Read Online In Partial Disgrace by Joshua Cohen, Charles Newman - Free Book Online
Authors: Joshua Cohen, Charles Newman
Tags: General Fiction
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found irreverence and defiance irresistible, and as the possessor of what one could only call great moral charm, he was proud to take his place as a contrarian crank in a technological, profane, ego-based, and psychologically-oriented world, and mow his lawn on the principles of the Parthenon. Most anyone can orchestrate, but he could retranscribe, reduce a symphony to a quartet. In his heart he had both a sliver of ice and a sliver of gold.
My father’s idea of spirituality was to be in touch with matter and the way it moved, a hands-on mysticism which could have been lethal. For him, touch was the only performance of lasting duties. “If your hands and mouth are wise,” he told me when we first discussed the birds and bees, “virility will take care of itself. And you will seduce all the world, if you like.” He had three golden rules: 1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.
Semper Vero was crossed by the continental divide, marked by a mound made of earth brought in from sixty-three different countries in Grandfather Priam’s time, and not far from there, the Dead Mze broke up and darted underground, emerging again to die in peace one thousand miles away in some Russian marsh. This strange system was most visible at dawn, when the Cannonian countryside appears striped, the underground serpentine aquifers showing up as green squiggles in the sere pastures. In our part of the world, the Living Mze often changed directions, at the whim of its dead, diverted underground cousins, sometimes flowing East and sometimes West, a hydraulics as mysterious as those of the urinary tract, the only human system which remains unexplained by science.
Father was hardly surprised at this. “Nature is apprehended only by asking it a question,” he said to many an astounded visitor. “The river, like time, may flow both ways, but the point is that whichever way it flows, it runnels back into the past before it emerges in the future.”
Often a visitor, beset by literary aspirations, would attempt to amplify the liquid analogy. Count Zich, who knew better, one day tried his hand: “So would you say then, sir, that life is walking alongside a river which gradually disappears?”
“Experience is not a river,” Felix gently riposted. “Experience is countless rivers converging in a damp place, where there is nothing which could be said, in any helpful sense, to be a river.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that a man who first thing each morning (with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a book under his arm) checked to see if the river of Grace had decided to flow east or west, might be simultaneously a believer and an unbeliever, a romantic and a moderate, a stoic and an epicure, a yogi without meditation, deadly serious about his whimsies, humorous about death and taxes, reflective and decisive in the same gesture. He was interested in the minimally implausible, and believed that the function of the intellect was to set stern limits to its own pretensions. He had the skepticism of the peasant, the indifference of the nobleman, and the insistence on value-by-critique of the country gentry, and so lived voluntarily in a no-man’s-land on the borders of the intelligentsia, the Astingi nomads, the lesser aristocracy, and bureaucratic squires, thinking of himself as an intermediary metabolite. He was basically interested in secondary differential, a student of nothing so insipid as change, but of changes in the rate of change ; not only in the gray-green river, but in the human métabole as well. How does one thing become another? That was his métier . What exactly is it that the hero doesn’t know before he becomes, well, quite something else? That was his subject. What is the opposite of an epiphany? That was his method. What is the opposite of a hangover? That was his temperament. Born when the voluntary sublime
My father’s idea of spirituality was to be in touch with matter and the way it moved, a hands-on mysticism which could have been lethal. For him, touch was the only performance of lasting duties. “If your hands and mouth are wise,” he told me when we first discussed the birds and bees, “virility will take care of itself. And you will seduce all the world, if you like.” He had three golden rules: 1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.
Semper Vero was crossed by the continental divide, marked by a mound made of earth brought in from sixty-three different countries in Grandfather Priam’s time, and not far from there, the Dead Mze broke up and darted underground, emerging again to die in peace one thousand miles away in some Russian marsh. This strange system was most visible at dawn, when the Cannonian countryside appears striped, the underground serpentine aquifers showing up as green squiggles in the sere pastures. In our part of the world, the Living Mze often changed directions, at the whim of its dead, diverted underground cousins, sometimes flowing East and sometimes West, a hydraulics as mysterious as those of the urinary tract, the only human system which remains unexplained by science.
Father was hardly surprised at this. “Nature is apprehended only by asking it a question,” he said to many an astounded visitor. “The river, like time, may flow both ways, but the point is that whichever way it flows, it runnels back into the past before it emerges in the future.”
Often a visitor, beset by literary aspirations, would attempt to amplify the liquid analogy. Count Zich, who knew better, one day tried his hand: “So would you say then, sir, that life is walking alongside a river which gradually disappears?”
“Experience is not a river,” Felix gently riposted. “Experience is countless rivers converging in a damp place, where there is nothing which could be said, in any helpful sense, to be a river.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that a man who first thing each morning (with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a book under his arm) checked to see if the river of Grace had decided to flow east or west, might be simultaneously a believer and an unbeliever, a romantic and a moderate, a stoic and an epicure, a yogi without meditation, deadly serious about his whimsies, humorous about death and taxes, reflective and decisive in the same gesture. He was interested in the minimally implausible, and believed that the function of the intellect was to set stern limits to its own pretensions. He had the skepticism of the peasant, the indifference of the nobleman, and the insistence on value-by-critique of the country gentry, and so lived voluntarily in a no-man’s-land on the borders of the intelligentsia, the Astingi nomads, the lesser aristocracy, and bureaucratic squires, thinking of himself as an intermediary metabolite. He was basically interested in secondary differential, a student of nothing so insipid as change, but of changes in the rate of change ; not only in the gray-green river, but in the human métabole as well. How does one thing become another? That was his métier . What exactly is it that the hero doesn’t know before he becomes, well, quite something else? That was his subject. What is the opposite of an epiphany? That was his method. What is the opposite of a hangover? That was his temperament. Born when the voluntary sublime
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