Cosmos - Closing

I went back to Warsaw and my parents - warfare with my father was resumed - and to other things, problems, difficulties and complications. Today we had chicken and rice for lunch.

Cosmos - pg. 157

I looked all round. What a spectacle. Mountains projecting themselves blindly into the expanse of the sky, on which centaurs, swans, ships, lions with shining manes, were navigating and below a ballet of hills and woods enveloped in tremulous whiteness. Oh, the moon, a dead sphere shining with borrowed light; its second-hand, weakened, nocturnal glow was as contaminating and poisonous as an illness. And the constellations were unreal, artificial, imposed; they were the obsessions of the luminous sky.

Cosmos - pg. 135

All it had left behind was a solar void, a kind of sunny emptiness exposed by the tense brilliance coming from behind a mountain as from a hidden source and inflaming the lilac sky that was now shining as if for itself and was no longer in communication with the earth.

Cosmos - pg. 112

My throat contracted. What was I to call what was happening to me? Was it a return to the interior? A return to my own horribleness, my own dirt, my crime, my imprisonment in myself, my self-condemnation?

Cosmos - pg. 98

We turned a corner, and came to towering walls and pinnacles, contorted piles of rock and deep chasms, peaceful rounded eminences, summits or peaks, craggy crests and vertical precipices to which the bushes clung, then rocks on heights and below them meadows descending into silence, an incomprehensible, motionless, universal silence, such a powerful silence that the noise of our minute, advancing carriage seemed to exist quite apart from it. This landscape continued for sometime, and then a new element imposed itself, a nude or chaotic or shining, sometimes heroic, element, made up of chasms and abysses, solid rock, variations on the theme of overhanging cliffs, ascending and descending rhythms of trees and vegetation, wounds and scars and landslides; idylls floated towards us, sometimes soft and gentle and sometimes hard and crystalline. There were all sorts of different things - marvelous distances, enchanting convolutions, space captured and stretched, aggressive or yielding space, space twisting or bending, striking up or down. Gigantic, motionless movement.

Cosmos - pg. 96

(though at the same time I coolly noted through half-closed eyes the curious fact that, though the sparrow was receding, its existence was by no means undermined by the process of recession, it was merely receding, and that was all).

Cosmos - pg. 89

It was still hanging, just as it had been when Fuchs and I found it. I examined the little dried-up ball, which was becoming less and less like a sparrow every day. Strange, I wanted to laugh, but better not. But I didn't really know what I wanted to do, because after all I had not come here only to look at it. I could not think what the right thing to do was, perhaps I ought to greet it with an appropriate gesture, or say something, but no, better not, that would be exaggerating, going too far .... How dappled with sunshine the black earth was. And look at that worm there. The round trunk of a pine-tree. If I came here bringing my hanging of the cat with me, it's certainly no trivial matter, but something I have done to myself. Amen, amen, amen. The edges of the leaves were curling, that was the effect of the heat. Who had dropped that old tin here, and what was inside it? Oh, ants, of course, I hadn't noticed them. Oh, that's enough, let's be off. What a good thing you've associated your hanging of the sparrow, that has made something quite different of it. Why different? Don't ask. Let's be off. What's that bit of paper over there?

Cosmos - pg. 34

It was nearly five o'clock. The gravel lay hot in the sun-shine and the grass had dried up round the young trees, which cast no shadow. Overhead great white clouds drifted in the pitiless blue. The house looked at me through its two rows of windows on the ground floor, and the glass glittered in the sun.

Cosmos - pg. 77

She was lying. No, she was not. It was both truth and falsehood. Truth because it accorded with the facts, falsehood because the significance of what she said - as I already knew - depended not on its truth but on the fact that it came from her, like the look in her eyes or her perfume.

Cosmos - pg. 12

We waited on the top step, my head was still buzzing with the journey, the clatter of the train, the events of the day before, the crowds, the fumes, the din. The noise in my head was deafening. I was startled by a strange deformity in the decent, domesticated, blue eyed face of the woman who opened the door. Her mouth seemed to be excessively prolonged to one side, though only to an infinitesimal extent, perhaps about a millimetre, but when she spoke this imparted a darting or gliding, almost reptilian, motion to her upper lip. There was a repellent coldness, like that of a frog or snake, about those lateral movements of her mouth, but in spite of that the woman warmed and excited m, for there was a kind of obscure transition leading straight to her bed, to gliding, creeping sin. Also her voice surprised me. I don't know what I expected to come from that mouth of hers, but the voice with which she spoke was that of the ordinary, stoutish, middle-aged, domestic servant that she was. Next I heard it from inside the house.

Cosmos - Opening

I
BUT let me tell you about another, even more curious adventure.

English translation copyright 1967
by MacGibbon & Kee Limited

All Rights Reserved

First published in 1965 in Polish by the Intytut
Literati (Kultura), Paris, France, copyright 1965
by Witold Gombrowicz

First Printing

Manufactured in the United States of America


WITOLD
GOMBROWICZ / COSMOS

English version by
ERIC MOSBACHER

Grove Press, Inc. / New York