Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals’ emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths.

I suppressed my laughter, laughed only inwardly, bearing witness to his adolescent memories as if they were not a cliché, and instead, as if they mattered.

Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.

The more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use,

Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge,

I stole two jars of it from one of these travel centers, the weight of the jars giving a new tug to the leather straps of my handbag as I purchased my wine. It wasn’t that I believed the wine I bought was payment enough for my jars of human cat food. Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief. You’re in a highway travel center, people in a great flux and flow, coming and going and milling and choosing, the cashiers in a fugue state of next and next and next. And in order to locate the precise moment when you can take unseen, you slow it all down. You make time stop. You insert into reality what composers call a “fermata,” and while time is stopped, you put something in your bag. In this way, I test my fitness. I test my ability to see. I gauge what other people see, and also, what they fail to see.

I don’t waste my time on games. I don’t know if this is because I’m not a man, or because I’m not into games.

In such a scene between new lovers, a moment repeated everywhere all the time with no originality to it—none—Lucien surely felt that something singular and novel was taking place.

I could sense him gathering a false hindsight that afternoon in the Place des Vosges, shaping a retrospective narrative, the thing a person tells himself about fate, about how everything had seemed fated, when the only evidence of this fate is how things went.

I do not need to remind you, Bruno wrote to Pascal Balmy and the others, that the annals of history are filled with descriptions of gifted and charismatic people who wanted to remake the world, special souls with second sight, natural leaders who burned clean and bright, and who brought the promise of their vision to the masses, but who gorged on joy until it wrecked them. Keep a list, Bruno wrote, of those who have been martyred to joy, lost to it. Do not be on that list.

Who wants to argue that consumer culture, whether it’s fast food or franchised movies or duty-free cosmetics, is wholesome and beneficial? If people do not start out as imbeciles, they are made imbecilic by the corporate contours of their daily life, lulled into a sleep, a sleep which, according to Debord, prevents them from wanting a more authentic life.

(People think fluency is about having a good accent. It isn’t. Fluency is about how well you understand the language, and how well you are able to speak it. Having a good accent is nothing. It’s a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent.)

he could deduce the following precepts, pertaining to ancient art: —The Homo sapiens was a copier. Despite his virtuosity in drawing animals and scenes of hunting, he depicted what was already there. —The Neanderthal was a conjurer, and this act, Bruno said, to bring into being something new, was the fundamental kernel of true art. To render the unseen seen: that is what an artist does, Bruno said. And so the Neanderthals were artists. While the Homo sapiens were absolutely, definitely not artists. They were frauds.

Bruno’s life in the barn was treated as part of a long and involved process of altering consciousness and retreating from civilization, which he saw as the only solution to this stage of late capitalism. Revolution, which back in 1968 he had believed was possible, he now understood to be foreclosed. The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.

Pascal said the Cagot was both real and a kind of myth, but that when people believe a myth, that, too, is real. It is a real belief.

The helmet’s weight, its reduction of his visibility—it rode low—felt to him, he wrote to the Moulinards, like the intrinsic burdens of men and war. He was trying on those burdens, which was the essence of play, to rehearse the dramas and terrors of adulthood.

Love confirms who a person is, and that they are worth loving. Politics do not confirm who a person is.

What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.

“TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK OF MEN,” the filmmaker says to the prostitute in her tidy kitchen, she and her kitchen both reeking of despair. “Men are all the same,” she says. “They try to get what they want. And after they get it, they change. They’re completely different.”

Bruno had declared in his letters that capitalism wasn’t coming to an end. The only option was to leave the world. An abstruse idea, as he didn’t mean leave the blue-green earth. He meant leave our world on it, cast off an entire manner of inhabiting reality. At first this idea struck me as lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.

What I don’t like about jumping from heights into water, including from diving boards—even low ones into clear water whose depth is known—is that once you’ve initiated your jump, you cannot change your mind. You can’t turn back. I don’t like irreversible decisions. I don’t see the point. I always want the option of doubling back, reversing course, changing plan.

“It’s a striking coincidence. Platon coming here. And you knowing about it.” “What I’ve always appreciated about this concept of coincidence,” I said, “is how it reifies our search for causality, our need to establish logical connections among disparate events.”

had assumed the North Star was the brightest star in the sky, but it wasn’t. It was just a star, but one with special powers. That I had located it, and it wasn’t obvious, made me proud. Bruno, I found it. I went back inside.

In the dark dynamism of wind and trees and night, I wanted to address Bruno. To tell him he was not alone. “Bruno.” I said his name out loud. I shouldn’t have. “Bruno, I feel that way too.” The act of speaking, of hearing a voice, my own, in this empty house, pulled some kind of stopper. It let something into the room, some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above, from up near the ceiling of this room, a room I would soon leave forever, as I would leave this false life. There was a girl below, on the bed, in this room. She had tears on her face, this girl. And her face was my face, and her tears were my tears.

I spent my afternoons on the hotel terrace, eating squid and drinking beer. But then I gave up the beer. Gave up drinking. Just stopped. That was it. No, it was not easy. But I did it. Few things worth doing are easy. Any habit that offers pleasure becomes a hassle if you need it to get from hour to hour.

What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

You and I, Bruno had said, don’t live in their world. Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time. With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything.

We are all sieves, Bruno had said. We catch and hold on to things along the way. We say hello to these things, these distractions, and we let them float past.

when you attempt to escape the world, to leave it behind, you bring things with you. Understand that you can never leave purely, he said. We want to escape what ails us, into some idyll, but know that when you go, you travel with cargo, stowaways, souvenirs from the old world. Don’t be afraid of them. Instead, say hello. Be friendly. Be patient. These things you’ve brought along will pass. Say hello and watch them go.