'Wonders of the Invisible World'

[vonMetternich]

'Wonders of the Invisible World'
by David Gates

January 26, 2000
Web posted at: 3:24 p.m. EST (2024 GMT)
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/b....of/index.html


(CNN) -- David Gates' characters know their Hopper, Huysmans and Haggard, their Beckett, Bartoli and Billie Holiday, more confidently than they know their families, friends and lovers. Yet they're terrifyingly self-aware, and refuse to go gently -- even when they're going nowhere fast. "Wonders of the Invisible World" was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award.




This text contains profanity that may be offensive to some readers.

EXCERPT

From "A Wronged Husband" Half awake, pawing at the night table for The Book of Great Conversations, I knock the bottle onto the floor. The sound hangs there: a ringing part, a shattering part, a splashing part. I smell the gin. Fine. It can stay there until I feel like getting up and dealing with it. Nobody here to be scandalized, nobody to be protected. A mouse, I suppose, might scamper across and cut its dainty foot, but that's the mouse's lookout, no? I remember when we first moved in here, we felt sorry for them, darting along the countertop to cower, bright-eyed, beside the toaster. So tiny, so dear: couldn't we all just live? It took a month for you to agree that something had to be done. But no D-Con. So, like what? I said. A resettlement program? "Well, couldn't we?" you said. "Couldn't we try?" And finally I went out and bought the Hav-a-Heart trap. Humane, enlightened. That was only last fall. Less than a year ago. As I remember it, we were all right then.
Kid noise through the open window. Sunday morning, quarter to eleven, already hot. I lift the sheet and shake it out to make it feel cool as it floats back down to rest on my legs. The coolness doesn't last. I prop both pillows (yours and mine) together against the headboard, sit up, put on my prescription sunglasses and turn to the Great Conversation in which Shaw loses his temper when Chesterton calls him a Puritan. Shaw says Chesterton has no real self, no firm place to stand, and Chesterton calls Shaw a Puritan for thinking that was necessary. Trying to understand these ideas is waking me up. I put the book back on the night table--carefully, though now there's no need--get out of bed, step around the glass (though I can't wholly avoid the gin puddle), go to the window and tug the shade to make it go up. Down in the street firemen have put a sprinkler cap on the hydrant--otherwise the Dominican kids just open it up and let it gush--and pencil-thick streams of water come arching out. A little boy stands at the edge of the widening pool, undecided.
But hang on: didn't I park the car in that first space to the right of the hydrant? What's there now is a rusted-out station wagon, cloudy plastic duct-taped over where the passenger window used to be. So now I know: they tow after a week of tickets. Well, fine, more power to 'em. Unless of course somebody stole the thing. In which case, also fine. But isn't it weird. You were always the one who said it was insane to keep a car in New York. I was always the one who said I wanted the feeling I could get out.
And your suddenly having to go to D.C. (yes, well, supposedly) provided a blame-free opportunity. Drive up to New Hampshire, get away from the heat and noise, spend some time with my brother. We hung out at the house mostly--Joey was still depressed about throwing his marriage away--though one afternoon we did get over into Vermont, to a used-book store run by a lady with cats. Joey beat her down on the price of some old compendium of myths he wanted for the engravings; to atone, I picked The Book of Great Conversations off the twenty-five-cent table and told her it came from the dollar table.
He called yesterday, speaking of Joey, to say he was doing a lot better. In case I'd been worried. I said I was doing a lot worse: that you had gone to live in Boston, that I hadn't left the apartment for a week, hadn't called work, didn't know if I had a job anymore and, even if I did, couldn't face going back and having to see Kate every day. I said I couldn't sleep because of the car alarms and sirens. Kate, he said: refresh me. I refreshed him. Hm, he said. But the Kate thing was already over with, I said. Discussed. Worked through. Resolved. Hm, he said. Well, he said, as far as the job, they were probably just assuming I was taking two weeks instead of the one; if they were seriously upset, they would've called, no? He said he was sorry about your leaving, but guessed he'd seen it coming when we'd been up there at Christmas. What do you mean? I said. Why do you say that? Well, for one thing, he said, you never touched each other. He said, speaking as somebody who'd been through the same thing, he knew I was going to come out of this stronger. Said at least in my case there were no children. Said maybe I could start seeing this Kate again. Joey. He runs off to the Outer Banks for a mad two-week interlude with his old used-to-be, she ends up going back to her husband (many tears), he comes home and Meg and the children are gone. And now he discovers there are no great new women in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
The night I arrived, in fact, he tried to talk me into getting back in the car and driving down to Boston to pick up college girls. Just as big as real women, he said, but stupider.
"Joey," I said. "I just drove five hours."
"So I'll drive and you can sleep on the way down. Listen, I got a teensy thing of coke left. And we can absolutely get more once we're in Boston. ****, let's do some coke, you want to?"
But as of yesterday, he'd gotten the north side of the house painted, which badly needed it, he'd started cutting wood for the following winter--he likes it to dry for a year and a half--and he'd patched the leak in the woodshed with roofing tar. He'd probably just needed some physical exercise. Said he'd begun a new series of silkscreens, which were absolutely going to be the best things since those ducks he was doing a couple of years ago. They're going to be--whatever the plural is of phoenix. But getting back to my thing: he'd always said that Gordon Conway was scum, and he was glad at least that now everybody would see it. Said as it turned out he guessed it was a damn good thing I'd talked him out of driving down to Boston that night. He'd planned to hit Gordon up, since Gordon generally kept enough coke around to sell, and it would've been an absolute mess if we'd knocked on the door and so on. Said he thought you might come back once the dust had a chance to settle. If that was what we both wanted. Said it seemed to him that despite everything there'd been a lot of love there.

Copyright© 1999 by David Gates.

[vonMetternich]

37 Quotes for 'G. K. Chesterton'
Better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.

Every man knows his follies and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

If Christianity should happen to be true -- that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe -- then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. [All] things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He lives and reigns.

We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.

Commemoration of Martyrs of Japan, 1597 Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with fire brands were slanderers -- but they were, at least, far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbours, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild!

A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Continuing a series on God and the human condition: That Jones shall worship the "god within him" turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon -- anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

Commemoration of Gilbert of Sempringham, Founder of the Gilbertine Order, 1189 I am quite prepared to promise the secularists secular education if they on their side will promise not to have moral instruction. Secular education seems to me intellectually clean and comprehensible. Moral instruction seems to me unclean, intolerable; I would destroy it with fire. Teaching the Old Testament by itself means teaching ancient Hebrew ethics, which are simple, barbaric rudimentary, and, to a Christian, unsatisfying. Teaching moral instruction means teaching modern London, Birmingham and Boston ethics, which are not barbaric and rudimentary, but are corrupt, hysterical and crawling with worms, and which are to a Christian, not unsatisfying but detestable. The old Jew who says that you must fight only for your tribe is inadequate; but the modern prig who says you must never fight for anything is substantially and specifically immoral. I know quite well, of course, that the unreligious ethics suggested for modern schools do not verbally assert these things; they only talk about peaceful reform, true Christianity, and the importance of Count Tolstoy. It is all a matter of tone and implication--but then, so is all teaching. Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume that really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

Feast of Bartholomew the Apostle It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of Battles, "a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts" pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that He was indeed a God of Battles. Well it is for us that He was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving Him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen Him stretching out His hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte... It would have been easy enough for His worshipers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that His followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin, [to stop them]. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because He was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe.

Commemoration of Mary Slessor, Missionary in West Africa, 1915 It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt whether there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretense that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life in order to keep it.

The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes...

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, / The pen is mightier than the sword.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

[You reporters] should have printed what he meant, not what he said.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another. - "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908.

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell. - Tremendous Trifles.

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.

People generally quarrel because they can't argue.

Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.


The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

[knightmare]

вначале ужос - очень многа букав... правда потом пробелов побольше становится, но после букав, которые были вначале, это не помогает... короче, автор, иди пройди тест Войта-Кампфа нах.