The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

There were other stories about this painter, because after this he decided he could not paint blue. He decided that he must see white, and this time he persuaded the pilot of a plane to fly him to a station in the far North of Canada.

You know the old joke. I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.

Liberace might have read it in his intellectually malformative years and profited thereby, instead of allowing his mind to solidify, we may say, to the state where the cerebratory atoms spent their time perpetually away from their correct lattice sites.

tristatur.

matutinal

uxorious

au sérieux.

piquet.

partipotentiary

and the girls were all made to study French, German and English, with Italian for bad behaviour.

She’s not really pretty, I said. She’s beautiful. When she’s excited. When she’s bored she looks like someone who’s got two weeks to live. Someone who’s got two weeks to live & is going to spend it begging the doctor for a mercy killing.

People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones—when you look at each one as if you’d never seen one before, they all look alike.

I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I’d spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.

Bandura

Jaime Jaramillo?

I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say

He came back with another drink. He said he was sorry but they were out of Coke, he had brought me an orange juice instead.

efficacious

I didn’t mean that the way it sounds. I just meant you could do better. That was the last time he laughed. He sat quietly, looking down, as if it tired him to look into a face. I didn’t say I didn’t think I could do better.

Sib said: You mean go back to the States? But I don’t want to go back to the States. I said: Why not? Sib said: You can’t get Nebraska Fried Chicken. It’s too depressing for words.

Do you know what Boulez says somewhere? she said. No, what does Boulez say somewhere? I said. Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi. Not everyone can.