Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

27th . Wrote poorly. When one is tired, one’s sentences are always the first to suffer. Seven pages of bumph for one paragraph and a polysyllable. “Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.” Witty. But cruel. We are all too cruel.

Long letter to Dodypol. Just gone twelve. And so to bed.

30th . My lungs hurt. Smoking. And the weather is up. I chose England arbitrarily, would have chosen Venice were I a freeholder — cold, but better air — and yet, the courts, the courts! Slower than Quin-syburg justice. And this sad, old month.

October 1st . The girl’s name is Svarta Furstinna, a Swede, and she lives across the hall. She looks like the beautiful girl Ronsard once saw in the Château of Blois, bending over her lute and singing the branle de Bourgogne. Spellvexit himself was flirting. Shall I ask her over for a glass of wine?

Later: the courage necessary for the execution killed the sentiment. Wrote all night, so write this another day.

3rd . Spent the day in the Victoria and Albert Museum reading room, farming through the stacks for books on angelology. Darconville Pseudangelos, wanting to be one? I checked, for the record, for The Shakeing of the Sheets ; not a copy. I looked, however, into the Pythagoras question; to sum up: the opposition of the limiting (odd and perfect) and the limited (even and imperfect) organizes the world. The categories one, right, male, at rest, straight, light, good, and square belong to the sphere of the former; to the sphere of the even and imperfect belong the opposites: many, left, female, moving, bent, darkness, bad, oblong. The science of cutting pies! Art shouldn’t classify, but declassify. A misogynist’s ontology. Boring. Meditabund.

The idea that limitation poses a definiteness, nevertheless, warrants further study. I’ve survived for that, perhaps, because to know the worst is still to know what, having never known, is worse than worst by far — indeed, to know the worst is to know you’ll never know the worst again. When you know the worst, in short, you don’t. So truth is then fortified by wrongs?

N.B . I love the confusion of trichotomies. They turn me into enough of a fool to confirm by embarrassment the rejection in which she left nothing otherwise to understand. Furthermore, I think I’m insane.

4th . The imagination consumes some part of reality. That would be the essential salvation of writing, wouldn’t it? Bark is cinnamon: therapy.

5th . Today, I bought two tickets to the opera. Went across the hall and redeemed the time. Wrote until late: nulla dies sine linea. ( Cello-tape that to the wall!)

6th . “Who can’t say, I may be some part of your destiny?” Thus pretty Svarta, at one point in a general discussion of lost love over a post-and-rail tea in a tiny cellar of a Beauchamp Place restaurant. I’d sketched, prompted to it, an abstract of the past year, following of course the parliamentary custom of avoiding reference to any particular member by name. But the sublime intoxication of recovered divinity was in the conversation only; women can be too wonderful in their mystery to need to know as individuals. I want nothing to matter anymore, not even enjoyment, the mystical truth near but not next to the heresy that everything human in us is an obstacle in the way of holiness. Henceforth, in any case, like the Stuarts I will govern without a Parliament. (“In an uneven number heaven delights.” Eclogue VIII.75)

We walked through Kensington Gardens, saw the statue of Peter Pan, then home.

7th . Wrote.

8th . We attended a performance of The Flying Dutchman at Sadler’s Wells. Catharsis, I suppose. I wonder, is that grizzled Ahasuerus of the sea correct in thinking, since Senta is recreant to her former lover, that she’ll be so to him? If so, death must be exacted to prove faithfulness unto death. Novel, isn’t it? “Antilogy; or How I Relinquished What I Loved Because I Loved So Much.” (A cutisbound edition, of course.)

Whoso would love

Must make headway

On a ship ever windward

Of Table Bay.

God bless us out of it! Excessive joy, I’ve read, has killed men. I kissed Svarta goodnight.

9th . Wrote.

10th . The leaden sky puts its very own weather into my sentences: “With the sun a reminding touch upon their frozen hair the winged phagones of evil flashed out of Heaven into the fumerole of empty space, screaming, ‘ No, no! Not now! Not yet !’ “

Not too bad. Not too good.

11th . Wrote. The book looms up. Spellvexit asleep by the shilling heater all day. Rain for four straight days.

12th . Spirit of the Pities! I woke tonight in the middle of a frightful nightmare, a profane vision with a girl, outbawling with joy , being dragged by her long hair to a high wall as a sacrifice where perched the goat god, Pan, whose pointed ears wagged lasciviously in anticipation of — Drank until morning. Wine is poison to hemlock.

The question is, has part of me stayed behind to retrace what I thought I should otherwise have missed? Puritanical! Learning may be the enemy of thinking, and thinking, of learning. I have never known which I wanted and so am left with oneirotic circuses: fiction — the other barber in the mirror, shaving the other you.

Mem . Never drink in afternoon.

14th . Feel grey as a badger. Haven’t been out of bed for two days. It’s been raining longer than Louis XIV. Cramps from overdepres-sants of smoke, drink, malneirophrenia. I’ve begun to lose the habit of attention that is strong and extreme because I can think only of things, God forgive me, I hold in contempt. The thing that will fail me first when I get old will be my patience, a malefaction of Verrine, one of the Thrones.

I must up burtons and break out.

15th . Worse, pre-eminently so. And so slept.

16th. Dies notandus . This morning I found several letters for me down in the foyer, one — how I, an inventory of every anxiety, approached that little thing — a cablegram from Fawx’s Mt., postmarked, to be Petrarchally exact, October 12 and reading: “I love you.”

I will not drag Pyrrho from Elis to figure on this page. Things belong to the past quite quickly, that’s all. (Ridiculous. The present, the past, the future are happening at once!) But I am thinking: to know the truth one must start by not believing in anything. I am thinking: and so I sit here, doubting everything. I am thinking: I think something, and then I think, ‘I doubt that,’ and so it is false. I am thinking: that means I am sitting here and thinking ‘I don’t think I am doubting everything,’ meaning there is something I don’t doubt. O God, don’t disappoint me! Don’t stop time! O angels, clap your wings upon the skies, and give this virgin crystal plaudities! I am loved !

17th . How decisions aren’t decisions at all! How we believe what we don’t quite realize! I’ve spent the day shaking ink over a dozen unposted letters, read all, liked some, mailed none. Transatlantic phone calls from the Cadogan Hotel (Charlottesville number: no longer in service; Fawx’s Mt. number: no one at home), but the place triggers the mind to create the place. Sent telegram from Knightsbridge, repeating hers to the word. Only abide, rich Penelope!

Noctuarial entry: I can’t eat for happiness. I can’t write. I am the masked Touareg, brigand from the desert; the Bishop of Fun, in wonder of tabret and chimer of solisequious gold; Zeus with effulgent forehead and attributes. The sparkle in the tail of my eye could light up the world!