I
09 Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.
10 How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?
13 The past beats inside me like a second heart.
15 How the mind wanders, even on the most concentrated of occasions.
17 The carpeted corridor absorbed my footsteps. The lift, pressed, plunged.
19 One's eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within.
21 The steel kettle shone, a slow furl of steam at its spout, vaguely suggestive of genie and lamp. Oh, grant me a wish, just the one.
22 It was as if a secret had been imparted to us so directly, so nasty, that we could hardly bear to remain in one another's company yet were unable to break free, each knowing the foul thing that the other knew and bound together by that very knowledge. From that day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.
33 But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?
35 Everybody seems to be younger than I am, even the dead.
39 I suppose so many of the living passing through have worn away all traces of the dead.
48 Now under the bronze sunlight of the October afternoon, everything had a quaintly faded look, as if it were all pictures from old postcards.
52 He seemed always teasingly on the point of revealing, as he might show a lewd picture, some large, general and disgusting piece of knowledge to which only adults were privy.
58 The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.
69 I had not switched on the lamps in the room and the long, tapering trapezoid of light spilling across the linoleum from the landing where she stood was a pathway leading straight to childhood, hers and my own.
70 When Anna's body betrayed her and she became afraid of it and its alien possibilities, I developed, by a mysterious process of transference, a crawling repugnance of my own flesh.
71 Sickness in those days was a special place, a place apart, where no one else could enter, not the doctor with his shiver-inducing stethoscope or even my mother when she put her col hand on my burning brow. It is a place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone.
77 At that age we had no small-talk, no rituals of polite advance and encounter, but simply put ourselves into each other's vicinity and waited to see what would happen.
87 Beyond the smouldering sunlight there is the placid gloom of indoors on a summer afternoon, where my memory gropes in search of details, solid objects, the components of the past.
89 Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.
94 Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, towards the final, almost unnoticed quietus.
96 So what I foresaw for the future was in fact, if fact comes into it, a picture of what could only be an imagined past. I was, one might say, not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone. And suddenly now this strikes me as in some way significant. Was it actually the future I was looking forward to, or something beyond the future?
97 …as if it were I and not Anna who was destined soon to be another one among the already so numerous shades.
My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about the drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.
98 Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
99 If there were pain, she said, it would at least be an authenticator, the thing to tell her that what had happed to her was realer than any reality she had known before now. But she was not in pain, not yet; there was only what she described as a general sense of agitation, a sort of interior frizzing, as if her poor, baffled body were scrabbling about inside itself, desperately throwing up defences against an invader that had already scuttled in by a secret way, its shiny black pincers snapping.
106 As the light thickened in the trees and the shadow of the next-door house began to close over the garden like a trapdoor.
107 How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were the gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known. (Apotheosis)
119 Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, a sprinkling of atoms in the air of the room where we breathed our last, yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead.
123 a torpor descended on the rest of us in that little dell, the invisible net of lassitude that falls over a company when one of its number detaches and drops away into sleep.
II
141 That is, there must have been some or even all of these, must have been a first time we held hands, embraced, made declarations, but these first times are lost in the folds of an ever more evanescent past.
144 Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things—new experiences, new emotions—and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
146 People suspected something was up, but not, until the final stages, that what was up, for her, was the game itself.
148 The room was much as I remembered it, or looked as if it was as I remembered, for memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past.
149 I am like a man with an agonising toothache who despite the pain takes a vindictive pleasure in prodding the point of his tongue again and again deep into the throbbing cavity.
155 She said so many strange things nowadays, as if she were already somewhere else, beyond me, where even words had a different meaning.
159 Before it is a beginning an egg is an absolute end. It is the very definition of self-containment.
160 Really, one might almost live one's life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollection.
168 In Chloe the world was first manifest for me as an objective entity. … She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before, there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me.
179 Despite all efforts of architects, designers, managements, hotel rooms are always impatient for us to be gone; hospital rooms, on the contrary, and without anybody's effort, are there to make us stay, to want to stay, and be content.
184 I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin.
204 I did not deserve their reverence, for reverence is what it felt like, that I had been merely a bystander, a bit-player, while Anna did the dying.
215 Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day?
216 Be yourself! Meaning, of course, Be anyone you like. That was the pact we made, that we would relieve each other of the burden of being the people whom everyone else told us we were.
218 Could I have lived differently? Fruitless interrogation. Of course I could, but I did not, and therein lies the absurdity of even asking.
221 Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau.
251 It was one of those plangent autumn evenings streaked with late sunlight that seemed itself a memory of what sometime in the far past had been the blaze of noon.引自 Das ganze Buch
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