Short Stories

[surfer]

Favorite writers, favorite collections, etc.

I'm going to restrict myself to very short shorts that I can post in their entirity.

Since my son just started pre-school this year, let's start with Shirley Jackson's "CHARLES"





The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with
bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning
with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweetvoiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me.
He came running home the same way, the front door slamming open, his cap on
the floor, and the voice suddenly become raucous shouting, “Isn’t anybody here?”
At lunch he spoke insolently to his father, spilled his baby sister’s milk, and
remarked that his teacher said we were not to take the name of the Lord in vain.
“How was school today?” I asked, elaborately casual.
“All right,” he said.
“Did you learn anything?” his father asked.
Laurie regarded his father coldly. “I didn’t learn nothing,” he said.
“Anything,” I said. “Didn’t learn anything.”
“The teacher spanked a boy, though,” Laurie said, addressing his bread and butter.
“For being fresh,” he added, with his mouth full.
“What did he do?” I asked. “Who was it?”
Laurie thought. “It was Charles,” he said. “He was fresh. The teacher spanked
him and made him stand in the corner. He was awfully fresh.”
“What did he do?” I asked again, but Laurie slid off his chair, took a cookie, and
left, while his father was still saying, “See here, young man.”
The next day Laurie remarked at lunch, as soon as he sat down, “Well, Charles
was bad again today.” He grinned enormously and said, “Today Charles hit the teacher.”
“Good heavens,” I said, mindful of the Lord’s name, “I suppose he got spanked
again?”
“He sure did,” Laurie said. “Look up,” he said to his father.
“What?” his father said, looking up.
“Look down,” Laurie said. “Look at my thumb. Gee, you’re dumb.” He began
to laugh insanely.
“Why did Charles hit the teacher?” I asked quickly.
“Because she tried to make him color with red crayons,” Laurie said. “Charles
wanted to color with green crayons so he hit the teacher and she spanked him and said
nobody play with Charles but everybody did.”
The third day—it was a Wednesday of the first week—Charles bounced a see-saw
on to the head of a little girl and made her bleed, and the teacher made him stay inside all
during recess. Thursday Charles had to stand in a corner during story-time because he
kept pounding his feet on the floor. Friday Charles was deprived of black-board
privileges because he threw chalk.
On Saturday I remarked to my husband, “Do you think kindergarten is too
unsettling for Laurie? All this toughness and bad grammar, and this Charles boy sounds
like such a bad influence.”
“It’ll be alright,” my husband said reassuringly. “Bound to be people like Charles
in the world. Might as well meet them now as later.”
On Monday Laurie came home late, full of news. “Charles,” he shouted as he
came up the hill; I was waiting anxiously on the front steps. “Charles,” Laurie yelled all
the way up the hill, “Charles was bad again.”
“Come right in,” I said, as soon as he came close enough. “Lunch is waiting.”
“You know what Charles did?” he demanded following me through the door.
“Charles yelled so in school they sent a boy in from first grade to tell the teacher she had to make Charles keep quiet, and so Charles had to stay after school. And so all the
children stayed to watch him.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He just sat there,” Laurie said, climbing into his chair at the table. “Hi, Pop,
y’old dust mop.”
“Charles had to stay after school today,” I told my husband. “Everyone stayed
with him.”
“What does this Charles look like?” my husband asked Laurie. “What’s his other
name?”
“He’s bigger than me,” Laurie said. “And he doesn’t have any rubbers and he
doesn’t wear a jacket.”
Monday night was the first Parent-Teachers meeting, and only the fact that the
baby had a cold kept me from going; I wanted passionately to meet Charles’s mother. On
Tuesday Laurie remarked suddenly, “Our teacher had a friend come to see her in school
today.”
“Charles’s mother?” my husband and I asked simultaneously.
“Naaah,” Laurie said scornfully. “It was a man who came and made us do
exercises, we had to touch our toes. Look.” He climbed down from his chair and
squatted down and touched his toes. “Like this,” he said. He got solemnly back into his
chair and said, picking up his fork, “Charles didn’t even do exercises.”
“That’s fine,” I said heartily. “Didn’t Charles want to do exercises?”
“Naaah,” Laurie said. “Charles was so fresh to the teacher’s friend he wasn’t let
do exercises.”
“Fresh again?” I said.
“He kicked the teacher’s friend,” Laurie said. “The teacher’s friend just told
Charles to touch his toes like I just did and Charles kicked him.
“What are they going to do about Charles, do you suppose?” Laurie’s father
asked him.
Laurie shrugged elaborately. “Throw him out of school, I guess,” he said.
Wednesday and Thursday were routine; Charles yelled during story hour and hit a
boy in the stomach and made him cry. On Friday Charles stayed after school again and
so did all the other children.
With the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family; the
baby was being a Charles when she cried all afternoon; Laurie did a Charles when he
filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen; even my husband, when he
caught his elbow in the telephone cord and pulled the telephone and a bowl of flowers off
the table, said, after the first minute, “Looks like Charles.”
During the third and fourth weeks it looked like a reformation in Charles; Laurie
reported grimly at lunch on Thursday of the third week, “Charles was so good today the
teacher gave him an apple.”
“What?” I said, and my husband added warily, “You mean Charles?”
“Charles,” Laurie said. “He gave the crayons around and he picked up the books
afterward and the teacher said he was her helper.”
“What happened?” I asked incredulously.
“He was her helper, that’s all,” Laurie said, and shrugged.
“Can this be true about Charles?” I asked my husband that night. “Can something
like this happen?”
“Wait and see,” my husband said cynically. “When you’ve got a Charles to deal
with, this may mean he’s only plotting.” He seemed to be wrong. For over a week
Charles was the teacher’s helper; each day he handed things out and he picked things up;
no one had to stay after school.
“The PTA meeting’s next week again,” I told my husband one evening. “I’m
going to find Charles’s mother there.”
“Ask her what happened to Charles,” my husband said. “I’d like to know.”
“I’d like to know myself,” I said.
On Friday of that week things were back to normal. “You know what Charles did
today?” Laurie demanded at the lunch table, in a voice slightly awed. “He told a little
girl to say a word and she said it and the teacher washed her mouth out with soap and
Charles laughed.”
“What word?” his father asked unwisely, and Laurie said, “I’ll have to whisper it
to you, it’s so bad.” He got down off his chair and went around to his father. His father
bent his head down and Laurie whispered joyfully. His father’s eyes widened.
“Did Charles tell the little girls to say that?” he asked respectfully.
“She said it twice,” Laurie said. “Charles told her to say it twice.”
“What happened to Charles?” my husband asked.
“Nothing,” Laurie said. “He was passing out the crayons.”
Monday morning Charles abandoned the little girl and said the evil word himself
three or four times, getting his mouth washed out with soap each time. He also threw
chalk.
My husband came to the door with me that evening as I set out for the PTA
meeting. “Invite her over for a cup of tea after the meeting,” he said. “I want to get a
look at her.”
“If only she’s there.” I said prayerfully.
“She’ll be there,” my husband said. “I don’t see how they could hold a PTA
meeting without Charles’s mother.”
At the meeting I sat restlessly, scanning each comfortable matronly face, trying to
determine which one hid the secret of Charles. None of them looked to me haggard
enough. No one stood up in the meeting and apologized for the way her son had been
acting. No one mentioned Charles.
After the meeting I identified and sought out Laurie’s kindergarten teacher. She
had a plate with a cup of tea and a piece of chocolate cake; I had a plate with a cup of tea
and a piece of marshmallow cake. We maneuvered up to one another cautiously, and
smiled.
“I’ve been so anxious to meet you,” I said. “I’m Laurie’s mother.”
“We’re all so interested in Laurie,” she said.
“Well, he certainly likes kindergarten,” I said. “He talks about it all the time.”
“We had a little trouble adjusting, the first week or so,” she said primly, “but now
he’s a fine helper. With occasional lapses, of course.”
“Laurie usually adjusts very quickly,” I said. “I suppose this time it’s Charles’s
influence.”
“Charles?”
“Yes,” I said, laughing, “you must have your hands full in that kindergarten, with
Charles.”
“Charles?” she said. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.”

[surfer]

The Chaser

By John Collier


Alan Austen, as nervous as a kitten, went up certain dark and creaky stairs in the neighborhood of Pell Street, and peered about for a long time on the dime landing before he found the name he wanted written obscurely on one of the doors.

He pushed open this door, as he had been told to do, and found himself in a tiny room, which contained no furniture but a plain kitchen table, a rocking-chair, and an ordinary chair. On one of the dirty buff-coloured walls were a couple of shelves, containing in all perhaps a dozen bottles and jars. An old man sat in the rocking-chair, reading a newspaper. Alan, without a word, handed him the card he had been given.

"Sit down, Mr. Austen," said the old man very politely.

"I am glad to make your acquaintance."

"Is it true," asked Alan, "that you have a certain mixture that has-er-quite extraordinary effects?"

"My dear sir," replied the old man, "my stock in trade is not very large-I don't deal in laxatives and teething mixtures-but such as it is, it is varied. I think nothing I sell has effects which could be precisely described as ordinary."

"Well, the fact is. . ." began Alan.

"Here, for example," interrupted the old man, reaching for a bottle from the shelf. "Here is a liquid as colourless as water, almost tasteless, quite imperceptible in coffee, wine, or any other beverage. It is also quite imperceptible to any known method of autopsy."

"Do you mean it is a poison?" cried Alan, very much horrified.

"Call it a glove-cleaner if you like," said the old man indifferently. "Maybe it will clean gloves. I have never tried. One might call it a life-cleaner. Lives need cleaning sometimes."

"I want nothing of that sort," said Alan.

"Probably it is just as well," said the old man. "Do you know the price of this? For one teaspoonful, which is sufficient, I ask five thousand dollars. Never less. Not a penny less."

"I hope all your mixtures are not as expensive," said Alan apprehensively.

"Oh dear, no," said the old man. "It would be no good charging that sort of price for a love potion, for example. Young people who need a love potion very seldom have five thousand dollars. Otherwise they would not need a love potion."

"I am glad to hear that," said Alan.

"I look at it like this," said the old man. "Please a customer with one article, and he will come back when he needs another. Even if it is more costly. He will save up for it, if necessary."

"So," said Alan, "you really do sell love potions?"

"If I did not sell love potions," said the old man, reaching for another bottle, "I should not have mentioned the other matter to you. It is only when one is in a position to oblige that one can afford to be so confidential."

"And these potions," said Alan. "They are not just-just-er-"

"Oh, no," said the old man. "Their effects are permanent, and extend far beyond the mere casual impulse. But they include it. Oh, yes they include it. Bountifully, insistently. Everlastingly."

"Dear me!" said Alan, attempting a look of scientific detachment. "How very interesting!"

"But consider the spiritual side," said the old man.

"I do, indeed," said Alan.

"For indifference," said the old man, they substitute devotion. For scorn, adoration. Give one tiny measure of this to the young lady-its flavour is imperceptible in orange juice, soup, or cocktails-and however gay and giddy she is, she will change altogether. She will want nothing but solitude and you."

"I can hardly believe it," said Alan. "She is so fond of parties."

"She will not like them any more," said the old man. "She will be afraid of the pretty girls you may meet."

"She will actually be jealous?" cried Alan in a rapture. "Of me?"

"Yes, she will want to be everything to you."

"She is, already. Only she doesn't care about it."

"She will, when she has taken this. She will care intensely. You will be her sole interest in life."

"Wonderful!" cried Alan.

"She will want to know all you do," said the old man. "All that has happened to you during the day. Every word of it. She will want to know what you are thinking about, why you smile suddenly, why you are looking sad."

"That is love!" cried Alan.

"Yes," said the old man. "How carefully she will look after you! She will never allow you to be tired, to sit in a draught, to neglect your food. If you are an hour late, she will be terrified. She will think you are killed, or that some siren has caught you."

"I can hardly imagine Diana like that!" cried Alan, overwhelmed with joy.

"You will not have to use your imagination," said the old man. "And, by the way, since there are always sirens, if by any chance you should, later on, slip a little, you need not worry. She will forgive you, in the end. She will be terribly hurt, of course, but she will forgive you-in the end."

"That will not happen," said Alan fervently.

"Of course not," said the old man. "But, if it did, you need not worry. She would never divorce you. Oh, no! And, of course, she will never give you the least, the very least, grounds for-uneasiness."

"And how much," said Alan, "is this wonderful mixture?"

"It is not as dear," said the old man, "as the glove-cleaner, or life-cleaner, as I sometimes call it. No. That is five thousand dollars, never a penny less. One has to be older than you are, to indulge in that sort of thing. One has to save up for it."

"But the love potion?" said Alan.

"Oh, that," said the old man, opening the drawer in the kitchen table, and taking out a tiny, rather dirty-looking phial. "That is just a dollar."

"I can't tell you how grateful I am," said Alan, watching him fill it.

"I like to oblige," said the old man. "Then customers come back, later in life, when they are better off, and want more expensive things. Here you are. You will find it very effective."

"Thank you again," said Alan. "Good-bye."

"Au revoir," said the man.

[surfer]

Last one for today,


"Virtuoso" by Herbert Goldstone




“Sir?”

The Maestro continued to play, not looking up from the keys.

“Yes, Rollo?”

“Sir, I was wondering if you would explain this apparatus to me.”

The Maestro stopped playing, his thin body stiffly relaxed on the bench. His long supple fingers floated off the keyboard.

“Apparatus?” He turned and smiled at the robot. “Do you mean the piano, Rollo?”

“This machine that produces varying sounds. I would like some information about it, its operation and purpose. It is not included in my reference data.”

The Maestro lit a cigarette. He preferred to do it himself. One of his first order to Rollo when the robot was delivered two days before had been to disregard his built-in instruction on the subject.

“I’d hardly call a piano a machine, Rollo,” he smiled, “although technically you are correct. It is actually, I suppose, a machine designed to produce sounds of graduated pitch and tone, singly or in groups.”

“I assimilated that much by observation,” Rollo replied in a brassy baritone which no longer which no longer sent tiny tremors up the Maestro’s spine. “Wires of different thickness and tautness struck by felt-covered hammers activated by manually operated levers arranged in a horizontal panel.”

“A very cold-blooded description of one of man’s nobler works,” the Maestro remarked dryly. “You make Mozart and Chopin mere laboratory technicians.”

“Mozart? Chopin?” The duralloy sphere that was Rollo’s head shone stark and featureless, its immediate surface unbroken but for twin vision lenses. “The terms are not included in my memory banks.”

“No, not yours, Rollo,” the Maestro said softly. “Mozart and Chopin are not for vacuum tubes and fuses and copper wire. They are for flesh and blood and human tears.”

“I do not understand,” Rollo droned.

“Well,” the Maestro said, smoke curling lazily from his nostrils, “they are two of the humans who compose and design successions of note-varying sounds, that is, produced by the piano or by other instruments, machines that produce other types of sounds of fixed pitch and tone.”

“Sometimes, these instruments, as we call them, are played, or operated, individually; sometimes in groups – orchestras, as we refer to them – and the sounds blend together, they harmonise. That is, they have an orderly, mathematical relationship to each other which results in…”

The Maestro threw up his hands.

“I never imagined,” he chuckled, “that I would one day struggle so mightily, and so futilely to explain music to a robot!”

“Music?”

“Yes, Rollo. The sounds produced by this machine and others of the same category are called music.”

“What is the purpose of music, sir?”

“Purpose?”

The Maestro crushed the cigarette in an ash tray. He turned to the keyboard of the concert grand and flexed his fingers briefly.

“Listen, Rollo.”

The wraithlike fingers glided and wove the opening bars of “Clair de Lune”, slender and delicate as spider silk. Rollo stood rigid, the fluorescent light above the music rack casting a bluish jewelled sheen over his towering bulk, shimmering in the amber vision lenses.

The Maestro drew his hand back from the keys and the subtle tread of melodymelted reluctantly in the silence.

“Claude Debussy,” the Maestro said, “one of the mechanics of an era long past. He designed the succession of tones many years ago. What do you think about it?”

Rollo did not answer at once.

“The sounds were very well formed,” he replied finally. “They did not jar my auditory senses as some do.”

The Maestro laughed, “Rollo, you may not realise it but you are a wonderful critic.”

“The music, then,” Rollo droned. “Its purpose is to give pleasure to humans?”

“Exactly,” the Maestro said. “Sounds well formed, that do not jar the auditory senses as some do. Marvellous! It should be carved in marble over the entrance of New Carnegie Hall.”

“I do not understand. Why should my definition?”

The Maestro waved a hand. “No matter, Rollo. No matter.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Rollo?”

“These sheets of paper you sometimes place before you on the piano. They are the plans of the composer indicating which sounds are to be produced by the piano and in which order?”

“Just so. We call each sound a note; combinations of notes are called chords.”

“Each dot represents a sound to be made?”

“Perfectly correct, my man of metal.”

Rollo stared straight ahead. Maestro felt a sense of wheels turning within that impenetrable sphere.

“Sir, I have scanned my memory banks and find no specific or implied instructions against it. I should like to be taught how to produce these notes on the piano. I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers on the panel into my memory banks.”

The Maestro peered at him, amazed. A slow grin travelled across his face.

“Done!” he exclaimed. “It has been many years since pupils helped gray these ancient locks, but I have a feeling that you, Rollo, will prove a most fascinating pupil. To install the Muse into metal and machinery … I accept the challenge gladly!”

He rose, touched the cool latent power of Rollo’s arm.

“Sit down here, my Rolleindex Personal Robot, Model M-e. We shall start making Beethoven spin in his grave – or make musical history.”

More than an hour later, the Maestro yawned and looked at his watch.

“It’s late,” he spoke at the end of the yawn. “These old eyes are not tireless like yours, my friend.” He touched Rollo’s shoulders. “You have the complete fundamentals of musical notations in your memory banks, Rollo. That’s a good night’s lesson, particularly when I recall how long it took me to acquire the same amount of information. Tomorrow, we’ll attempt to put those awesome fingers of yours to work.”

He stretched. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Will you lock up and put out the lights?”

Rollo rose from the bench. “Yes, sir,” he droned. “I have a request.”

“What can I do for my star pupil?”

“May I attempt to create some sounds with the keyboard tonight? I will do it so very softly so as to not disturb you.”

“Tonight? Aren’t you-?” Then the Maestro smiled. “You must pardon me, Rollo. It is still a bit difficult for me to realize that sleep has no meaning for you.”

He hesitated, rubbing his chin. “Well, I suppose a good teacher should not discourage patience to learn. All right, Rollo, but please be careful.” He patted the polished mahogany. “This piano and I have been together for many years. I hate to see its teeth knocked out by those sledgehammer digits of yours. Lightly, my friend, very lightly.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Maestro fell asleep with a faint smile on his lips, dimly aware of the shy, tentative notes that Rollo was coaxing forth.

Then, the gray fog closed in and he was in that world where reality is dream-like and dreams are real. It was soft and feathery and lavender clouds and sounds were rolling and washing across his mind like flowing waves.

Where? The mist drew back a bit and he was in red velvet and deep and the music swelled and broke over him.

He smiled.

My recording. Thank you, thank you, thank-

The Maestro snapped erect, threw the covers aside.

He sat on the edge of the bed, listening.

He groped for his robe in the darkness, shoved bony feet into his slippers.

He crept, trembling and uncontrollably, to the door of his studio and stood there, thin and brittle in the robe.

The light over the music rack was an eerie island in the brown shadows of the studio. Rollo sat at the keyboard, prim, inhuman, rigid, twin lenses focused somewhere off into the shadows.

The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting – they were living entities, separate, somehow, from the machine perfection of his body.

The music rack was empty.

A copy of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” lay closed on the bench. It had been the Maestro remembered, in a pile of sheet music on the piano.

Rollo was playing it.

He was creating it, breathing it, drawing it through silver flame.

Time became meaningless, suspended in midair.

The Maestro didn’t realise he was weeping until Rollo finished the sonata.

The robot turned to the Maestro. “The sounds,” he droned, “They please you?”

The Maestro’s lips quivered. “Yes, Rollo,” he replied at last. “They pleased me.” He fought the lump in his throat.

He picked up the music in fingers that shook.

“This,” he murmured, “Already?”

“It has been added to my store of data,” Rollo replied. “I applied the principles you explained to me to these plans. It was not very difficult.”

The Maestro swallowed as he tried to speak. “It was not very difficult…” he repeated softly.

The old man sank down slowly onto the bench next to Rollo, stared silently at the robot, as though seeing him for the first time.

Rollo got onto his feet.

The Maestro let his fingers rest on his keys, strangely foreign now.

“Music!” he breathed. “I may have heard it in that way in my soul. I know Beethoven did!”

He looked up at the robot, a growing excitement in his face.

“Rollo,” he said, his voice straining to remain calm. “You and I have some work to do tomorrow on your memory banks.”

Sleep did not come again that night.

He strode briskly into the studio the next morning. Rollo was vacuuming the carpet. The Maestro preferred carpets to the new dust-free plastics, which felt somehow profane at his feet.

The Maestro’s house was, in fact, an oasis of anachronisms in a desert of contemporary antiseptic efficiency.

“Well, are you ready for work, Rollo?” he asked. “We have a lot to do, you and I. I have such plans for you, Rollo – great plans!”

Rollo, for once, did not reply.

“I have asked them all to come this afternoon,” the Maestro went on. “Conductors, concert pianists, composers, my manager. All the giants of music, Rollo. Wait till they here you play.”

Rollo switched of the vacuum and stood quietly.

“You’ll play for them right here this afternoon.” The Maestro’s voice was high pitched, breathless. “The ‘Appassionata’ again, I think. Yes, that’s it. I must see their faces!”

“Then we will arrange a recital to introduce you to the public and the critics and then a major concerto with one of the big orchestras. We’ll have it telecast around the world. Rollo, it can be arranged.

“Think of it, Rollo, just think of it! The greatest piano virtuoso of all time… a robot! It’s completely fantastic and completely wonderful. I feel like an explorer at the edge of a new world.”

He walked feverishly back and forth.

“Then, recordings, of course. My entire repertoire, Rollo, and more. So much more!”

“Sir?”

The Maestro’s face shone as he looked up at him. “Yes, Rollo?”

“In my built in instructions, I have the option of rejecting an action which I consider harmful to my owner,” the robot’s words were precise, carefully selected. “Last night, you wept. That is one of the indications I am instructed in making my decisions.”

The Maestro gripped Rollo’s thick, superbly moulded arm.

“Rollo, you don’t understand. That was for the moment. It was petty of me, childish!”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I must refuse to approach the piano again.”

The Maestro stared at him, unbelieving, pleading.

“Rollo, you can’t. The world must hear you!”

“No, sir.” The amber lenses almost seem to soften.

“The piano is not a machine,” the powerful inhuman voice droned. “To me, yes. I can translate the notes into sounds at a glance. From only a few I can grasp at once the composer’s conception. It is easy for me.”

Rollo towered magnificently over the Maestro’s bent form.

“I can also grasp,” the brassy baritone rolled through the studio, “that this… music is not for robots. It is for man. To me it is easy, yes… It was not meant to be easy.”

[Jesse]

Amy Hempel [dosed correctly]

Flannery O'Connor

James Salter

Mary Robison [particularly Why Did I Ever?]

Raymond Carver [dosed correctly]

Gina Berriault [Women In Their Beds is perhaps my favorite collection of stories of the past 30 years]

Paul Bowles [peerless]

[faster]

My Life with the Wave

By Octavio Paz (translated by Eliot Weinberger)

When I left that sea, a wave moved ahead of the others. She was tall and light. In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed her by her floating clothes, she clutched my arm and went off with me leaping. I didn’t want to say anything to her, because it hurt me to shame her in front of her friends. Besides, the furious stares of the elders paralyzed me. When we got to town, I explained to her that it was impossible, that life in the city was not what she had been able to imagine with the ingenuity of a wave that had never left the sea. She watched me gravely: “No, your decision is made. You can’t go back.” I tried sweetness, hardness, irony. She cried, screamed, hugged, threatened. I had to apologize.

The next day my troubles began. How could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers, the police? Certainly the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves on the railroad, but this same reserve was an indication of the severity with which our act would be judged. After much thought I arrived at the station an hour before departure, took my seat, and, when no one was looking, emptied the water tank for the passengers; then, carefully, poured in my friend.

The first incident came about when the children of a nearby couple declared their noisy thirst. I stopped them and promised them refreshments and lemonade. They were at the point of accepting when another thirsty passenger approached. I was about to invite her also, but the stare of her companion stopped me. The lady took a paper cup, approached the tank, and turned the faucet. Her cup was barely half full when I leaped between the woman and my friend. She looked at me astonished. While I apologized, one of the children turned the faucet again. I closed it violently. The lady brought the cup to her lips:

“Agh, this water is salty.”

The boy echoed her. Various passengers rose. The husband called the conductor:

“This man put salt in the water.”

The conductor called the Inspector:

“So you put substances in the water?”

The Inspector in turn called the police:

“So you poisoned the water?”

The police in turn called the Captain:

“So you’re the poisoner?”

The captain called three agents. The agents took me to an empty car amid the stares and whispers of the passengers. At the next station they took me off and pushed and dragged me to the jail. For days no one spoke to me, except during the long interrogations. When I explained my story no one believed me, not even the jailer, who shook his head, saying: “The case is grave, truly grave. You didn’t want to poison the children?” One day they brought me before the Magistrate.

“Your case is difficult,” he repeated. I will assign you to the Penal Judge.”

A year passed. Finally they judged me. As there were no victims, my sentence was light. After a short time, my day of liberty arrived.

The Chief of the Prison called me in:

“Well, now you’re free. You were lucky Lucky there were no victims. But don’t do it again, because the next time won’t be so short. .

And he stared at me with the same grave stare with which everyone watched me.

The same afternoon I took the train and after hours of uncomfortable traveling arrived in Mexico City. I took a cab home. At the door of my apartment I heard laughter and singing. I felt a pain in my chest, like the smack of a wave of surprise when surprise smacks us across the chest: my friend was there, singing and laughing as always.

“How did you get back?”

“Simple: in the train. Someone, after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me in the engine. It was a rough trip: soon I was a white plume of vapor, soon I fell in a fine rain on the machine. I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.”

Her presence changed my life. The house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with air, with sun, with sounds and green and blue reflections, a numerous and happy populace of reverberations and echoes. How many waves is one wave, and how it can make a beach or a rock or jetty out of a wall, a chest, a forehead that it crowns with foam! Even the abandoned corners, the abject corners of dust and debris were touched by her light hands. Everything began to laugh and everywhere shined with teeth. The sun entered the old rooms with pleasure and stayed in my house for hours, abandoning the other houses, the district, the city, the country. And some nights, very late, the scandalized stars watched it sneak from my house.

Love was a game, a perpetual creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, it enveloped me like music or some giant lips. Her present was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in a wink of an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the dryness, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew laughing.

But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal, that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to then swoon. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they weren’t concentric ripples, but rather eccentric, spreading each time farther, until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspected. But her center . . . no, she had no center, just emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me in and smothered me.

Stretched out side by side, we exchanged confidences, whispers, smiles, Curled up, she fell on my chest and there unfolded like a vegetation of murmurs. She sang in my ear, a little snail. She became humble and transparent, clutching my feet like a small animal, calm water. She was so clear I could read all of her thoughts. Certain nights her skin was covered with phosphorescence and to embrace her was to embrace a piece of night tattooed with fire. But she also became black and bitter. At unexpected hours she roared, moaned, twisted. Her groans woke the neighbors. Upon hearing her, the sea wind would scratch at the door of the house or rave in a loud voice on the roof. Cloudy days irritated her; she broke furniture, said bad words, covered me with insults and green and gray foam. She spit, cried, swore, prophesied. Subject to the moon, to the stars, to the influence of the light of other worlds, she changed her moods and appearance in a way that I thought fantastic, but it was as fatal as the tide.

She began to miss solitude. The house was full of snails and conches, of small sailboats that in her fury she had shipwrecked (together with the others, laden with images, that each night left my forehead and sank in her ferocious or pleasant whirlwinds). How many little treasures were lost in that time! But my boats and the silent song of the snails was not enough. I had to install in the house a colony of fish. I confess that it was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend, caressing her breasts, sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair with light flashes of color.

Among all those fish there were a few particularly repulsive and ferocious ones, little tigers from the aquarium, with large fixed eyes and jagged and bloodthirsty mouths. I don’t know by what aberration my friend delighted in playing with them, shamelessly showing them a preference whose significance I preferred to ignore. She passed long hours confined with those horrible creatures. One day I couldn’t stand it any more; I threw open the door and launched after them. Agile and ghostly they escaped my hands while she laughed and pounded me until I fell. I thought I was drowning. And when I was at the point of death, and purple, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don’t know what things. I felt very weak, fatigued, and humiliated. And at the same time her voluptuousness made me close my eyes, because her voice was sweet and she spoke to me of the delicious death of the drowned. When I recovered, I began to fear and hate her.

I had neglected my affairs. Now I began to visit friends and renew old and dear relations. I met an old girlfriend. Making her swear to keep my secret, I told her of my life with the wave. Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man. My redeemer employed all of her arts, but what could a woman, master of a limited number of souls and bodies, do in front of my friend who was always changing—and always identical to herself in her incessant metamorphoses.

Winter came. The sky turned gray. Fog fell on the city Frozen drizzle rained. My friend cried every night. During the day she isolated herself, quiet and sinister, stuttering a single syllable, like an old woman who grumbles in a corner. She became cold; to sleep with her was to shiver all night and to feel freeze, little by little, the blood, the bones, the thoughts. She turned deep, impenetrable, restless. I left frequently and my absences were each time more prolonged. She, in her corner howled loudly with teeth like steel and a corrosive tongue she gnawed the walls, crumbled them. She passed the nights in mourning, reproaching me. She had nightmares, deliriums of the sun, of warm beaches. She dreamt of the pole and of changing into a great block of ice, sailing beneath black skies in nights long as months. She insulted me. She cursed and laughed; filled the house with guffaws and phantoms. She called up the monsters of the depths, blind ones, quick ones, blunt. Charged with electricity she carbonized all she touched; full of acid, she dissolved whatever she brushed against. Her sweet embraces became knotty cords that strangled me. And her body, greenish and elastic, was an implacable whip that lashed, lashed, lashed. I fled. The horrible fish laughed with ferocious smiles.

There in the mountains, among the tall pines and precipices, I breathed the cold thin air like a thought of liberty. At the end of a month I returned. I had decided. It had been so cold that over the marble of the chimney, next to the extinct fire, I found a statue of ice. I was unmoved by her weary beauty I put her in a big canvas sack and went out to the streets with the sleeper on my shoulders. In a restaurant in the outskirts I sold her to a waiter friend who immediately, began to chop her into little pieces, which he carefully deposited in the buckets where bottles are chilled. [1949]

[surfer]

I didnt know that one, beautiful

[surfer]

Flannery O'Connor

Paul Bowles

"Parker's Back" and "A Distant Episode" particular personal favorites. Bowles is one of the most important writers of the last 60 years imo.

[surfer]

"The Pearl of Toledo" by Prosper Mérimée, 1833

Who can say whether the sun is most beautiful at dawn or at dusk? Who can tell whether the olive tree or the almond is the more beautiful? Who can tell whether Andalusia or Valencia breeds the bravest knight? What man can say who is the fairest of women? But I will tell you who is the fairest. She is Aurora de Vargas, the Pearl of Toledo.

Swarthy Suzani calls for his lance; he calls for his buckler. He grasps his lance in his strong right hand; his buckler hangs from his neck. He goes down to his stable, and, in proper order, he surveys his forty fiery chargers. Then he says:

"Berja is the swiftest and trustiest of them all. On her sure back will I carry away the Pearl of Toledo. As mine I will bear her away, or by Allah, Cordova shall see me no more."

So he sets forth. He rides on till at length he reaches Toledo. Hard by Zucatin he meets an old man.

"Old snowy beard, carry this letter to Don Guttiera de Saldana. If he is a man he will come and meet me in single combat...at the fountain of Almami. The Pearl of Toledo must belong to one of us two."

The old man takes the letter and carries it to the Count of Saldana, as he sits playing chess with the Pearl of Toledo. The count reads the letter. Then, with his closed fist he smites the table so mightily that all the chessmen fall to the ground. Then he rises and calls for his lance and his steed. All trembling, the Pearl of Toledo rises, for she perceives that he is going forth to combat.

"My Lord Guttiera de Saldana, do not go hence I pray. Stay and continue this game with me."

"I may play chess no longer. I must play the game of lances at the fountain of Almami."

And the tears of Aurora avail not. Then the Pearl of Toledo takes her mantle, and, mounting upon her mule she goes her way to the fountain of Almami.

All about the fountain the grass is crimson, and the waters of the fountain. But it is not the blood of a Christian that stains the greensward and the waters of the fountain. The dusky Suzani lies there with his face to the sky. The lance of Don Guttiera is splintered in his breasts; all his life blood spends itself drop by drop. His faithful steed, Berja, looks down upon him weeping, for she can not heal her master's wound.

The Pearl of Toledo alights from her mule. "Take heart, good sir, for you will live yet to wed some fair Moorish maiden; my hand has cunning to heal the wound made by my knight."

"O Pearl so white, O Pearl so fair, draw forth from my breast the splinter of the lance which rends it. The cold of the steel chills me and freezes my heart."

Trustingly she approaches him, but he, with a last effort, gathers together his failing strength, and with his saber's sharp blade, gashes the face so fair, so tender.

[surfer]

The Silences of Mr. Palomar: "The World Looks at the World" by Italo Calvino translated by William Weaver

After a series of intellectual misadventures not worth recalling, Mr. Palomar has decided that his chief activity will be looking at things from the outside. A bit nearsighted, absent-minded, introverted, he does not seem to belong temperamentally to that human type generally called an observer. And yet it has always happened that certain things--a stone wall, a seashell, a leaf, a teapot--present themselves to him as if asking him for minute and prolonged attention: he starts observing them almost unawares, and his gaze begins to run over all the details and is then unable to detach itself. Mr. Palomar has decided that from now on he will redouble his attention: first, by not allowing these summons to escape him as they arrive from things; second, by attributing to the observer's operation the importance it deserves.

At this point he faces his first critical moment: sure that from now on the world will reveal to him an infinite wealth of things, Mr. Palomar tries staring at everything that comes within eyeshot; he feels no pleasure, and he stops. A second phase follows, in which he is convinced that only some things are to be looked at, others not, and he must go and seek the right ones. To do this, he has to face each time problems of selection, exclusion, hierarchies of preference; he soons realizes he is spoiling everything, as always when he involves his own ego and all the problems he has with his own ego.

But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a window sill, looking at the world stretching out before him in all its immensity. So, then: a window looks out on the world. The world is out there; and in here, what do we have? The world still--what else could there be? With a little effort of concentration, Mr. Palomar manages to shift the world from in front of him and set it on the sill, looking out. Now, beyond the windows, what do we have? The world is also there, and for the occasion has been split into a looking world and a world looked at. And what about him, also known as "I," namely Mr. Palomar? Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the "I," the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar.

So, from now on Mr. Palomar will look at things from outside and not from inside. But this is not enough: he will look at them with a gaze that comes from outside, not inside, himself. He tries to perform the experiment at once: now it is not he who is looking; it is the world of outside that is looking outside. Having established this, he casts his gaze around, expecting a general transfiguration. No such thing. The usual quotidian grayness surrounds him. Everything has to be rethought from the beginning. Having the outside look outside is not enough: the trajectory must start from the looked-at thing, linking it with the thing that looks.

From the mute distance of things a sign must come, a summons, a wink: one thing detaches itself from the other things with the intention of signifying something . . . what? Itself, a thing is happy to be looked at by other things only when it is convinced that it signifies itself and nothing else, amid things that signify themselves and nothing else.

Opportunities of this kind are not frequent, to be sure; but sooner or later they will have to arise: it is enough to wait for one of those lucky coincidences to occur when the world wants to look and be looked at in the same instant and Mr. Palomar happens to be going by. Or, rather, Mr. Palomar does not even have to wait, because these things happen only when you are not awaiting them.

[Jesse]

I can't read short stories on a 15" screen comfortably, but I will check in to note authors.
The scrolling annoys too.
One voice only, if others come to this thread for short stories, so be it.
Paz is amazing.

[Damon_Smith]

For me the best are Tommy Bernhard's "The Voice Imitator" and all of Robert Walser's short stories. I'll post a Bernhard story later.

[nicenick]

seconding the robert walser recommendation. "selected stories" on NYRB is great, "kleist in thun" being my personal favorite. "microscripts" is pretty incredible too. not a whole lot of his online but found this one -- "the job application":

Esteemed gentlemen,

I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? —I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life’s boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. —I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience.

WENZEL

[faster]

Should You Lie About Having Read That Book
Dave Eggers



How could anyone possibly know you hadn't? You are on your way to the marina, where you will board a sailboat owned by a friend of a friend, and on this boat, among nine sailing-people total, will be a person who has written a book that everyone has read, and that you should have read, but which you have not read.

The book was written three years ago, and is being taught and discussed with great seriousness by people who consider themselves very serious people. You are driving to the marina with your friend Terry, who stutters so dramatically that he drools, and it was he who told you, two weeks ago, that, if you wanted to go sailing this day, you needed to read this book, because the author likes to talk about his book and can sniff out non-readers miles away.

Fine, you said. And you had planned to read this book, which is about the king of some country who has an affair with ... No, wait. Not that at all. It is about an American family, and the mother is a nuclear scientist, and in every way the story is a parable for our times and devastating and all-too-believable in every particular. Something like that.

And now, as you pull into the marina and can see the water birds and masts and bright sail coverings, Terry wants to know if you read the book, given you had two weeks and were even provided with a signed copy by Terry. You didn't even open it, because you didn't like the author photo - he had his chin in his hand, and you can't stand that kind of thing, people who pose with their chins in their hands - but now you have to decide whether you will lie to Terry, and to everyone else, and if you can get away with it for six hours on a boat near the Farallon Islands.

You consider yourself an extraordinary liar, and thus you assumed, waking up today, that you would lie and would be fine with your lying. But now you're nervous. Will you be a good-enough liar even if slightly seasick? Can you lie on an empty stomach - if you need to vacate your interiors over the bow?

You board the boat, still unsure of how you'll handle the task, but your concern, in the end, is unwarranted, because just out of the harbor, this boat, and its nine passengers, are devoured, whole, by a giant squid. In the Bible they called these creatures leviathans, and they are as much a nuisance now as then. To report a sighting of these giant squids/leviathans, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to 826 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 USA. Thank you.

[P. Wretch]

The late 19th/early 20th C. abounded in great short story writers. Some obvious favourites would include Ambrose Bierce ('An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' is the famous one, but he wrote scores of them), Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Saki. Been looking recently at Kipling's remarkably assured Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), written in his early twenties: this man was once considered a literary giant, but his reputation seemed to collapse with the British Empire that he had dubiously championed. The Penguin Selected Stories gives a pretty good sense of his range.

Another area of possible interest is early fantasy short stories (by early, I mean decades before it had calcified into an elfin Tolkienian genre). In the 'children's' category, I'd recommend E. Nesbit's whimsical Book of Dragons (1900), even if you don't have children to read it to. In a different vein, for those who can stomach a quasi-biblical/scriptural register, is Lord Dunsany's Time and the Gods (1905: Project Gutenberg link), which has a sort of melancholic 'Celtic twilight' ambiance, and some almost proto-Borgesian touches (try 'The Sorrow of Search'). As for the American pulps, if you've ever found yourself wishing for something like the gloom and grotesquery of H.P. Lovecraft, but written with more literary skill and irony, I highly recommend the work of his fellow Weird Tales contributor Clark Ashton Smith, whose 1930s yarns of futile sorcery and cruelty, unfolding on the last crumbling continent of a dying Earth, can be read with pleasure by the most jaded of materialists (here's a link to a good example, on a site which seems to host his entire oeuvre: 'The Empire of the Necromancers').

[faster]

Lu Hsun is among my very favorites. His Selected Stories can be found here--I have this version and it's fine.

[Dohol]

Jorge Luis Borges. The Circular Ruins.

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent. What is certain is that the grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the bank with pushing aside (probably, without feeling) the blades which were lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse, which sometimes was the color of flame and now was that of ashes. This circle was a temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched himself out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead. He was not astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and slept, not through weakness of flesh but through determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place required for his invincible intent; he knew that the incessant trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another propitious temple downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight he was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare feet, some figs and a jug warned him that the men of the region had been spying respectfully on his sleep, soliciting his protection or afraid of his magic. He felt a chill of fear, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated wall where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it is contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon (now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake for a couple hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled of those of his dreamer. The brusque elimination of his fellow students did not disconcert him for long; after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless, a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were useless. He tried to assemble the student body but scarcely had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it became deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil, tears of anger burned his old eyes.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off at first, and he sought another method of work. Before putting it into execution, he spent a month recovering his strength, which had been squandered by his delirium. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few times that he had dreams during this period, he paid no attention to them. Before resuming his task, he waited until the moon's disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods, pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and went to sleep. He dreamed almost immediately, with his heart throbbing.

He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs. Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man--a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.

In the Gnostic cosmosgonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as a clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the wizard's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his entire work, but then changed his mind. (It would have been better had he destroyed it.) When he had exhausted all supplications to the deities of earth, he threw himself at the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt and implored its unknown help. That evening, at twilight, he dreamt of the statue. He dreamt it was alive, tremulous: it was not an atrocious bastard of a tiger and a colt, but at the same time these two firey creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a storm. This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood. He commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice. In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

The wizard carried out the orders he had been given. He devoted a certain length of time (which finally proved to be two years) to instructing him in the mysteries of the universe and the cult of fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being separated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming. He also remade the right shoulder, which was somewhat defective. At times, he was disturbed by the impression that all this had already happened . . . In general, his days were happy; when he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will be with my son. Or, more rarely: The son I have engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I do not go to him.

Gradually, he began accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to place a flag on a faraway peak. The next day the flag was fluttering on the peak. He tried other analogous experiments, each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he understood that his son was ready to be born--and perhaps impatient. That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose remains were turning white downstream, across many miles of inextricable jungle and marshes. Before doing this (and so that his son should never know that he was a phantom, so that he should think himself a man like any other) he destroyed in him all memory of his years of apprenticeship.

His victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream; at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does. His perceptions of the sounds and forms of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being nourished by these diminution of his soul. The purpose of his life had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a certain time, which some chronicles prefer to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen awoke him at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a charmed man in a temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without burning himself. The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He remembered that of all the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only one who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams--what an incomparable humiliation, what madness! Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.

His misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South, the sky took on the rose color of leopard's gums; then came clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic-stricken flight of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

[Dohol]

My favorite Borges..

Three Versions of Judas..



In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Frälsaren appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version, Der heimliche Heiland, published in 1912 by Emil Schering.)



Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it is necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In some salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires, a literary person might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but these arguments, presented in such a setting, would seem like frivolous and idle exercises in irrelevance or blasphemy. To Runeberg they were the key with which to decipher a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation, and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses this essay should know that it states only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof. Someone may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the "proofs". For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about?



The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the following categorical epigraph, whose meaning, some years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously dilate:

Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false.

(De Quincey, 1857.)



Preceded in his speculation by some German thinker, De Quincey opined that Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ in order to force him to declare his divinity and thus set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg offers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by pointing out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in order to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity into history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of all men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lower order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigma of Judas.



The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars Peter Engström accused him of ignoring, or of confining to the past, the hypostatic union of the Divine Trinity; Axel Borelius charged him with renewing the heresy of the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus; the sharp tongued bishop of Lund denounced him for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two of the Gospel of St.

Luke.



These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain of theology to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who could count on the considerable resources which Omnipotence offers," did not need to make use of a man to redeem all men. Later, he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of the inexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure the sick, to cleanse the leprous, to resurrect the dead, and to cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1). A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished deserves from us the best interpretations of his deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most torpid motive force. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.1 With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.



In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in the Lord. (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men.2



Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginnings of Runeberg lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige Frälsaren is a mere perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that thesacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.3 To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text "He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.



In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this revelation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious theological game; the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from this universal indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God had commanded this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret propagated in the world. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain top so as not to see God; he remembered Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes saw That One whose glory fills the earth; Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Wasn't he, perchance, guilty of this dark crime? Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for having revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his for having discovered and divulged the terrible name of God?



Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be given the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.



He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912. The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamity and evil.

[surfer]

That theory has undergone quite a revival lately, not sure what its origins are, though I'm pretty sure theologians and biblical historians have always been aware of it, but I have personally seen at least 3 different documentaries in the past year or so on the "Gospel of Judas", Judas as knowing and willing participant in the Passion play. Personally, Borges' account was the first version of this idea I ever came across, and when I read it maybe 15 years ago, it was pretty eye-opening at the time. I doubt he was the first to posit it though.

[surfer]

seconding the robert walser recommendation. "selected stories" on NYRB is great, "kleist in thun" being my personal favorite. "microscripts" is pretty incredible too. not a whole lot of his online but found this one

I bought Walser's Microscripts about a month ago, and have been dipping into it here and there, its pretty good, but more interesting than essential imo. I posted one of the Microscripts over on the main WAYRN thread: http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic. ... 40#p204266

On the lookout for his Selected Stories . .. .

[surfer]

For me the best are Tommy Bernhard's "The Voice Imitator"

I like the Bernhard a lot. I used to think of them as prose poems, but I think that's wrong, I think they are short stories, more narrative than lyric expressions imo.

Pisa and Venice

The mayors of Pisa and Venice had agreed to scandalize visitors to their cities, who had for centuries been equally charmed by Venice and Pisa, by secretly and overnight having the tower of Pisa moved to Venice and the campanile of Venice moved to Pisa and set up there. They could not, however, keep their plan a secret, and on the very night on which they were going to have the tower of Pisa moved to Venice and the campanile of Venice moved to Pisa they were committed to the lunatic asylum, the mayor of Pisa in the nature of things to the lunatic asylum in Venice and the mayor of Venice to the lunatic asylum in Pisa. The Italian authorities were able handle the affair in complete confidentiality.