David Cerruti > Recent Status Updates

“Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.”

- - - A spiritual leader is a finger pointing at the moon. If the finger attempts to become the moon, this can lead to a grave sin.

- - - We don’t think twice about spending nine or ten dollars on a glass of wine. And yet we hesitate when it comes to buying a book, which is the price of only one or two glasses of wine.

- - - “A mosquito has been in my room for the last two days, and it still hasn’t bitten me.
OK, let us live together. We must share our karmic affinity.”
(reader comment: Maybe your mosquito is a male. Only females bite.)

- - - Words of wisdom, on the path to mindfulness. An example: “What is the use of someone carrying a designer handbag, when her behavior lacks the same refinement?”

The plane rose and the camera went on. The girlfriend and I talked. …
Maybe you ought to say something profound for the sound man?
No, let him sweat. Let them all sweat. It’s their film burning.
On the escalator out of the airport a man asks me, “What’s all the cameras? What’s going on?”
“I’m a poet,” I tell him.
“A poet?” he asks, “what’s your name?”
“Garcia Lorca,” I say…

I got into the door, said goodbye, turned on the radio, found a half-pint of scotch, drank that, laughing, feeling good, finally relaxed, free, burning my fingers with short cigar butts, then made it to the bed, made it to the edge, tripped, fell down, fell down across the mattress, slept, slept, slept…
In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.

I don’t know how it happens to people. I had child support, need for something to drink, rent, shoes, socks, all that stuff. Like everyone else I needed an old car, something to eat, all the little intangibles.
Like women.
Or a day at the track.

Eleven years! I didn’t have a dime more in my pocket than when I had first walked in. Eleven years. Although each night had been long, the years had gone fast. Perhaps it was the night work. Or doing the same thing over and over and over again.

It was ridiculous to be going off somewhere to get paid for reading poetry. I didn't like it and I could never get over how silly it seemed. To work like a mule until you were fifty at meaningless, low jobs, and then suddenly to be flitting about the country, a gadfly with drink in hand.

"I'll bet you know a lot of women," said Hilda. "We've read your books."
"I write fiction."
"What's fiction?"
"Fiction is an improvement on life."
"You mean you lie?" asked Gertrude.
"A little. Not too much."
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
"No. Not now."
"We'll stay," said Gertrude.
"There's only one bed."
"That's all right."
"Just one other thing ..."
"What?"
"I must sleep in the middle."

Today we walked the Rue des Martyrs from bottom to top.

There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries.

,,, although the war had been over a long time. … rich and noble ladies who wore rags out of conventional sentimentality and fear of taxes, while men on the Stock Exchange ceaselessly bought diamonds, not for their wives but because, having no confidence in the credit of any country, they sought safety in tangible wealth,

And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory. Those particular streets of Paris, will, for me, always be composed of a different substance from others.

** Reader’s lament: I wish I could quote more of the beautiful passages in this book, but they just don’t fit in this tiny quote box. I curse the 420 character limit. **

"Oh, don't let us talk about my life, I am doomed in advance." Was he then alluding to the vice which he had until then succeeded in hiding from the world, the gravity of which he perhaps exaggerated as young people do who make love for the first time or who even earlier seek solitary gratification and imagine themselves like plants which cannot disseminate their pollen without dying?

“Haven’t you read in the papers that Sarah Bernhardt said France would go on till the end. The French will let themselves be killed to the last man.” “I don’t doubt for a single instant that the French will bravely be killed to the last man,” M. de Charlus answered as though it were the most natural thing in the world, in spite of his having no intention of doing anything whatever …

Thus Napoleon invaded Russia and magnanimously invited the authorities to present themselves to him. But no one came.

On that account highly–strung men believe in the chastity of their idol. And the halo with which they surround her is also a product, but, as we see, an indirect one, of their excessive love. There is in woman something of the unconscious function of drugs which are cunning without knowing it, like morphine.

M. de Charlus put the same sort of arrogance into his tone in pronouncing the word boches as he did formerly in the train to Balbec when he alluded to men whose taste is not for women.

In fact one became giddy looking at the lazy, beautiful sky which deigned not to change its time–table and prolonged in its blue tones the lengthened day above the lighted city; it was no longer a spreading sea, but a vertical gradation of blue glaciers.

Ah! if Albertine had lived, how sweet it would have been, on the evenings when I dined out, to make an appointment with her under the arcades. At first I should have seen nobody, I should have had the emotion of believing she would not come, when all at once I should have seen one of her dear grey dresses in relief against the black wall, her smiling eyes would have perceived me ...

Once I left Gilberte early and in the middle of the night, while still half–asleep, I called Albertine. I had not been thinking or dreaming of her, nor had I mistaken her for Gilberte. My memory had lost its love for Albertine but it seems there must be an involuntary memory of the limbs, pale and sterile imitation of the other, which lives longer as certain mindless animals or plants live longer than man.

Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while, a fragment smashes away his chin. The same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Lear groans as he supports himself on his arm. He bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes, he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician in school?

The hindermost of the two flame throwers is hit. He falls. The hose slips away from the other fellow. Fire squirts about on all sides and the man burns.

Toward the end of 1997, Ronald Hoffmann . . . sent me an intriguing parcel. It contained . . . a little bar of a very dense, greyish metal, which fell onto the floor as I opened the package. I recognized it at once by its feel and its sound.
The clonk served as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, and instantly brought Uncle Tungsten to mind. . . . and it is to Ronald, therefore, that I dedicate this book.

There was also Uncle Abe, my physics uncle, who had started me on spectroscopy. He was regarded as the most brilliant of his father’s eighteen children.
But he was also perfectly capable of turning his mind to practical and commercial ends too. He played a part in developing Marmite, the widely used vitamin-rich yeast extract developed early in the century (my mother adored this; I hated it).

Exploring this took me away from my lab, took me to a new book that immediately became my bible, the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, a thick, almost cubical book of nearly three thousand pages, containing tables of every imaginable physical and chemical property, many of which, obsessively, I learned by heart.
[DC comment: I still have the 40th edition, 1958-1959]

In 1945 the Science Museum in South Kensington reopened (it had been closed for much of the war), and I first saw the giant periodic table displayed there.
I kept dreaming of the periodic table in the excited half-sleep of that night – I dreamed of it as a flashing, revolving pinwheel.