“Europe has destroyed the whole world,” said Port.
“Should I be thankful to it and sorry for it? I hope the whole place gets wiped off the map.” He wanted to cut short the discussion, to get Kit aside and talk with her privately. Their long, rambling, supremely personal conversations always made him feel better. But she hoped particularly to avoid just such a tete-a-tete.
“Why don’t you extend your good wishes to all humanity, while you’re at it?” she demanded.
“Humanity?” cried Port. “What’s that? Who is humanity? I’ll tell you. Humanity is everyone but one’s self. So of what interest can it possibly be to anybody?”
Tunner said slowly: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’d like to take issue with you on that. I’d say humanity is you, and that’s just what makes it interesting.
“Good, Tunner!” cried Kit.
Port was annoyed. “What rot!” he snapped, ‘You’re never humanity; you’re only your own poor hopelessly isolated self.” Kit tried to interrupt. He raised his voice and went on.
“I don’t have to justify my existence by any such primitive means. The fact that I breathe is my Justification. If humanity doesn’t consider that a justification, it can do what it likes to me. I’m not going to carry a passport to existence around with me, to prove I have the right to be here! I’m here! I’m in the world! But my world’s not humanity’s world. It’s the world as I see it.”
“Don’t yell,” said Kit evenly. “If that’s the way you feel, it’s all right with me. But you ought to be bright enough to understand that not everybody feels the same way.”
From Paul Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky.
Michel Leiris’s book of dream fragments, Nights as Day, Days as Night is new from Spurl Editions. Their blurb:
Translated from French by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot. Hailed as an “important literary document and contemporary pleasure” by Lydia Davis, Nights as Day, Days as Night is a chronicle of Michel Leiris’s dreams. But it is also an exceptional autobiography, a distorted vision of twentieth-century France, a surrealist collage, a collection of prose poems. Leiris, author of the seminal autobiography Manhood, here disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being. He captures the profound strangeness of the dreamer’s identity: that anonymous creature who stirs awake at night to experience a warped version of waking life.
Whatever the setting (from circus shows to brothels, from the streets of Paris to Hollywood silent films), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace. Beautifully translated by Richard Sieburth, these dream records often read like an outsider’s view of Leiris’s life and epoch. This outsider is the dreamer, Leiris’s nocturnal double, whose incisors grow as large as a street, who describes the terror he feels at being executed by the Nazis, and who can say in all seriousness, “I am dead.” It is an alternate life, with its own logic, its own paradoxes, and its own horrors, which becomes alienating and intimate at once. With hints of Kafka, Pirandello, and Nerval, Nights as Day, Days as Night is one of Leiris’s finest works of self-portraiture.
Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was an author, ethnographer, art critic, and former surrealist who pioneered a unique form of autobiographical writing. Praised by Susan Sontag, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he made powerful contributions to modern French literature. His autobiographical works include Manhood, The Rules of the Game, and Nights as Day, Days as Night.
I’ve nibbled a little bit—something like microfictions, or unfinished fables, Leiris’ fragments are often funny and often unsettling.
An erotic(ish) one:
Spurl also enclosed some nice postcards.
I like postcards.
They make lovely bookmarks.
Biblioklept 