Fariha’s Reviews > Invitation to a Beheading > Status Update

He realized that this fear was dragging him precisely into that false logic of things that had gradually developed around him, but from which he had still somehow been able to escape that morning. The very thought that this chubby, red-cheeked hunter was going to hack at him was already an inadmissible sickening weakness, drawing Cincinnatus into a system that was perilous to him.

...it was as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining. In his mother’s gaze, Cincinnatus suddenly saw that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also. What was this spark so piercingly expressing now?

More than once, probably, you have felt your chest expand on a wonderful spring day, when the buds swell and feathered songsters enliven the groves, clad in their first sticky leafage. The first modest flowers peep coquettishly out of the grass, as if they would entice the passionate lover of nature, as they whisper timidly: ‘Oh, don’t, don’t pick us, our life is short.’

How can I stir you? Oh, our life together was horrible, horrible, but I cannot stir you with that, I tried hard at first, but, you know, our tempos were different, and I immediately fell behind. Tell me, how many hands have palpated the pulp that has grown so generously around your hard, bitter little soul?
Such words do not come in the small size that fits your everyday needs. And yet I shall try again:

Well, why not drink this mush of hope, this thick, sweet slop … my hopes are still alive … and I thought that at least now, at least here, where solitude is held in such high esteem, it might divide into two parts only, for you and for me, instead of multiplying as it did—noisy, manifold, absurd ... this is why I am writing—this is my last attempt to explain to you what is happening, Marthe …

This cold ochre smelled of the grave, it was pimply and horrible, yet his gaze still persisted in selecting and correlating the necessary little protuberances—so starved he was for even a vague semblance of a human face. Finally he turned over, lay on his back and, with the same attention began to examine the shadows and cracks on the ceiling.
“Anyway, they have succeeded in softening me,” mused Cincinnatus.

Cincinnatus’s face, grown transparently pallid, with fuzz on its sunken cheeks and a mustache with such a delicate hair texture that it seemed to be actually a bit of disheveled sunlight on his upper lip; Cincinnatus’s face, small and still young despite all the torments, with gliding eyes, eerie eyes of changeable shade, was, in regard to its expression, something absolutely inadmissible...

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world,

I issue from such burning blackness, I spin like a top, with such propelling force, such tongues of flame, that to this day I occasionally feel (sometimes during sleep, sometimes while immersing myself in very hot water) that primordial palpitation of mine, that first branding contact, the mainspring of my “I.” How I wriggled out, slippery, naked! Yes, from a realm forbidden and inaccessible to others, yes.

I have a feeling that you will not answer me at any cost;that is logical,for even irresponsibility in the end develops its own logic.For thirty years I have lived among specters that appear solid to the touch,concealing from them the fact that I am alive &real—but now that I have been caught,there is no reason to be constrained with you.At least I shall test for myself all the unsubstantiality of this world of yours.