He had simply guessed that for me freedom meant the freedom to satisfy desire, private ambition. Against that he set a freedom that must be responsible for its actions; something much older than the existentialist freedom, I suspected — a moral imperative, an almost Christian concept, certainly not a political or democratic one. I thought back over the last few years of my life, the striving for individuality that had obsessed all my generation after the limiting and conforming years of the war, our retreat from society, nation, into self. I knew I couldn’t really answer his charge, the question his story posed; and that I could not get off by claiming that I was a historical victim, powerless to be anything else but selfish — or I should not be able to get off from now on. It was as if he had planted a bandillera in my shoulder, or a succubus on my back: a knowledge I did not want.

— John Fowles, The Magus

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

— John Fowles, The Magus

By Shalom Auslander
theparisreview

Hope: A Tragedy was the first title I suggested to my editor. I really thought it was right.

“No,” he said.

My parents didn’t love me, so I have low self-esteem, and I agreed to keep working. These are some of the alternate titles I presented, and the reasoning for or against them:

The Diary of Anne Frankenstein:
My working title; I never really intended to use it—too Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters—but it had grown on me, and I mentioned it to my editor as I was finishing the manuscript. This caused him to proclaim a couple of “title rules” for this novel:

1) Nothing funny.

2) No mentioning Anne Frank.

Apparently, people don’t buy “funny” novels, and they don’t buy books about Anne Frank. Which is, ironically enough, pretty fucking funny.

It’s a Wonderful Ka-Pow:
Too funny.

Did I Ever Tell You How Unlucky You Are?
Too funny.

To Those About to Be Consumed by Flames:
Too Sedaris.

Nowhere Ho:
I liked this title quite a bit, a play on the old expression “Westward Ho.” Kugel, the main character, wishes for nothing more than to be nowhere—a place with no past, no history, no wars, no genocides. My editor liked it as well, and began mentioning it to people, testing it out. It turns out young people don’t know that expression anymore. The poor dears were very confused. My editor was disappointed. I wanted to run to Nowhere even more than I had before.

There was a brief concern that they wouldn’t know who Anne Frank is, either, which, we decided, would be pretty fucking funny.

The Sufferers:
I do my best to stay out of bookstores because they make me want to kill myself, but apparentlyThe X is a bit of a trend now. The Informers, The Intuitionist, The Imperfectionists. Et cetera. There was some concern it would be seen as that. I had a difficult time believing that things had gotten so bad that the word “The” was a trend.

“Like the Bible?” I asked.

“Keep working,” I was told.

The Lacerations and The Crematorians died for the same reason. Probably for the best, those.

What Have You Done, Mother, What Have You Done?
My editor phoned one day, and told me that he liked novel titles that were questions.

“Questions?” I asked.

“Questions.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I like titles that are questions,” he said.

“That’s why?”

“Yes.”

“Because you just like them?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you like titles that are questions?”

“Hey,” he replied, “what’s with all the goddamned questions?”

“Sorry,” I said.

My parents didn’t love me, so I have low self-esteem, and I agreed to keep working.

The Sea:
That’s the title of a John Banville novel. It makes me laugh for some reason, and so I suggest it as a title for every book I write. This was the response:

?

The Driftwood Remains:
There’s an old Yiddish expression: the storm passes but the driftwood remains. It seemed appropriate, and it sounded like a “literary novel,” plus Yiddish is a dying language, so I’d get points for that.

“What’s the title?” people asked.

“The Driftwood Remains,” I said.

“Oh,” they replied, nodding their heads as if to say, Yes—yes, that sounds like a book. My editor, showing it to people he knew, was getting the same unenthusiastic reception.

We kept looking. As the time ticked by, the suggestions received more scrutiny and less consideration. The Attic was my shrink’s recommendation. He pushed it pretty hard, too. “Because the attic is his superego, which he is trying to emerge from beneath.” That’s what’s called knowing too much about your character. Just analyze me, Doc, stay away from my characters. Laceration Nation—too George Saunders. Life’s a Gas—too Tadeusz Borowski.Sufferer’s Delight—too Sugarhill Gang.

The Excruciating Agony of Joy: Sounded to my wife a bit too much like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She was pushing for Hope: A Tragedy from the beginning, though, so maybe she was just bullshitting me.

At last, time ran out and the winter catalog had to ship, which is the way most literary decisions are finally made.

“How about,” the editor said to me, “Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel? But when the copy editor complains, I’m giving her your landline.”

There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

All that is past possesses our present. Seidevarre possesses Bourani. Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest.

— John Fowles, The Magus

To arrive at even the nearest stars man would have to travel for millions of years at the speed of light. Even if we had the means to travel at the speed of light we could not go to, and return from, any other inhabited area of the universe in any one lifetime; nor can we communicate by other scientific means, such as some gigantic heliograph or by radio waves. We are for ever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.

How futile all our excitement over aeroplanes! How stupid this fictional literature by writers like Verne and Wells about the peculiar beings that inhabit other planets!

But it is without doubt that there are other planets round other stars, that life obeys universal norms, and that in the cosmos there are beings who have evolved in the same way and with the same aspirations as ourselves. Are we then condemned never to communicate with them?

Only one method of communication is not dependent on time. Some deny that it exists. But there are many cases, reliably guaranteed by reputable and scientific witnesses, of thoughts being communicated at precisely the moment they were conceived. Among certain primitive cultures, such as the Lapp, this phenomenon is so frequent, so accepted, that it is used as a matter of everyday convenience, as we in France use the telegraph or telephone.

Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained.

This is the only means we shall ever have of communicating with mankind in other worlds. Sic itur ad astra.

This potential simultaneity of awareness in conscious beings operates as the pantograph does. As the hand draws, the copy is made.

The writer of this pamphlet is not a spiritualist and is not interested in spiritualism. He has for some years been investigating telepathic and other phenomena on the fringe of normal medical science. His interests are purely scientific. He repeats that he does not believe in the ‘supernatural’; in rosicrucianism, hermetism, or other such aberrations.

He maintains that already more advanced worlds than our own are trying to communicate with us; and that a whole category of noble and beneficial mental behaviour, which appears in our societies as good conscience, humane deeds, artistic inspiration, scientific genius, is really dictated by half-understood telepathic messages from other worlds. He believes that the Muses are not a poetic fiction; but a classical insight into scientific reality we moderns should do well to investigate.

He pleads for more public money and co-operation in research into telepathy and allied phenomena; above all he pleads for more scientists in this field.

Shortly he will publish direct proof of the feasibility of intercommunication between worlds. Watch the Parisian press for an announcement.

— John Fowles, The Magus

There are people who have said that I’m being brave for being openly supportive of gay marriage, gay adoption, basically of gay rights but with all due respect I humbly dissent, I’m not being brave, I’m being a decent human being. And I don’t think I should receive an award for that or for merely stating what I believe to be true, that love is a human experience not a political statement. However, I acknowledge that sadly we live in a world where not everybody feels the same. My family and I will help the good fight continue until that long awaited moment arrives, when our rights are equal and when the political limits on love have been smashed.

— Anne Hathaway
(via joberholtzer)

A space suit is made out of a flight suit, a Goodrich tire, a bra, a girdle, a raincoat, a tomato worm. An American rocket ship is made out of a nuclear weapon, and a German ballistic missile; a “space program” — a new organization with new goals — is made out of preexisting military, scholarly, and industrial institutions and techniques.

— Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit

The first thing that goes through a captain’s head when he hears there’s low morale going around is: What’d I do? Is it all my fault? Well, he’s probably right. Most of us have been together a long time. There were others that were here before that. Do you all… not… like me anymore? I mean… What am I supposed to do? I don’t know. Look. If you’re not against me, don’t cross this line. If yes… do. I love you all.

— Capt Steve Zissou, from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

[U]pon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done.

— An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679
John Fowles, The Magus

I was silent, thinking that I must make up my mind what course of action to take. I sensed an inherent hostility, which rose from beyond anything that had passed between us; the subconscious resistance of water to oil. A course of polite skepticism seemed best.

— John Fowles, The Magus

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, first paragraph

Her long hair was not quite blonde, but bleached almost to that colour. It looked odd, because the urchin cut was the fashion: girls like boys, not girls like girls; and there was something German, Danish, about her — waif-like, yet perversely or immorally so. She kept back from the open doorway, beckoned me. Her smile was very thin, very insincere, and very curt.

. . . . When I came back, she was standing with a glass of Scotch in her hand. She smiled again, but it was an effort; shut off almost at once. I helped her remove her mackintosh. She was wearing a French perfume so dark it was almost carbolic, and her primrose shirt was dirty.

. . . . She raised her glass in a silent toast. She had candid grey eyes, the only innocent things in a corrupt face, as if circumstances, not nature, had forced her to be hard. To fend for herself, yet to seem to need defending. And her voice, only very slightly Australian, yet not English, veered between harshness, faint nasal rancidity, and a strange salty directness. She was bizarre, a kind of human oxymoron.

. . . . We exchanged wary smiles.

. . . . The door opened. She had her hair up, and a towel wrapped round her; very brown shoulders, very brown legs. She went quickly back into the bathroom. Draining water gurgled. I shouted through the door.

. . . . ‘Wait a minute.’

I waited several. But then the door opened and she came out into the living-room. She was wearing a very simple white dress, and her hair was down again. She had no make-up, and looked ten times prettier.

She gave me a  little bitten-in grin. ‘I pass?’

‘The belle of the ball.’ Her look was so direct I found it disconcerting. ‘We go down?’

. . . . There I pretended to read a paperback.

Alison knelt beside me. ‘I’m sloshed. That whisky. Hey, have some of this.’ It was gin. She sat sideways, I shook my head. I thought of that white-faced English girl with the red smudged mouth. At least this girl was alive; crude, but alive.

‘I’m glad you returned tonight.’

She sipped her gin and gave me a small sizing look.

I tried again. ‘Ever read this?’

‘Let’s cut corners. To hell with literature. You’re clever and I’m beautiful. Now let’s talk about who we really are.’

The grey eyes teased; or dared.

. . . . Gradually, though I was offended at having been taught a lesson in the art of not condescending, she made me talk about myself. She did it by asking blunt questions, and by brushing aside empty answers. I began to talk about being a brigadier’s son, about loneliness, and for once mostly not to glamourize myself but simply to explain. I discovered two things about Alison: that behind her bluntness she was an expert coaxer, a handler of men, a sexual diplomat, and that her attraction lay as much in her candour as in her having a pretty body, an interesting face, and knowing it. She had a very un-English ability to flash out some truth, some seriousness, some quick surge of interest. I fell silent. I knew she was watching me. After a moment I looked at her. She had a shy, thoughtful expression; a new self.

‘Alison, I like you.’

‘I think I like you. You’ve got quite a nice mouth. For a prig.’

. . . . All the lights except one dim one had long ago been put out, and there were the usual surrendered couples on all available furniture and floor-space. The party had paired off. Maggie seemed to have disappeared, and Charlie lay fast asleep on the bedroom floor. We danced. We began close, and became closer. I kissed her hair, and then her neck, and she pressed my hand, and moved a little closer still.

‘Shall we go upstairs?’

‘You go first. I’ll come in a minute.’ She slipped away, and I went up to my flat. Ten minutes passed, and then she was in the doorway, a faintly apprehensive smile on her face. She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice.

She came in, I shut the door, and we were kissing at once, for a minute, two minutes, pressed back against the door in the darkness.

. . . . She sat leaning back against the wall, with the too-large shirt on, a small female boy with a hurt face, staring at the bedcover, in our silence.

. . . . But those grey, searching, always candid eyes, by their begging me not to lie, made me lie.

‘I like you. Really very much.’

‘Come back to bed and hold me. Nothing else. Just hold me.’

I got into bed and held her. Then for the first time in my life I made love to a woman in tears.

. . . . Alison was always feminine; she never, like so many English girls, betrayed her gender. She wasn’t beautiful, she very often wasn’t even pretty. But she had a fashionably thin boyish figure, she had a contemporary dress sense, she had a conscious way of walking, and her sum was extraordinarily more than her parts. I would sit in the car and watch her walking down the street towards me, pause, cross the road; and she looked wonderful. But then when she was close, beside me, there so often seemed to be something rather shallow, something spoilt-child, in her appearance. Even close to her, I was always being wrong-footed. She would be ugly at one moment, and then some movement, expression, angle of her face, made ugliness impossible.

When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye-shadow, which married with the sulky was she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more. Men were always aware of her, in the street, in restaurants, in pubs; and she knew it. I used to watch them sliding their eyes at her as she passed. She was one of those rare, even among already pretty, women that are born with a natural aura of sexuality: always in their lives it will be the relationships with men, it will be how men react, that matters. And even the tamest sense it.

There was a simpler Alison, when the mascara was off. She had not even been typical of herself, those first twelve hours; but still always a little unpredictable, ambiguous. One never knew when the more sophisticated, bruised-hard persona would reappear. She would give herself violently; then yawn at the wrongest moment. . . . She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

. . . . I couldn’t see her face. We sat in silence, close and warm, both aware that we were close and aware that we were embarrassed by the implications of this talk about children. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

. . . . I remember one day when we were standing in one of the rooms at the Tate. Alison was leaning slightly against me, holding my hand, looking in her childish sweet-sucking way at a Renoir. I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off.

. . . . There was a difficult pause. I knew what she wanted me to say, but I couldn’t say it. I felt as a sleepwalker must feel when he wakes up at the end of the roof parapet. I wasn’t ready for marriage, for settling down. I wasn’t psychologically close enough to her; something I couldn’t define, obscure, monstrous, lay between us, and this obscure monstrous thing emanated from her, not from me.

. . . . ‘If I say what I feel about you, will you … ‘

‘I know what you feel.’

And it was there: an accusing silence.

I reached out and touched her bare stomach. She pushed my hand away, but held it. ‘You feel, I feel, what’s the good. It’s what we feel. What you feel is what I feel. I’m a woman.’

I was frightened; and calculated my answer.

‘Would you marry me if I asked you?’

‘You can’t say it like that.’

. . . . The rain came in sudden great swathes across the tree-tops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice that tried to be normal, but sounded harsh.

‘I don’t want to hurt you and the more I … want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me and the more you don’t want me the more you will.’

. . . . We overslept in the morning. I had deliberately set the alarm late, to make a rush, not to leave time for tears. Alison ate her breakfast standing up. We talked about absurd things; cutting the milk order, where a library ticket I had lost might be. And then she put down her coffee-cup and we were standing at the door. I saw her face, as if it was still not too late, all a bad dream, her grey eyes searching mine, her small puffy cheeks. There were tears forming in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to say something. But then she leant forward, desperately, clumsily, kissed me so swiftly that I hardly felt her mouth; and was gone. Her camel-hair coat disappeared down the stairs. She didn’t look back. I went to the window, and saw her walking fast across the street, the pale coat, the straw-coloured hair almost the same colour as the coat, a movement of her hand to her handbag, her blowing her nose; not once did she look back. She broke into a run. I opened the window and leant out and watched until she disappeared round the corner at the end of the street into Marylebone Road. And not even then, at the very end, did she look back.

I turned to the room, washed up the breakfast things, made the bed; then I sat at the table and wrote out a cheque for fifty pounds, and a little note.

Alison darling, please believe that if it was to be anyone, it would have been you; that I’ve really been far sadder than I could show, if we were not both to go mad. Please wear the ear-rings. Please take this money and buy a scooter and go where we used to go — or do what you want with it. Please look after yourself. Oh God, if only I was worth waiting for …

NICHOLAS

It was supposed to sound spontaneous, but I had been composing it on and off for days. I put the cheque and the note in an envelope, and set it on the mantlepiece with the little box containing the pair of jet ear-rings we had seen in a closed antique-shop one day. Then I shaved and went out to get a taxi.

The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped; and hardly less clearly, but much more odiously, that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won. So on top of the excitement of the voyage into the unknown, the taking wing again, I had an agreeable feeling of emotional triumph. A dry feeling; but I liked things dry. I went towards Victoria as a hungry man goes towards a good dinner after a couple of glasses of Mananzilla. I began to hum, and it was not a brave attempt to hide my grief, but a revoltingly unclouded desire to celebrate my release.

— John Fowles, The Magus