Frost: A Novel Read Free Page A

difficult, but not a hopeless case. “Strength of character, leading to death,” a phrase from a book I’d read early on, occurred to me, and made me think about the painter: How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to aman? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can’t be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It’s something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he’ll have walled himself up. Then, once he can’t see out anymore, because he can’t breathe anymore, he’ll be persuasive: because he’ll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.
    “A brain is like a state,” the painter said. “Suddenly anarchy breaks loose.” I was in his room, waiting for him to get his boots on. “The greater and lesser assailants among the ideas” would form coalitions, only for these coalitions to be equally suddenly revoked. And “being understood, and wanting to be understood, are a deception. Based on all the errors of gender.” Contraries reigned for a single, everlasting night over the day. “Colors, you know, colors are everything. Which means shadows are everything. Contraries are very highly colored.” In many ways, it was like clothes: you buy them and wear them a few times, and then you don’t wear them anymore, at best you sell them, give them away, let them molder away in a chest of drawers. You move them tothe attic or basement. “In the evening, you may have a sense of what the morning will be like,” he said, “but the morning is always a surprise.” There was really no such thing as experience, not really. No continuity. Admittedly, there were ways of avoiding desperation. “These ways never existed for me.” 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. He had never been short of privation, nor had he put himself beyond the reach of exploitation by others, nor could he. “I still put my trust in people even when I knew they were deceiving me, and intending to kill me.” Then he had kept himself to himself, “in the way that you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it’s a tree,” and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.
    There are people in the village who have never left the valley. The bread delivery woman, for example, who started delivering bread when she was just four, and is still delivering bread now, today, at seventy. Or the milkman. Both of them have only ever seen the train from outside. And the sister of the bread delivery woman, and the sexton. For them, the Pongau is the equivalent of darkest Africa. The cobbler. They havetheir work; nothing else interests them. Or else