Read Online Vaseline Buddha by Jung Young Moon - Free Book Online Page B

as the sound of applause or the sight of an open umbrella, and smiled to myself, and wondered if the goats, which looked as if they found some kind of a pleasure in passing out, found real pleasure in passing out, and thought that it was after I’d seen the horrors of a war that I smiled, thinking about strange goats, and recalled the masturbating monkey I saw somewhere while traveling, and thought about the misfortune of polar bears that were losing their home because of melting glaciers, as well as their daily hardship, and thought, not seriously, about the issue of Germans and Jews, or not thought about it at all, and thought, above all, about my body, which wasn’t healthy, contraryto what people thought, and recalling the fact that Novalis, the writer, was an expert on mining, and Keats, the poet, was a licensed surgeon, wondered if there wasn’t something I could do professionally besides writing, and having been constipated for several days and sitting on the toilet and applying great force to a certain part of my body, thought about the expression “with all your might,” or “with your heart and soul,” and thought that everything that was before my eyes at that moment was staying where they were with all their might, or with their heart and soul, and thought about things that could be seen endlessly moving (seas and clouds, for example), and things that seemed stationary but were moving (clouds and deserts, for example), and things that moved without being seen (deserts and excrement in the body, for example), and wondered what kinds of things in today’s world would be considered uncivilized and barbarous to mankind in the distant future, and thought about how much despair or joy Newton must have felt while teaching math at Trinity College at Cambridge when none of his students showed up for his lecture, which happened from time to time because he taught in such an abstract way, and despaired at the fact that what I wanted to write more than anything, perhaps, was something without a beginning or an end, but that it was impossible, and above all, thought, somewhat irritably, about how irritating it was to think repeatedly about certain human concerns regarding human suffering, which would never come to an end, and thought about the artist who, suffering from Alzheimer’s, tried to put herbicide in coffee, thinking it was whiskey (should I stop here?—this is the narrator speaking. I could stop, but I could go on as much as I want, and I do want to goon—this is the author speaking, in a more playful way), and thought about the fact that I could think only in a way that was much too complicated, and wondered if I might go insane, if only for that reason, and wondered if being able to think in a way that was much too complicated was a talent, whether it would be better to discard it or nurture it, and wondered why I liked to say something nonsensical in a clever way so that it made sense, and thought about how the expression “retarded” is used to mean stupid, and thought about some figures of speech and about using figures of speech appropriately or inappropriately, and looking at a bruise on my body, wondered how I’d gotten it, and wondered why I sometimes had bruises on my body I didn’t know about, and wondered why I felt affection for other animals, and thought that, among other reasons, it was because they couldn’t speak, and thought that there was rapport that was possible only between those who couldn’t communicate through words, and while reading a book on mathematics and trying to incompletely understand or completely misunderstand an equation that was beyond my understanding, wondered, as befits someone who doesn’t know math very well, if the fact that Bertrand Russell, who was a mathematician, among other things, was one of the passengers who sat in the smoking section and survived the flight that crashed in Norway in 1948, while