Clippings

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

The tacit premise of this book is that behaviors appropriate to launching a scientific career can be learned. Many of my colleagues doubt this, throw up their hands and propound the Darwinian approach. They say that scientific maturity comes with experience and cannot be taught. The fittest students will survive. The rest will not, according to the law of the science jungle. As I mentioned at the outset, adopting this fatalistic, laissez-faire viewpoint does have the advantage that busy professors need not spend time trying to teach their students science survival strategies. On the other hand, if they are wrong, then they are guilty of avoiding an important responsibility.

I take a behaviorist viewpoint. Although the inner feelings and thoughts that go along with “scientific maturity” may be real, and may only come with experience, what is needed to make the transition from graduate student to professional researcher is to learn certain “behaviors.” … They are not all that hard to learn, and the underlying ideas do not tax one’s intellectual powers greatly. It should be obvious that the problem with waiting for experience to dictate appropriate behaviors is that one is very likely to fail as a result of the bad experiences that are supposed to produce the appropriate feelings. It is far better to learn from the bad experiences of others than from your own.

All that is observable in a man—that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions—falls into the domain of history. But his romanceful or romantic side (sa partie romanesque ou romantique) includes “the pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows and self-communings which politeness or shame prevent him from mentioning”; and to express this side of human nature is one of the chief functions of the novel.

…

We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well—he has tried. …

And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist because it ends a book conveniently. He can make it a permanency, and his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been—will be. All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future… Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams.

“What’s the fuckin’ diff?” she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. “Billy’s a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is?”

…

Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy’s lead. At length he said, You like that one? It’s nice. Billy, she whispered, it’s forty thousand, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. “Well, by now they know he’s an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here’s the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.” — Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager’s brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy’s account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intentions to sue them for two millions dollars in damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. “Don’t you love him?” Mimi asked Chamcha. “The boy’s a genius. I mean, this was class.”

…one sees parents clutching their children, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The beautiful young daughter with blue eyes and blond hair will never stop smiling the smile she smiles now, will never lose this soft pink glow on her cheeks, will never grow wrinkled or tired, will never get injured, will never unlearn what her parents have taught her, will never think thoughts that her parents don’t know, will never know evil, will never tell her parents that she does not love them, will never leave her room with the view of the ocean, will never stop touching her parents as she does now.

…

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

A man stands at the graveside of his friend, throws a handful of dirt on the coffin, feels the cold April rain on his face. But he does not weep. He looks ahead to the day when his friend’s lungs will be strong, when his friend will be out of his bed and laughing, when the two of them will drink ale together, go sailing, talk. He does not weep. He waits longingly for a particular day he remembers in the future when he and his friend will have sandwiches on a low flat table, when he will describe his fear of growing old and unloved and his friend will nod gently, when the rain will slide down the glass of the window.