Montaigne's Library

This is where the books go.

The Hangover

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. Hs mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

—Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Ignorance and Deprivation

“I’d much rather see her once or twice and not do anything about it — what could I do about it anyway? She’s a bit out of my class, don’t you think? If I did try to do anything I’d only get sent off with a clear in my air. We’re both tied up with other …”

“You sound as if you’re in love with her.”

“Do you think so?” he said almost eagerly; he couldn’t help regarding her remark as a compliment — one that he’d been needing for a long time, too.

“Yes. Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can’t, and you don’t know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what’s more you want to  go on fitting it. The old hopeless passion, isn’t it? There are no two doubts about that, as Cecil used to say before I broke him of it.”

“That’s rather adolescent, isn’t it?” If you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? … Yes, I was quite sure when I was about fifteen that that was the way things worked, only nobody could afford to admit it.”

—Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Smoking Engines

To drive this thought away he opened the cupboard that contained his smoking engines and accessories — monuments, some of them costly, to economy. As long as he could remember he’d never been able to smoke as much as he wanted to. This armoury of devices had been assembled as each fresh way of seeming to smoke as much as he wanted to had come to his notice: the desiccated packet of cheap cigarette-tobacco, the cherry-wood pipe, the red packet of cigarette-papers, the packet of pipe-cleaners, the leather cigarette-machine, the quadripartite pipe-tool, the crumbling packet of cheap pipe-tobacco, the packet of cotton-wool filter-tips (new process), the nickel cigarette-machine, the clay pipe, the briar pipe, the blue packet of cigarette-papers, the packet of herbal smoking-mixture (guaranteed free from nicotine or other harmful substances. Why?), the rusting tin of expensive pipe-tobacco, the packet of chalk pipe-filters. Dixon took a cigarette from the packet in his pocket and lit it.

—Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Lower the bar

Like all police I guess I’m state-of-the-art cynical, on the one hand. And, on the other, I don’t judge. We never judge. We may make the roust and make the collar. We may bust you. But we won’t judge you.

Fresh from the latest slaughterhouse, that kraut brute Henrik Overmars will listen to a drunk’s hard-luck story with tears in his eyes. I’ve seen Oltan O’Boye give his last fin to some self-pitying asshole at Paddy’s — some guy whose entire acquaintance has drawn down the shade on him, years ago. Keith Booker can’t pass a bum on the street — no, every time he’ll slip him a buck and squeeze his hand. I’m the same way. We’re the softest touch.

Is it because we’re plain brutal/sentimental? I don’t think so. We don’t judge you because whatever you’ve done it isn’t even close to the worst. You’re great. You didn’t fuck a baby and throw it over the wall. You don’t chop up eighty-year-olds for laughs. You’re great. Whatever you’ve done, we know all the things you might have done, and haven’t done.

In other words, our standards, for human behavior, are desperately low.

Martin Amis, Night Train

Verse and worst

“Her eyes were large, and full of subdued fire, but she was so bashful that she could not look anyone in the face. Like the mother and the aunt, she always had some needlework with her, though she was not as industrious as they; from time to time the movements of her hands would grow sluggish, her fingers would doze, and she would sit motionless, gazing dreamily across the lake. I don’t know what it was that I found so attractive in her aspect on these occasions. Was it no more than the commonplace but inevitable impression aroused by the sight of a withered mother beside a daughter in the fresh bloom of youth, the shadow behind the substance, the thought that in every cheek there lurks a fold; in every laugh, weariness; in every dream, disillusionment? Was it the ardent but aimless yearning that was so plainly manifest in her expression, the hearing of those wonderful hours in a girl’s life when her eyes look covetously forth into the universe because she has not yet found the one thing to which in due time she will cling — to rot there as algae cling to and rot on a floating log? Whatever the cause, I found it pathetic to watch her, to note the loving way in which she would caress a dog or a cat, and the restlessness with which she would begin one task after another only to abandon it. Touching, too, was the eagerness with which she would scan the shabby books in the hotel library, or turn the well-thumbed pages of a volume or two of verse she had brought with her, would muse over the poems of Geothe or Baumbach.”

He broke off for a moment, to say: “What are you laughing at?”

—Stefan Zweig, The Fowler Snared

The Book or books

Thirty-three years earlier, an awkward youngster with black down sprouting on his chin and black ringlets hanging over his temple, he had come from Galicia to Vienna, intending to adopt the calling of rabbi, but before long her forsook the worship of the harsh and jealous Jehovah to devote himself to the more lively and polytheistic cult of books. Then he happened upon the Cafe Gluck, by degrees making it his workshop, headquarters, post office — his world. Just as an astronomer, along in an observatory, watches night after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their extinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel, seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar universe, is full of changing cycles.

—Stefan Zweig, Buchmendel

Route 17

So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Niniveh — I felt as if I and the car I say in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toy land where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned. It was as if the car had a will of its own on the broad highway. As all vehicles moved at almost the same speed, overtaking, when it occurred at all, went so slowly that I began to feel like a traveling companion of my neighbor in the next lane as I inched my way forward. At one point, for instance, I drove in the company of a black family for a good half hour. They waved and smiled repeatedly to show that I already had a place in their hearts, as a friend of the family, as it were, and when they parted from me in a broad curve at the Hurleyville exit — the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window — I felt deserted and desolate for a time.

—W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Make the man

The older Uncle Adelwarth grew, the more hollowed-out he seemed to me, and the last time I saw him in the house at Mamaroneck that the Solomons had left him so finely furnished, it was as if his clothes were holding him together.

—W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Merlin’s Laugh

“The magician Merlin had a strange laugh, and it was heard when nobody else was laughing. He laughed at the beggar who was bewailing his fate as he lay stretched on a dunghill; he laughed at the foppish young man who was making a great fuss about choosing a pair of shoes. He laughed because he knew that deep in the dunghill was a golden cup that would have made the beggar a rich man; he laughed because he knew that the persnickety young man would be stabbed in a quarrel before the soles of his new shoes were soiled. He laughed because he knew what was coming next.”

—Robertson Davies, World of Wonders

Artificial

“I’m thinking of a few things, Dunny. I might surprise them. They’re all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there’s a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others. I think I’ll surprise them. They talk so much about art, but really, education is just as much a barrier between a man and real art as it is in other parts of life. They don’t know what a mean old bitch art can be. I think I’ll surprise them.”

—Robertson Davies, World of Wonders