we don’t get to choose our own hearts
18:46 | 06-01-2015 | Literature | No Comments
да, и, кстати, романом года[1] с легкостью оказался тот самый “Щегол” Донны Тарт — все было снова, как в детстве, право: и картинная галлерея[2], и Диккенс, и невозможность расстаться с книгой хоть на миг. открытость всегда подкупает? что ж, как и полагается Bildungsroman, у героя ее хватало — как и верности, смелости, и опять честности. впрочем, это лишь мертвые слова наперекор безгранчно живому рассказ:
This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home.
тем более забавно, какие идиотские отзывы умудрился собрать он в русскоязычной среде. что и еще удивительнее, если действительно прочитать книгу — тень Федора Михайловича лежит там на каждой странице, да и сам русский язык забористо ухмыляется читателю между строк: что, dorogoy, еще один стакан?
Well — I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you — wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well — think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no — hang on — this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
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а вторым, пусть и с большим отставанием, “Пир Джона Сатурналла”, столь же неизмеримо волшебный и ищущий. ↩
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там, где “Урок анатомии” и “Жемчужная сережка” — где напротив, на берегу, утопают Генеральные штаты, а под боком небоскребы ушлым аистом задирают облака. ↩