Posts for Tuesday, 7 July 2009
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one’s own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.” The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Dressing up corpses and setting them in grotesque tableaux was a favourite pastime of the dentist’s. His imagination, repressed by all the years of reconstructing his patients’ mouths, came alive particularly when he was playing with the dead. The previous day Laing had blundered into an apartment and found him painting a bizarre cosmetic mask on the face of a dead account-executive, dressing the body like an overblown drag-queen in a voluminous silk nightdress. Given time, and a continuing supply of subjects, the dentist would repopulate the entire high-rise.
JG Ballard, High-Rise
