[b]Nathanael West
Numbers constitute the only universal language.[/b]
So far anyway.
He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
But only making it worse as often as not.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
Nothing not postmodern about this, right?
He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.
A bit over the top, sure, but point taken.
He’s an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.
Me too. Only now it’s more in the way of a jungle.
At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.
I’m still working on that, he thought.