The Passion According to G.H. Read Free Page B

with antennas, and I picking up the signal. I can only make the phonetic transcription. Three thousand years ago I went astray, and what was left were phonetic fragments of me. I’m blinder than before. I saw, I did. I saw, and was frightened by the brute truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that, in admitting I’m as alive as it is — and my worst discovery is that I’m as alive as it is — I shall have to heighten my consciousness of exterior life until it becomes a crime against my personal life.
    For my previous profound morality — my morality was the desire to understand and, since I didn’t, I arranged things, this was only yesterday and now I’ve discovered that I was always profoundly moral: I only admitted the purpose — for my previous profound morality, having discovered that I’m as crudely alive as that crude light I learned yesterday, for that morality of mine, the hard glory of being alive is the horror. Before I lived in the humanized world, but did something purely alive collapse the morality I had?
    Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.

Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.
    Yesterday morning — when I left the living room to enter the maid’s room — nothing led me to suspect that I was a step away from discovering an empire. Just a step from me. My most primary struggle for the most primary life would open with the calm, devouring ferocity of desert animals. I would encounter inside myself a degree of life so primal in myself that it was nearly inanimate. Yet no gesture of mine hinted that I, with my lips dry from thirst, would come to exist.
    Only afterward did an old sentence occur to me, one that years before had been unwittingly engraved upon my memory, no more than the subtitle of a magazine article I ended up not reading: “Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Struggles Desperately for Life.” Nothing led me to guess where I was going. But then I was never one to recognize events as they were unfolding; every time they came to a head, they surprised me like a break, explosion of instants, with a date, and not the continuation of an uninterruption.
    That morning, before entering the maid’s room, what was I? I was what others had always seen me be, and that was how I knew myself. I don’t know how to say what I was. But at least I want to remember: what was I doing?
    It was almost ten in the morning, and for a long time my apartment hadn’t much belonged to me. The maid had quit the day before. The fact that nobody was talking or walking and making things happen expanded in silence that house where in semi-luxury I live. I lingered at the breakfast table — how difficult it’s being to know what I was like. Yet I must try to at least give myself a prior form in order to understand what happened when I lost that form.
    I was lingering at the breakfast table, making balls out of the soft center of a loaf of bread — was that it? I need to know, I need to know what I was! I was this: I was distractedly forming balls out of bread, and my last relaxed romantic entanglement had dissolved amicably with a caress, I gaining once again the happy and somewhat insipid taste of freedom. Does that place me? I’m easy to get along with, I have sincere friendships, and my awareness of this allows me a pleasant friendship with myself, one that has never ruled out a certain ironic feeling for myself, though without persecutions.
    But — what my silence was like before, that I don’t know and never knew. Sometimes, looking at a snapshot taken on the beach or at a party, I noted with light ironic dread what that smiling, darkened face revealed to me: a silence. A silence and a destiny that escaped me, I, hieroglyphic fragment of an empire dead or alive. Looking at the picture I saw the mystery. No. I’m going to lose the rest of my fear of bad taste, I’m going to begin my exercise in courage, courage isn’t being alive, knowing that