String of Excerpts #11, feel free to send me yours
As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center.
How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way—and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance—that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: “Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?” as though there were nothing further to be said.
The immigration authorities at the disembarkation had not been satisfied to leave a blank after the word Profession on their papers as he had done in his passport. (That passport, official proof of his existence, racing after him, somewhere behind in the desert!) They had said: “Surely monsieur must do something.” And Kit, seeing that he was about to contest the point, had interposed quickly: “Ah, yes. Monsieur is a writer, but he is modest!” They had laughed, filled in the space with the word ecrivain, and made the remark that they hoped he would find inspiration in the Sahara. For a while he had been infuriated by their stubbornness in insisting upon his having a label, an etat-civil. Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning—namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated. He had not even mentioned the idea to Kit; she surely would have killed it with her enthusiasm. Since the death of his father he no longer worked at anything, because it was not necessary, but Kit constantly held the hope that he would begin again to write—to write no matter what, so long as he worked at it. “He’s a little less insupportable when he’s working,” she explained to others, and by no means totally in jest. And when he saw his mother, which was seldom, she too would say: “Been working?” and look at him with her large sad eyes. He would reply: “Nope,” and look back at her insolently. Even as they were driving to the hotel in the taxi, with Tunner saying: “What a hellhole” as he saw the miserable streets, he had been thinking that Kit would be too delighted at the prospect; it would have to be done in secret—it was the only way he would be able to carry it off. But then when he had got settled in the hotel, and they had started their little pattern of café life at the Eckmuhl-Noiseux, there had been nothing to write about—he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper. …As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility. But that was all right. He would not have written well, and so he would have got no pleasure from it. And even if what he might have written had been good, how many people would have known it? It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace.
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, page 205-207
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