conceive the finer-than-flesh?… At all events, my dear Sahara Desert, what I passionately want you to understand at this crisis in our lives, is that if I now take flight from you and recede rapidly into the blue obscure, weaving about myself a fine shroud of stellar air, it is not the individual but the generic you that I flee from, finding horrible. For this horror is ubiquitous—its yellow tooth is everywhere, in all women, in all men. I have fought against it for years. Yes, I recall its fangs in even my very first love affair, when years ago walking in a dark London square with a woman whose affection for me was a little too public and unrestrained (she suddenly tried to embrace me, murmuring, no, shouting, passionate phrases!) I observed a sign, happily emblazoned against the palings of a fence, ‘Organs and street cries prohibited near here,’ and read it aloud to her, with the fortunate result that she was dissolved into shrieks of laughter.… I do not know in the least why I should want to recite to you this oblique episode of my past. Perhaps only because it gives you a little of my background. But background is so important and so complicated! What use to give you a mere fragment like this? Isn’t it equally important that I should tell you that I dislike intensely the odor of female perspiration; that I have an obscure passion for jungles, snake-infested thickets, and the sound of horns; that a dull pencil makes me miserable and inert, as if paralyzed, and that I find intolerable any business dealing with a stranger?… Even so, I make hardly the slightest of beginnings. I’m a sort of nexus of loathings. As I sit here in the park, with the sun just dipping his chin into a swift cloud and a few drops of rain beginning to fall among moist pebbles and dead leaves, it seems to me that I am really a vast net of unpleasant sensation, a net of boredom which enmeshes everything, and down the slack nerves of which run tremors of feeble disgust from the uttermost stars. What a paltry attempt at the poetic that is! I am ashamed of myself. What I mean, of course, is merely that my own nervous system is degraded—perhaps by too much sensation, and sensation too precise.

“Ah, Sahara, those precise sensations! Did you know that there has always been something peculiarly offensive to me in the line of the gums above your upper teeth? On chilly days, too, I have noticed that the part of the chest which shows above your blouse is very apt to be of a bluish hue which I find extraordinarily repulsive. And then, to pass from the physiological to the psychological, how singularly you have misjudged, from the very outset, the sort of stimulus with which to play upon me! If only you had known how to be proud instead of humble, reserved instead of placatory, mysterious instead of dumb!… These are extraordinary things to be saying to a woman at the very outset of ‘love’; no doubt, you will be simply dumfounded. ‘How is it possible?’ I hear you asking. ‘Did you not kiss me last night? Surely there was no sham about that? You loved me then—is it possible that love should evaporate so soon?’… Yes, I loved you last night, that is true. When I left my own lodgings and started off in the evening to see you I will not deny that I did so with tremendous excitement, that I had taken the very last care with my appearance, and that all the way, in the car, my imagination, like an expert contrapuntalist, performed the most amazing feats of virtuosity with the simple theme of ‘you.’ I saw you burning like a creature of light, alternately fusing and paling with the pulse of fire. I trembled when I thought of you. I could feel waves of psychic blindness go over me periodically, and when at last I climbed the steps to your house I felt as if my head and my body had been somehow separated.… But then, when I saw you, these feelings began rapidly to change! I saw something a little coarse in you; I found you to be stupid; the curve of your jaw seemed to me to be too heavy. You manifested also a disposition to abuse those gestures which I had at first found charming. How sick I became of your trick of looking up at me from your pillow with silly admiration, just allowing me a glimpse of your small blue eyes between the fingers of your hand! How I loathed you for the arch way in which you kept turning your back. I responded to these things as you expected, but you did not guess with what weariness and anger.