My it’s
a good thing the men couldn’t hear us. Wouldn’t they just
laugh! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary.
Oh yeah?
I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with
the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing
struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she
surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of
her terror of me.
She felt
like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees
the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender
with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry
for the kiss which they invited.
He told
me of his prospecting days in South America. It was a tale of high adventure,
fraught with mortal dangers, hair-raising escapes, and improbable twists
of fortune: hacking his way through the jungle with a machete, fighting
off bandits with his bare hands, shooting his donkey when it broke its
leg.
The fact
that narrative is so universal, so ‘natural,’ may hide what
is strange and problematic about it. Exactly what psychological or social
functions do stories serve? Just why do we need stories, lots of them,
all the time?
In an S
bus (which is not to be confused with a trespass), I saw (not an eyesore)
a chap (not a Bath one) wearing a dark soft hat (and not a hot daft
sack), which hat was encircled by a plaited cord (and not by an applauded
cat).
The child’s
life wasn’t in vain because the polar bears had been made holy
by its suffering. The child had been a test, a message from god for
polar bears.”
Poetry
had fallen foul of the Romantics, become a mawkish, womanly affair full
of gush and fine feeling. Language had gone soft and lost its virility:
it needed to be stiffened up again, made hard and stone-like, reconnected
to the physical world.
Why don’t
you say something? You haven’t said a word all this time. You’ve
just let me go on talking. You have sat there with your eyes drawing
all these thoughts out of me—they were there in me like silk in
a cocoon....
But of
the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other.
For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone
up like a magazine.