"Would you like something about gods?"
1. Leaving the prison building is positively forbidden.
2. A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride.
3. You are firmly requested to maintain quiet between one and three p.m. daily.
4. You are not allowed to entertain females
5. Singing, dancing and joking with the guards is permitted only by mutual consent and on certain days.
6. It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or, if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by law to be guilty of rape.
7. Inasmuch as he enjoys the hospitality of the prison, the prisoner should in his turn not shirk participation in cleaning and other work of prison personnel in such measure as said participation is offered to him.
8. The management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or of the inmate himself.
---
The novel was the famous Quercus, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.
The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events - or shadows of events - of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds - one dappled, the other dun - so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm's blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak of a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now, a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph, a page and a half long in which all the words began with 'p'.
It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology - or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humour. Among other things there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behaviour of the weather.
Cincinnatus read for a while and laid it aside. This work was unquestionably the best that his age had produced; yet he overcame the pages with a melancholy feeling, plodded through the pages with dull distress, and kept drowning out the tale in the stream of his own meditation: what matters to me all this, distant, deceitful and dead - I, who am preparing to die? Or else he would begin imagining how the author, still a young man, living, so they said, on an island in the North Sea - would be dying himself; and it was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die - and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author's physical death.
The light would move along the wall. Rodion would appear with what he called Frühstück. Again a butterfly wing would slide between his fingers, leaving coloured powder on them.
- Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov (who's spot on about the French, incidentally), in collaboration with the author
2. A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride.
3. You are firmly requested to maintain quiet between one and three p.m. daily.
4. You are not allowed to entertain females
5. Singing, dancing and joking with the guards is permitted only by mutual consent and on certain days.
6. It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or, if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by law to be guilty of rape.
7. Inasmuch as he enjoys the hospitality of the prison, the prisoner should in his turn not shirk participation in cleaning and other work of prison personnel in such measure as said participation is offered to him.
8. The management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or of the inmate himself.
---
The novel was the famous Quercus, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.
The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events - or shadows of events - of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds - one dappled, the other dun - so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm's blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak of a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now, a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph, a page and a half long in which all the words began with 'p'.
It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology - or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humour. Among other things there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behaviour of the weather.
Cincinnatus read for a while and laid it aside. This work was unquestionably the best that his age had produced; yet he overcame the pages with a melancholy feeling, plodded through the pages with dull distress, and kept drowning out the tale in the stream of his own meditation: what matters to me all this, distant, deceitful and dead - I, who am preparing to die? Or else he would begin imagining how the author, still a young man, living, so they said, on an island in the North Sea - would be dying himself; and it was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die - and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author's physical death.
The light would move along the wall. Rodion would appear with what he called Frühstück. Again a butterfly wing would slide between his fingers, leaving coloured powder on them.
- Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov (who's spot on about the French, incidentally), in collaboration with the author