Metamorphoses - Book I:75

Yet a holier living creature, more able to think high thoughts,

which could hold dominion over the rest, was still to be found.

So Man came into the world. Maybe the great artificer

made him of seed divine in a plan for a better universe.

Maybe the earth that was freshly formed and newly divorced

from the heavenly ether retained some seeds of its

kindred element -

earth, which Prometheus, the son of Iapetus, sprinkled with

raindrops

and moulded into the likeness of gods who govern the universe.

Where other animals walk on all fours and look to the ground,

man was given a towering head and commanded to stand

erect, with his gave uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven.

Thus clay, so lately no more than a crude and formless substance,

was metamorphosed to assume the strange new figure of Man.

Metamorphoses - Book I:20

He severed the earth from the sky and he parted the sea from the land;

he separated translucent space from the cloudier atmosphere.

He disentangled the elements, so as to set them free

from the heap of darkness, then gave them their

separate places and tied them

down in a peaceful concordat: fire flashed out as a weightless force in the

vaulted heaven and found its rightful place

at the height of the firmament; air came next in position

and lightness;

Frost - pg. 311

Because, like all humans, you aren't able to identify your moment. Nothing identifies its moment, that's it! ... where there's a precipitate fall or climb, you don't know ... where it goes down into the practice of letting live and vegetating along.

Frost - pg. 309

"...And then there's the additional factor that incipient thoughts bat around the inside of my skull; each time, I think my head will break apart when I move from one subject to another. There is a continual imaginative assault, which is driving me half crazy. You must remember, no one has such self-restraint. Every object I see hurts me. Every color I am force3d to take in. Every memory that surfaces, everything, everything. There isn't anything I can look at till the end, because I would either be wiped out or driven crazy, in the way that everything strikes me as being so crazy already, that I'm like a cursed animal, do you understand! I've already crossed the line ..."

Frost - pg. 303

Once changed, he hunkered in the hallway and read to me from his Pascal. It was always "about the whole tragedy," he said, I didn't understand what he meant by that. Always about "a single coarse act." He said: "Factor in lethality." And: "Death renders everything infamous." He was continually leaving, only to get out at some city of thought, interrupting his journey he had a destination "that would permit of no arrival, that discourages any arrival." I went up to my room and said to myself, but aloud, so that it bounced off the walls and its echo struck me: "I can't stand any more of this!" I lay down. I leafed through my Henry James, without giving the writer a thought. Walked to and fro. Lay down again.

Frost - pg. 300

I could clearly see the butchers' fleeing footprints. One could see also the tracks of the livestock they had stolen. One could see the darkness of the planets, and the low proletarianism of murder.

Frost - pg. 293

It was possible to drift on a raft with other people for years and years, pressed together, body against body, in a tiny space, without coming to know those people any better. "The darkness around one must be equal at moments to the darkness later on, that turns to stone inside us, at the end. Petrifies our blood, like the veins in marble."

Frost - pg. 288

"There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state." As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn't a state ("no longer a state!"), it was something as ridiculous as a "squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo," in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was "only the great roaring" that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Out head of state was a "co-op manager" our chancellor "a market-day brothel attendant." The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers' assistants. Democracy, "our democracy," was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe's gut, completely indigestible, like an "ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot."

Frost - pg. 275

"...Truth is always a process of extermination, you must understand. Truth leads downhill, points downhill, truth is always an abyss. Untruth is a climbing, an up, untruth is no death, as truth is death, untruth is no abyss, but untruth is not A-truth, you understand: the great infirmities do not approach us from outside, the great infirmities have been within us, surprisingly, for millions of years ..."

Frost - pg. 237

"... Yes, the man who keeps them is not allowed to think ... Woman is a destroyer, she's not capable of friendship ... They're made for marriage and children, the only moment they stop lying is when they're giving birth ... Women are for bedding, and nothing more. A woman has no sense of humor. She's the devil's tool, and she's responsible for the tragedy of humankind."

Frost - pg. 235

"The nearness of a person produces in one the desire to know him to that point where he ceases to exist for oneself. That's how it is with people."

Frost - pg. 211

Eighteenth Day

"I could drill through my boots, you know that? I could. But I don't want to. I've got the strength. But I'm not going to drill through my boots. It would be a pointless waste of strength."

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - Closing

Perhaps because of that, and also because I am usually perfectly content, I sometimes sing or hum to myself at times, as she does, and I have a tendency to sing or whistle that song of many titles, from Ireland or the Wild West ('Nanna naranniario nannara nanniaro,' that's how the melody goes), 'The Bard of Armagh' who forecats: 'And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me'; or 'Doc Holliday' who first justified himself by saying: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But the men that I killed should have left me in peace' and then lamented: 'But here I am now alone and forsaken, with death in my lungs I am dying today'; or 'The Streets of Laredo,' which is the version whose words I know best and which is therefore the one I sometimes sing out loud or to myself, perhaps, who knows, as a reminder, especially the last verse that ends by asking: 'But please not one word of all this shall you mention, when others should ask for my story to hear.'

'No,' I said, 'nothing bad.'

May 2007

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 542

And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my pain, my word, your fever, our poison, the shadow and all these doubts, all that torment?

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Opening

1
THE GOLDEN AGE
Strauss, Mahler, and Fin de Siecle

When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and world had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale -- an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.

Part 1
1900-1933

I am ready, I feel free
To cleave the ether on a novel flight,
To novel spheres of pure activity.

-- GOETHE, FAUST, PART 1

THE REST IS NOISE Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175th Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Picadoe is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to repring the following material: Excerpt from "Art for Art's Sake" from The Cradle Will Rock. Used by permission of the Estate of Marc Blitzsen. "Battle Cry" by Milton Babbitt. Used by permission of the author. Excerpt from letter of September 1934 to Israel Citkowitz, by Aaron Copland. Used by permission of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

Designed by Michelle McMillan

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

For my parents
and
Jonathan

It seems to me ... that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliabilist in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.
--Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

HAMLET: ... -- the rest is silence.
HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within]
Why does the drum come hither?

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 531

And I thought and continued to think on the train back to Paddington: 'He's chosen me to be his rim, the part that resists being removed and erased, that resists disappearing, the part that clings to the porcelain or the floor and is the hardest bit to get rid of. He doesn't even know if he wants me to take charge of cleaning it up -- "the constitution of silence" -- or would rather I didn't rub too hard, but left a shadow of a trace, an echo of an echo, a fragment of a circumference, a tiny curve, a vestige, an ash remnant that can say: "I was here", or "I'm still here, therefor I mist have been here before: you saw me then and you can see me now," and that will prevent others from saying: "No, that never occurred, never happened, it neither strode the world not trod the earth, it never existed, never was."

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 457

'...You try to take one apart only to find there are ten new lies to deal with the next day. You can't cope. You let things go, give up. There are so many people devoted to creating those lies that they become a tremendous force impossible to stop. That was my first experience of war, I wasn't used to it, but all wars are full of lies, they're a fundamental part of them, if not their principal ingredient. And the worst thing is that none are ever completely refuted. However many years pass, there are always people prepared to keep an old lie alive, and any lie will do, even the most improbable and most insane. No lie is ever entirely extinguished.'

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 452

My wife Valerie's German, for example, was impeccable, without a trace of accent. No, that wasn't the reason, Jacobo. I may have had only a very brief experience of your War, but I felt that hatred when I was in Spain. It was kind of all-embracing hatred that surfaced at the slightest provocation and wasn't prepared to consider any mitigating factor or information or nuance. An enemy could be a perfectly decent person who had behaved generously towards his political opponents or shown pity, or perhaps even someone completely inoffensive, like all those schoolteachers who were shot by the beasts on one side and the many humble nuns killed by the beasts on the other. They didn't care. An enemy was simply that, an enemy; he or she couldn't be pardoned, no extenuating circumstances could be taken into consideration; it was as if that saw no difference between having killed or betrayed someone and holding certain beliefs or ideas or even preferences, do you see what I mean?

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 424

I had spent a long time passing judgment on a daily basis and with ever greater ease and unconcern, listening to voices and looking at faces, in the flesh or hidden in the station-studio or on video, saying who could be trusted and who could not, who would kill and who would allow himself to be killed and why, who would betray and who would remain loyal, who would lie and who would meet with failure or with only average success in life, who irritated me and who aroused my pity, who was a poseur and who I warmed to, and what probabilities each individual carried in his veins, just like a novelist who knows that whatever his characters say or tell, whatever is attributed to them or what they are made to do, will go no further than his novel and will harm no one, because, however real they may seem, they will continue to be a fiction and will never interfere with anyone real (with anyone in his right mind, that is).

Frost - pg. 171

And the Graben is lit up at Christmastime, and people bump into each other, and everyone feels glad to be alive. Sometimes you might shiver a little to be standing all alone in the midst of so many people, but then you think of your bed, and you don't feel sad anymore.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 359

She probably has no wish and no intention of doing so, but she will find herself obliged to say to this present or future lover, or to herself: "Not yet, my love, wait, wait, your hour has not yet come, don't spoil it for me, give me time and give him time too, the dead man whose time no longer advances, give him time to fade, let him change into a ghost before you take his place and dismiss his flesh, let him be changed into nothing, wait until there is no trace of his smell on the sheets or on my body, let it be as if what was never happened." But I'm still here, and so I must have been before, and no one can yet say of me: "No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened." Indeed, I am the person who could kill this second husband right now, with my gloves on and in my angry mood. I have a pistol in my hand and it's loaded, all I would have to do is cock it and squeeze the trigger, this man still has his back to me, he wouldn't even see my face, today or tomorrow or ever, not until the Final Judgment, if there is one.'

Frost - pg. 163

Listen, these tragedians, listen to them: the monstrously unappetizing republic of all-powerful idiocy, listen to them: this unsolicited shameless parliament of hypocrites ... There are the dogs, there is their yap, there is death, death in all its wild profusion, death with all its frailty, death with its stink of quotidian crime, death, this last recourse of despair, the bacillus of monstrous unendingness, the death of history, the death of impoverishment, death, listen, the death that I don't want, that no one wants, that no one wants anymore, there it is, death, the yap, listen, the unlawful drowning of reason, the refusal to give evidence of all supposition, the spastic smack of soft brain on concrete, on the concrete floor of human dementia ... Listen to my views on the yap, listen ... I want to try and plumb the thinking of the infernal tempest, the confusion of eras, Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, the monstrous Tertiary and Quaternary, the monstrously meaningless rejection of the great floods licking up from the depths ... Listen to me, I am going into the yap, I go in and I smash their fangs, I yell it with the thunder of my unreasonableness, I scramble its processes, its mendacious propaganda ... Listen, stop, listen, the seating stupid slavering dogs' tongues, listen to the dogs, listen to them, listen to them ..."

Frost - pg. 143

"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy ... Envy is what hold artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything ... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions ... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very greatest emetics ... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum? The infernality of unscrupulousness is something I always meet with in the thoughts of artists ... But I don't want any artists' anymore, no more of those unnatural thoughts, I want nothing more to do with artists or with art, yes, not with art either, that greatest of all abortions ... Do you understand: I want to get right away from that bad smell. Get away from that stink, I always say to myself, and secretly I always thought, get away from that corrosive, shredding, useless lie, get away from that shameless simony ..." He said: "Artists are the identical twins of hypocrisy, the identical twins of low-mindedness, the identical twins of licensed exploitation, the greatest licensed exploitation of all time. Artists, as they have shown themselves to me to be," he said, " are all dull and grandiloquent, nothing but dull and grandiloquent, nothing ..."

Frost - pg. 79

Memory which can be as clear as the air on an August day in eternity, spurred him to astonishing mental feats and an astonishing understanding of the world. History investigated him, and he returned the compliment -- and there was harmony. Nothing was so clear as through his registering of it, his senses must be the purest imaginable.

Frost - pg. 75

Cities, bubbling up against their inventors.

Frost - pg. 72

"Any rebellion has to get somewhere," he said. His rebellions no longer got anywhere. From time to time he saw people in whom he sees: amazing assets, inexhaustible assets, he never had such assets himself! He said: "It takes you hours ti adjust tot he palpitations that suddenly start going in you like drumbeats at such a sight. Nothing can stand up to it in the long run" The people here had no assets, and if they did, then they didn't have the strength to use them, on the contrary, "they fritter them away." There, "where human potential is negated." Where ugliness offered itself everywhere like" the sexual imperative." The whole region was "sodden with disease." In this valley corruption spoke "sign language so that the deaf could hear it": things that elsewhere took care to remain hidden till shortly before their objective, here showed no such fastidiousness: "people wear their tuberculosis on their sleeves. They wear it on the outside, shamelessly, so that the glacier wind can whirl them away like a pile of dead leaves.

Frost - pg. 56

"People often hang a modest talent on a big drum, and become famous. Subtlety! It's all the drum, all the big drum! I stayed aloof, I saw what the drum was, the big drum, and I was never popular. And since it's come up between us: the war is an inexpungible inheritance. The is properly the third sex. Do you understand!"

Frost - pg. 45

Memory was merely preference. "If not, it will destroy everything, even the toughest substance in oneself." Madness, joy, contentment, stubbornness and ignorance, belief and unbelief were at all times at its disposal. "It's pure pleasure, dissolving even death." To stand in relation to memory as to a human being, from whom one might part from time to time, only to welcome him back with renewed cordiality into ones home, that was the thing "that benefits the memory and the man who has it, more with each occasion."

Frost - pg. 43

So think: I have the strength of ten highly trained athletes, which enable me to raise my head from time to time. Imagine if I'd been able to develop such strength for myself! You see the way I fritter my strength on such a meaningless activity: because it's meaningless raising a head like mine. Or if I'd been able to invest one-hundredth of this strength in myself, somewhere where it might have been of significance ... I could have overthrown every scientific idea and theorem. Reaped all the celebrity the intellectual world has to bestow. A hundredth of that strength, and I could have become something like a second Creator! Mankind would have been unable to oppose me. In the blink of an eye, I could have gone back thousands of years, and reset our development in another, healthier direction. But as things are, my strength has had to be concentrated on my head, on my headaches, and it has gone to waste. This head, you see, is useless. At the center of it there is a crude glowing planet, and everything else if full of fractured harmonies!"

Frost - pg. 37

A landscape of people. Because the people took on the colors of the landscape as I did myself, the only way of recognizing them was by their voices, and it was only by my voice that they knew me. Such differentiated voices, you know, incredibly differentiated voices! Suddenly something horrible happened: my head swelled up, to such a degree that the landscape grew darker, and the people broke out in wailing, such terrible wailing as I have never heard. Wailing that was somehow commensurate with the landscape. I can't say why. Since my head was suddenly so big and heavy, it started rolling down from the hill where I had been standing, down across the white pastures, the black snow -- all the seasons here seemed to be simultaneous! -- and crushed many of the blue trees and the people. I could hear that. Suddenly I noticed that everything in my wake was dead. Withered, crushed, dead. My big head lay in a dead wasteland. In darkness. It lay in that darkness until I awoke. How is it that my dream took such a horrible turn?" he asked me. The painter took his Pascal out of his left jacket pocket, and stowed it in his right. "It's uncanny," he said.

Train To Pakistan - Closing

The leader raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired. He hit his mark and one of the man's legs came off the rope and dangled in the air. The other was still twined round the rope. He slashed away in frantic haste. The engine was only a few yards off, throwing embers high up in the sky with each blast of the whistle. Somebody fired another shot. The man's body slid off the rope, but he clung to it with his hands and chin. He pulled himself up, caught the rope under his left armpit, and again started hacking with his right hand. The rope had been cut in shreds. Only a thin tough strand remained. He went at it with the knife, and then with his teeth. The engine was almost on him. There was a volley of shots. The man shivered and collapsed. The rope snapped in the center as he fell. The train went over him, and went on to Pakistan.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 173

He who made the night and day,

The days of the ween and the seasons.

He who made the breezes blow, the waters run,

The fires and the lower regions.

Made the earth -- the temple of law.

He who made creatures of diverse kinds

With a multitude of names,

Made this the law --

By thought and deed be judged forsooth,For God is True and dispenseth Truth.

There the elect his court adorn,

And God Himself their actions honors.

There are sorted deeds that were done and bore fruit,

From those that to action could never ripen.

This, O Nanak, shall hereafter happen.

Meet Singh shut the prayer book and again put it to his forehead. He began to mumble the epilogue to the morning prayer:

Air, water and earth,

Of these are we made,

Air like the Guru's word gives the breath of life

To the babe born of the great mother Earth

Sired by the waters

Train To Pakistan - pg. 172

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsin, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed. Take philosophy, about which there is so much hoo-ha. It is just muddleheadedness masquerading as mysticism. And Yoga, particularly Yoga, that excellent earner of dollars! Stand on your head. Sit cross-legged and tickle your navel with your nose. Have perfect control over the senses. Make women come till they cry "Enough!" and you can say "Next, please" without opening your eyes. And all the mumbo-jumbo of four thousand kinds of animate things. Proof? We do not go in for such pedestrian pastimes as proof! That is Western. We are of the mysterious East. No proof, just faith. No reason; just faith. Thought, which should be the sine qua non of a philosophical code, is dispensed with. We climb to sublime heights on the wings of fancy. We do the rope trick in all spheres of creative life. As long as the world credulously believes in our capacity to make a rope rise skyward and a little boy climb it till he is out of view, so long will our brand of humbug thrive.

Take art and music. Why has contemporary Indian painting, music, architecture and sculpture been such a flop? Because it keeps harking back to B. C. Harking back would be all right if it did not become a pattern -- a deadweight. If it does, then we are in a cul-de-sac of art forms. We explain the unattractive by pretending it is esoteric. Or we break out altogether -- like modern Indian music of the films. It is all tango and rhumba or samba played on Hawaiian guitars, violins, accordions and clarinets. It is ugly. It must be scrapped like the rest.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 165

The courtyard of the gurdwara was spotted with rings of light cast by hurrican lamps and fires on improvised hearths over which women were cooking the evening meal. Inside the main hall was a circle of people around Meet Singh, who was reciting the evening prayer. The room in which Iqbal had left his things was locked.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 161

The subinspector picked up a yellow paper and read: "Juggut Singh, son of Alam Singh, age twenty-four, caste Sikh of village Mano Majra, budmash number ten."

"Yes, sir" interrupted Jugga, smiling. The treatment he had received from the police had not made any differnce to him. His equation with authority was simple: he was on the other side. Personalities did not come into it. Subinspectors and policemen were people in khaki who frequently arrested him, always abused him, and sometimes beat him. Since they abused and beat him without anger or hate, they were not human beings with names. They were only denominations one tried to get the better of. If one failed, it was just bad luck.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 145

That evening, the entire village turned up for the evening prayers at the gurdwara. This had never happened before, except on Gurus' birthdays or on the New Year's Day in April. The only regular visitors to the temple were old men and women.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 143

They sat and listened and watched strange undistinguishable forms floating on the floodwaters. The moon went down. After a brief period of darkness the eastern horizon turned gray. Long lines of bats flew across noiselessly. Crows began to caw in their sleep. The shrill cry of a koel came bursting through a clump of trees and all the world was awake.

The clouds had rolled away to the north. Slowly the sun came up and flooded the rain-soaked plain with a dazzling orange brilliance; everything glistened in the sunlight. The river had risen further. Its turbid water carried carts with the bloated carcasses of bulls still yoked to them. Horses rolled from side to side as if they were scratching their backs. There were also men and women with their clothes clinging to their bodies; little children sleeping on their bellies with their arms clutching the water and their tiny buttocks dipping in and out. The sky was soon full of kites and vultures. They flew down and landed on the floating carcasses. They pecked till the corpses themselves rolled over and shooed them off with hands which rose stiffly into the air and splashed back into the water.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 136

His colleague did not reply. He had a sardonic smile on his face. Mano Majra Sikhs and Muslims looked on helplessly.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 133

It rained intermittently all night. Early in the morning it became a regular downpour. Villagers who had stayed up most of the night fell asleep in the monotonous patter of rain and the opiate of the fresh morning breeze.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 93

With the monsoon, the tempo of life and death increases. Almost overnight grass begins to grow and leafless trees turn green. Snakes, centipedes and scorpions are born out of nothing. The ground is strewn with earthworms, ladybirds and tiny frogs. At night, myriads of moths flutter around the lamps. They fall in everybody's food and water. Geckos dart about filling themselves with insects till they get heavy and fall off ceilings. Inside rooms the hum of mosquitoes is maddening. People spray clouds of insecticide, and the floor becomes a layer of wriggling bodies and wings. Next evening, there are many more fluttering around the lamp shades and burning themselves in the flames.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 91

The sun makes an ally of the breeze. It heats the air till it becomes the loo and then sends it on its errand. Even in the intense heat, the loo's warm caresses are sensuous and pleasant. It brings up the prickly heat. It produces a numbness which makes the head nod and the eyes heavy with sleep. It brings on a stroke which takes its victim as gently as breeze bears a fluff of thistledown.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 84

The northern horizon, which had turned a bluish gray, showed orange again. The orange turned copper and then into a luminous russet. Red tongues of flame leaped into the black sky. A soft breeze began to blow toward the village. It brought the smell of burning kerosene, then of wood. And then -- a faint acrid smell of searing flesh.

The village was stilled in a deathly silence. No one asked anyone else what the odor was. They all knew. They had known it all the time. The answer was implicit in the fact that the train had come from Pakistan.

That evening, for the first time in the memory of Mano Majra, Imam Baksh's sonorous cry did not rise to the heavens to proclaim the glory of God.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 77

KALYUG

EARLY in September the time schedule in Mano Majra started going wrong. Trains became less punctual than ever before and many more started to run through at night. Some days it seemed as though the alarm clock had been set for the wrong hour. On others, it was as if no one had remembered to wind it. Imam Baksh waited for Meet Singh to make the first start. Meet Sinfh waited for the mullah's call to prayer before getting up. People stayed in bed late without realizing that times had changed and the mail train might not run through at all. Children did not know when to be hungry, and clamored for food all the time. In the evenings, everyone was indoors before sunset and in bed before the express came by -- if it did come be. Goods trains had stopped running altogether, so there was no lullaby to lull them to sleep. Instead, ghost trains went past at odd hours between midnight and dawn, disturbing the dreams of Mano Majra.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 74

"No," he said. "For God's sake, no." He flung himself on the floor and clasped the subinspector's shoes with both his hands. "Please, O king of pearls." He was ashamed of himself, but he knew he could never endure such torture again. "I am innocent. By the name of the Guru, I had nothing to do with the dacoity."

Train To Pakistan - pg. 74

"No," he said. "For God's sake, no." He flung himself on the floor and clasped the subinspector's shoes with both his hands. "Please, O king of pearls." He was ashamed of himself, but he kew he could never endure such torture again. "I am innocent. By the name of the Guru, I had nothing to do with the dacoity."

Train To Pakistan - pg. 70

Jugga's arrival was the subject of much hilarity.

"Oye, you are back again. You think it is your father-in-law's house," shouted one of the constables from his barrack.

"It is, seeing the number of policemen's daughters I have seduced," answered Juggut Singh at the top of his voice. He had forgotten the unpleasantness in the tonga.

"Oye, Budmahsa, you will not desist from your budmashi. Wait till the Inspector Sahib hears of what you said and he will put hot chillies up your bottom."

"You cannot do that to your son-in-law!"

Train To Pakistan - pg. 54

"Babuji, we are being polite to you. We keep saying 'ji,' 'ji' to you all the time, but you want to sit on our heads. We have told you a hundred times we are doing our duty, but you insist on believing that we have a personal grudge." He turned to his colleague. "Put the handcuffs on the fellow. He can do what he likes with his face. If I had a face like his, I would want to hide it. We will report that he refused to cover it."

Train To Pakistan - pg. 49

Iqbal felt his temper rise. "They are a race of four-twenties," he said vehemently. [Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code defines the offense of cheating.] "Do not believe what they say."

Train To Pakistan - pg. 42

"You do not know the deputy?" Meet Singh was surprised. "It's Hukum Chand. He is staying at the dark bungalow north of the bridge. Now Hukum Chand is a nar admi. He started as a foot-constable and see where he is now! He always kept the sahibs pleased and they gave him one promotion after another. The last one gave him his own place and made him Deputy. Yes, Iqbal Singh Ji, Hukum Chand is a nar admi -- and clever. He is true to his friends and always gets things done for them. He has had dozens of relatives given good jobs. He is one of a hundred. Nothing counterfeit about Hukum Chand.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 38

"Why, Babu Sahib, you have come to stop killing and you are upset by one murder?" asked Meet Singh, smiling. "I thought you had come to stop such things, Babu Sahib. But you are quite safe in Mano Majra," he added. "Dacoits do not come to the same village more than once a year. There will be another dacoity in another village in a few days and people will forget about this one. We can have a meeting here one night after the evening prayer and you can tell them all you want. You had better rest. I will come back and tell them all you what happens."

The old man hobbled out of the courtyard. Iqbal collected the empty tin, his knife and fork and tin plate, and took them to the well to wash.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 19

Hukum Chand's style of smoking betrayed his lower-middle class origin. He sucked noisily, his mouth glued to his clenched fist. He dropped cigarette ash by snapping his fingers with a flourish. The subinspector, who was a younger man, had a more sophisticated manner.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 17

The rest house was originally built for the engineer in charge of the construction of the bridge. After the completion of the bridge, it became the common property of all senior officers. Its popularity is due to its proximity to the river. All about it are wild wastes of pampas grass and dhak, or flame of the forest, and here partridges call to their mates from sunrise to sundown. When the river has receded to its winter channel, bulrushes grow in the marshes and ponds left behind. Geese, mallard, widgeon, teal, and many other kinds of waterfowl frequent these places, and the larger pools abound with rahu and malli and mahseer.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 4

All this has made Mano Majra very conscious of trains. Before daybreak, the mail train rushes through on its way to Lahore, and as it approaches the bridge, the driver invariably blows two long blasts of the whistle. In an instant, all Mano Majra comes awake. Crows begin to car in the keekar trees. Bats fly back in long silent relays and begin to quarrel for their perches in the peepul. The mullah at the mosque knows that it is time for the morning prayer. He has a quick wash, stands facing west toward Mecca and with his fingers in his ears cries in long sonorous notes, "Allah-ho-Akbar." The priest at the Sikh temple lies in bed till the mullah has called. Then he too gets up, draws a bucket of water from the well in the temple courtyard, pours it over himself, and intones his prayer in monotonous singsong to the sound of splashing water.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 313

The next room was dominated largely by German art. It contained Durer's famous self-portrait, as well as his 'Adam' and his 'Eve.' However, my eye was caught at once by a long narrow painting I had been familiar with childhood, when, as was only normal, it had shocked and filled me with a degree of fear tinged with curiosity, 'The Three Ages and Death' by Hans Baldung Grien, which, like the two portraits, has its counterpart in another painting of the same format and dimensions next to it, 'Harmony, or The Three Graces.'

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 252

'If we judge wisely, we will count what has not happened as the past' is as true as the contrary position which allows us to count the past, along with everything else we have experienced, our entire life, as also not having happened. Then what does it matter what we do in our lives, or why it does it matter so very much to us?

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 231

When you haven't been back for some time to a place you know well, even if it's the city you were born in, the city to which you're most accustomed, where you'lived for the longest time asnd which is still home to your children and your father and your siblings and home even to the love that stood firm for many years (even if that place is as familiar to you as the air you breathe), there comes a moment when it begins to fade and your recollection of it dims, as if your memory were suddenly afflicted by myopia and -- how can I put it -- by cinematography: the different eras become juxtaposed and you start to feel unsure as to which of those cities you left or departed from when you last set off, the city of your childhood or your youth or the city of your manhood or maturity, when where you live dwindles in importance, and, hard though it is to admit, the truth is you'd be happy enough with your own little corner almost anywhere in the world.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 206

We raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We're filled by a kind of retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. 'I was abandoned,' we think, 'by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They'll regret it in the end, because it's nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one's been forgotten, and now I'm forgetting them, and anyone who dies knows more or less what fate awaits him or her. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away.' Then you quote these words to yourself: 'Memory is a tremulous finger.' And add in your own words: 'And it doesn't always succeed when it tries to point at us.' We discover that our finger can no longer be trusted, or less and less often, and that those who absorbed our thoughts night and day and day and night, and were fixed there like a nail hammered firmly in, gradually work loose and become of no importance to us; they grow blurred and, yes, tremulous, and one can even begin to doubt their existence as if they were a bloodstain rubbed and scrubbed and cleaned, or of which only the rim remains, which is the part that takes longer to remove, and then that rim, too, finally submits.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 186

'Far set in fields and woods, the town I see spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, crag'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagg'd.' And as I read I stole occasional glances at Tupra and saw that he was enjoying it, even though he didn't like Stevenson's poetry. 'There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, my dead, the ready and the strong of word. Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; the sea bombards their founded towers; the night thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers, one after one, here in this grated cell, where the rain erases and the rust consumes, fell upon lasting silence.'

Who knows, perhaps no one had read to him since he was a child.

Frost - pg. 34

"Do you know what I can hear now? I can hear charges being brought against the big ideas, a great court has been convoked to hear the case, I can hear them slowly beginning to arraign all the big ideas. More and more big ideas are arrested and thrown into prison. The big ideas are sentenced to terrible punishments, I know that for certain! I can hear it! Big ideas are picked up at border checkpoints! Many flee, but they are apprehended and punished, and thrown into jail! Life, I say, lifetime imprisonment is the least punishment to which the big ideas are sentenced! The big ideas have no one to defend them! Not even a wretched public defender! I hear the state's attorneys laying into the big ideas! I hear the police hitting the big ideas over the head with their nightsticks. The police were always battering the big ideas over the head! They've locked up the big ideas! Not one big idea will be left at large! Listen up! Look! All the big ideas have basically got it in the neck! Listen!" The painter tells me to go on ahead, and I go on ahead, and he drives me into the hollow with his stick.

Frost - pg. 29

"People who make a new person are taking an extraordinary responsibility upon themselves. All unrealizable. Hopeless. It's a great crime to create a person, when you know he'll be unhappy, certainly if there's any unhappiness about. The unhappiness that exists momentarily is the whole of unhappiness. To produce solitude just because you don't want to be alone anymore yourself is a crime." He said: "The drive of nature is criminal, and to appeal to it is a pretext, just as everything people do is a pretext."

Frost - pg. 18

At the moment, all the things on which life insisted were losing their value. "All endeavor is riding for a fall," he said. Something was splendid, and the next thing was brutal, much more brutal than the first had been splendid. "The man who gets to the top of the tree is forced to realize there is no top and no tree. I was your age when I first grasped that nothing is worth the least effort. It both calmed me and unsettled me. Now it frightens me." He referred to his condition as "expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It's like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks," he said.

Frost - pg. 11

"If you walk the way I'm pointing with my stick, you'll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety," he said. "You don't have to be afraid of being found out. Nothing can happen to you: everything has died. No minerals, no crops, nothing. You'll find traces of this or that period, stones, vestiges of masonry, indications, no one knows what of. A certain arcane relation to the sun. Birches. A ruined church. Traces of wild animals. Four or five days. Solitud, quiet," he said. "Nature without any human interference. The odd waterfall. It's like walking centuries before human settlement."

Evening falls very abruptly here, as if with a clap of thunder. As if a great iron curtain suddenly cut the world in half. Any way, night falls between one step and the next. The sour colors are drab. Everything is drab. No transition, no twilight. The Föhn wind sees to it that the temperature doesn't drop. An atmosphere that causes the heart to tighten, if not to stop altogether. The hospitals know all about this air current: ostensibly healthy patients, full to the brim with medical science to the point that there is hope for them, suddenly sink into unconsciousness, and cannot be reanimated by any human agency, however skillfil or ingenious. A climate that engendered embolisms. Bizarre cloud formations, somewhere far away. Dogs chasing pointlessly through lanes and farmyards, sometimes attacking people. Rivers stinking of corruption all along their length. Mountains like ridged brains, overly palpable by day, blackly invisible at night. Strangers suddenly getting into conversations at crossroads, asking questions, giving answers they never asked to hear. As if just then everything was possible: the ugly approaches the beautiful, and vice versa, the ruthless and the weak. The striking quarter hours drip down on cemeteries and rooftops. Death takes a deft hand in life. Children fall into sudden fits of weakness. Don't shout or yell, but walk under a train. In inns and stations near the waterfalls, relationships are formed that barely last a moment, friendships are struck up that never come to life; the other, the you, is tormented to the point of murderousness, and then strangled in pettiness and meanness.

Frost - pg. 10

I had intended to take with me Koltz on diseases of the brain, divided into "hyper-activity" and "lesions" of the brain, but in the end I didn't. Instead I took along a book of Henry James's, which I had started in Schwarzach.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 184

'...They say that the very old remember their childhood most clearly of all and almost shut themselves away in it, mentally I mean, and that they have a sense that everything that happened between that distant time and their present decline, their greeds and their passions, their battles and their setbacks, was all false, an accumulation of distractions and mistakes and of tremendous efforts to achieve things that really weren't important; and they wonder then if everything hasn't been an interminable detour, a pointless voyage, all merely to return to the essence, to the origin, to the only thing that truly counts at the end of the day.'

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 180

No, it was no longer easy for me to think of myself taking another less comfortable and less well-paid job, less attractive and less varied, after all, each morning I was confronted by new faces or else went deeper into familiar ones, and it was a real challenge to decipher them. To guess at their probabilities, to predict their future behavior, it was almost like writing novels, or at least biographical sketches. And sometimes there were outings, on-the-spot translations and the occasional trip out of London.

Train To Pakistan - Opening

DACOITY

THE summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year. It was hotter than usual, and drier and dustier. And the summer was longer. No one could remember when the monsoon had been so late. For weeks, the sparse clouds cast only shadows. There was no rain. People began to say that God was punishing them for their sins.

Copyright 1956 by Grove Press, Inc.

Introduction copyright 1981 by Arthur Lall

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First Black Cat Edition 1961

First Revised Black Cat Edition 1981

First Printing Revised Edition 1981

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-8920

Manufactured in the United States of America

Grove Press Inc., 920 Broadway,

New York, N.Y. 10010

Frost - Opening

First Day

A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn't just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either. An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 2008

Translation copyright 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc. New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in German as Frost by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, Germany, 1963. Copyright Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1963. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United State by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International

and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the products of the authors's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

FROST

Monsieur Pain - Closing

" ... In any case a busy routine would have been too much for Monsieur Pain. He tried to get his veteran's pension back, but everything was such a mess in those years; it was hopeless. So we went on working in cabarets and circuses on the outskirts of Paris. Until one day his lungs gave out and he collapsed. He died in my arms, in the manager's office at the Cabaret Madame Dore."

Agape Agape - Opening

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled cut up again my damn leg look at i, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions

VIKING

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Copyright the Estate of William Gaddis, 2002

Afterword copyright Joseph Tabbi, 2002

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Copyright 1980 by Thelma

D. Toole. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Excerpts from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock, Alfred A. Knopf,

1984, and The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Jack Dawson,

Knopf, 1991.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirley coincidental.

CIP data available

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Garamond 3 with Schneidler Initials

Designed by Carla Bolte

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 86

"The movie has just begun," murmured the vendor without looking at me; she was a rather plump redhead, more or less my age, who was busy writing something in what appeared to be an ordinary school exercise book, except that its pages were pink. Verses! A poet!

Monsieur Pain - pg. 82

All I could do was formulate a series of questions. What was Madame Reynaud doing in Lille? Was her presence there related in some way to Vallejo? What threats or promises could the telegram have contained to precipitate such an abrupt departure? How could I describe, or understand, my experience in the warehouse? Had it been an hallucination due to my own nervous instability, or some kind of inscrutable apparition. Was the imitated hiccupping a parody or a premonition? I had claimed that there was a plot to assassinate Vallejo; did I really believe that? I raised the napkin to my lips and closed my eyes. Yes, I did.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 58

"How about you do us a favor and shut up, Jean Luc?"

Raoul requested patiently. "The gentlemen here are trying to have a serious discussion about the fate of our homeland."

Monsieur Pain - pg. 57

The news was about the war in Spain: the latest on the bombing raids, the shelling, and new weapons that we hadn't known in the Great War.

"The damned Germans are testing out their arsenal." said Raoul.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 50

"I don't think so. Dancing is beautiful."

"You're a gentleman, Monsieur Pain. Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Madame Grenelle."

Monsieur Pain - pg. 47

I went across to the tank. On the bottom, resting on a layer of very fine sand, were miniature boats, trains and planes arranged to depict calamities, disasters simultaneously frozen in an artificial moment, over which indifferent goldfish were swimming back and forth.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 46

I went into a cafe: the roof, the walls, the tables, the seats, everything was green. As if the proprietor had, in a fit of madness, tried to give it a jungle-like ambiance or, as I later thought, endeavored to camouflage the premises, and partly succeeded, although in a way that was clearly inept.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 44

"And what are you? A detective?"

"No, god forbid ... Do I look like a detective? I'm just trying to return something that belongs to those two doctors."

Monsieur Pain - pg. 43

Before leaving I glanced at the bed-ridden man. He was dark and the sheets were white and harsh. At that moment everything seemed deceptively simple, or at least open to simple solutions. I was convinced -- and not entirely without reason -- that I could cure Vallejo.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 37

There was not the slightest sound from outside, except perhaps the murmuring of an indecipherable presence in the air,suspended matter;l and the light delineating her silhouette had the gray intimacy of certain Parisian mornings. She smiled sweetly, although with a certain reserve, and looked at everything with the curiosity of a vaguely disappointed little girl.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 31

"Not at all. It would simply be an error for an old man like me to set himself up as a judge ... But there will be judges, Pierre, you can be sure of that, judges hard as stone, who will not know the meaning of the word pity. Sometimes, between sleep and waking, I catch a glimpse of them; I see them at work, deciding. They piece it all together; they are cruel and follow rules that to us seem entirely arbitrary. In a word, they are dreadful and inscrutable. But by then, of course, I'll be gone."

Monsieur Pain - pg. 23

I observed him through the glass of wine: a slow, red eel, sucking his teeth and drinking with a feigned parsimony.

Monsieur Pain - pg. 8

My role and mission when I first appeared in her life had been to save her husband, and I had failed, but now I had a second chance, with her friend's husband; I had to save him, and so testify to a higher reality, a logical oder, in which we could continue to be who were. And perhaps come to recognize one another, finally, and having attained that condition, change, and, in my case aspire to happiness. (A reasonable happiness, akin to care and trust.)

Monsieur Pain - pg. 5

The waiter and the black man turned to look at us. The men, who were extremely pale, nodded their heads in unison, as if to signal assent. I was momentarily under the strange impression that those men, the pair of them, were one of the possible incarnations of pity. I wondered if Madame Reynaud might know them.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 177

I first taught translation and Spanish at Oxford, I was profoundly ignorant of my own language, not that it mattered much, for its an ignorance I share with almost all my compatriots and they couldn't care less.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 145

As long as there is in that life some shameful, untold episode, a stain or an anomaly. And that's not so very difficult, Jack, because we all have something of the sort in our past, possibly without even knowing that we do or without being able to put our finger on it. It depends on who's looking at us. And the worst that can happen to anyone is for no one to look at them. People can't bear it and go into a decline. Some people die of it or kill.'

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 133

Obviously his neck hadn't been broken, that would have been the end, the men in camouflage trousers didn't leave him long enough for that to happen, they were well trained, they must have known at what point it would be too late, not, I imagined, that it would matter very much if they got it wrong and the man snuffed it, perhaps no one in the world knew of his fate.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 51

What remains of the past no longer counts, as regards yearnings or fantasies, or even avarice. Or regret. Although it does as regards speculations.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 37

He'd done it again. I myself sometimes laugh at things despite myself. I couldn't suppress my own laughter, my anger vanished for a moment, or was postponed because it was no longer relevant. For a few seconds, we both laughed together, simultaneously, with neither of us hanging back or preempting the other, the laughter that creates a kind of disinterested bond between men and that suspends or dissolves their differences. This meant that, for all my irritation and my growing feelings of apprehension -- or was it perhaps unease, aversion, repugnance -- I hadn't entirely withdrawn my laughter from him. I might have been on the way to rationing it out, but I hadn't removed or denied him my laughter. Not altogether, not yet.

Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - Opening

'While it isn't ever something we would wish for, we would all nonetheless always preder it to be the person beside us who dies, whether on a mission or in battle, in an air squadron or under bombardment or in the trenches when there were trenches, in a mugging or a raid on a shop or when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us. Whenever someone covers another person with his own body, or places himself in the path of a bullet or a knife, these are all extraordinary exceptions, which is why they stand out, and most are fictitious and only appear in novels and films.

For Carmen Lopez M, who has been kind

enough to hear me out patiently until the end

And for my friend Sir Peter Russell and

my father, Julian Marias,

who generously lent me

a large part of their lives,

in memoriam.

Copyright 2007 by Javier Marias

English translation copyright 2009 by Margaret Jull Costa

Forst published in Spain in 2007 as Tu rostro manana, 3 Veneno y sombra y adios by Alfaguara, Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S.A.

Published by arrangement with Mercedes Casanovas Agencia Literaria, Barcelona, and in association with Chatto & Windus, The Random House Group UK.

The translator would like to thank Javier Marias, Annella McDermot, Palmira Sullivan, and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Ins., for permission to reprint from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke the line from the first "Duino Elegy," copyright 1989 by Stephen Mitchell. The Eliot lines are quoted from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," copyright 1917 by T. S. Eliot.

The publication of this book has been assisted with a translation subvention from the Director of Books, Archives, and Libraries of the Cultural Ministry of Spain.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

First published clothbound in 2009

Design by Semadar Megged

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Poet Cycle

• Robert Lowell
• Delmore Schwartz
• William Carlos Williams
• Ezra Pound
• Gerald Manley Hopkins
• James Merrill
• *** Berrigan
• Theodore Roethke

Thermopylae

Where the bay flashed, and an unrecorded number
of the Persian troops, whip-flicked into the spear-
clogged hourglass of the pass, were impaled and fell
screaming from the precipice to drown, the mirror

clogs: geography too gathers dust, though busloads
of us (sandaled Germans mostly), hankering for
an attar or a foothold, a principle that still
applies, a cruse of oil, a watershed no rain erodes,

find small inkling of what was staved off here,
or saved. A calcined stillness, beehives, oleanders,
polluted air, the hung crags livid; on the little hill
(beneath, the bay flashed as men fell and went under

screaming) where a stone lion once stood in honor
of that grade-school byword of a troop commander
Leonidas, we ponder a funneled.down inscription: Tell
them for whom we came to kill and were killed, stranger,

how brute beauty, valor, act, air, pride, plume here
buckling, guttered: closed in from behind, our spears
smashed, as, the last defenders of the pass, we fell,
we charged like tusked brutes and gnawed like bears.

Monsieur Pain - Opening

PARIS, 1938

On Wednesday the sixth of April, at dusk, as I was preparing to leave my lodgings, I received a telegram from my young friend Madame Reynaud, requesting, with a certain urgency, my presence that evening at the Cafe Bordeaux, on Rue de Rivoli, relatively close to where I live, which meant that if I hurried, I could still arrive punctually at the specified time.

P. Does the idea of death afflict you?

V. (Very quickly). No--no!

P. Are you pleased with the prospect?

V. If I were awake I should like to die, but now it is no matter. The mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.

P. I wish you would explain yourself, Mr Vankirk.

V. I am willing to do so, but it requires more effort than I feel able to make. You do not question me properly.

P. What then shall I ask?

V. You must begin at the beginning

P. The beginning! But where is the beginning?

"Mesmeric Revelation"

Edgar Allen Poe

for Carolina Lopez

Copyright 1999 by Roberto Bolaño

Translation copyright 2010 by Chris Andrews

Originally published by Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain, as Monsieur Pain in 1999; published by arrangements with the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria, Barcelona.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or telvision review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, Ltd.

New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

First published as a New Directions Book in 2010.

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011