[b]Tom Stoppard
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.[/b]
Of course it almost goes without saying: our words, not theirs.
I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond’s ‘Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles’ bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops.
Would that I could have been so perplexed.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Hell the days themselves are numbered for, say, all of us.
It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.
Or surely something as approximately true as this.
What’s the first thing you remember?
No, it’s no good. It was a long time ago.
No, you don’t take my meaning. What’s the first thing you remember after all the things you’ve forgotten?
Oh, I see…I’ve forgotten the question.
Let’s see him come back from that.
The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.
So, sure, I Googled it: youtu.be/ydgw2QJIQk4
Is this them?