did find a relative happiness even though alone on a desert island, with nothing more perhaps than an old shot-gun and a pair of torn breeches. A clean slate, with twenty-five thousand years of post-Magdalenian “progress” buried in his neurones. An eighteenth-century conception of relative happiness! And when Friday comes along, though Friday, or Vendredi, is only a savage and does not speak the language of Crusoe, the circle is complete. I should like to read the book again—and I will some rainy day. A remarkable book, coming at the culmination of our marvelous Faustian culture. Men like Rousseau, Beethoven, Napoleon, Goethe on the horizon. The whole civilized world staying up nights to read it in ninety-seven different tongues. A picture of reality in the eighteenth century. Henceforward no more desert isles. Henceforward wherever one happens to be born is a desert isle. Every man his own civilized desert, the island of self on which he is shipwrecked: happiness, relative or absolute, is out of the question. Henceforward everyone is running away from himself to find an imaginary desert isle, to live out this dream of Robinson Crusoe. Follow the classic flights, of Melville, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Jack London, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence … thousands of them. None of them found happiness. Rimbaud found cancer. Gauguin found syphilis. Lawrence found the white plague. The plague—that’s it! Be it cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, or what not. The plague! The plague of modern progress: colonization, trade, free Bibles, war, disease, artificial limbs, factories, slaves, insanity, neuroses, psychoses, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, anemia, strikes, lockouts, starvation, nullity, vacuity, restlessness, striving, despair, ennui, suicide, bankruptcy, arterio-sclerosis, megalomania, schizophrenia, hernia, cocaine, prussic acid, stink bombs, tear gas, mad dogs, auto-suggestion, auto-intoxication, psychotherapy, hydrotherapy, electric massages, vacuum cleaners, pemmican, grape nuts, hemorrhoids, gangrene. No desert isles. No Paradise. Not even relative happiness. Men running away from themselves so frantically that they look for salvation under the ice floes or in tropical swamps, or else they climb the Himalayas or asphyxiate themselves in the stratosphere….
What fascinated the men of the eighteenth century was the vision of the end. They had enough. They wanted to retrace their steps, climb back into the womb again.
THIS IS AN ADDENDA FOR LAROUSSE. …
What impressed me, in the urinal by the Luxembourg, was how little it mattered what the book contained; it was the moment of reading it that counted, the moment that contained the book, the moment that definitely and for all time placed the book in the living ambiance of a room with its sunbeams, its atmosphere of convalescence, its homely chairs, its rag carpet, its odor of cooking and washing, its mother image bulking large and totemlike, its windows giving out on the street and throwing into the retina the jumbled issues of idle, sprawling figures, of gnarled trees, trolley wires, cats on the roof, tattered nightmares dancing from the clotheslines, saloon doors swinging, parasols unfurled, snow clotting, horses slipping, engines racing, the panes frosted, the trees sprouting. The story of Robinson Crusoe owes its appeal—for me, at least—to the moment in which I discovered it. It lives on in an everincreasing phantasmagoria, a living part of a life filled with phantasmagoria. For me Robinson Crusoe belongs in the same category as certain parts of Vergil—or, what time is it? For, whenever I think of Vergil, I think automatically—what time is it? Vergil to me is a baldheaded guy with spectacles tilting back in his chair and leaving a grease mark on the blackboard; a bald-headed guy opening wide his mouth in a delirium which he simulated five days a week for four successive years; a big mouth with false teeth producing this strange oracular nonsense: rari nantes in gurgite vasto. Vividly I recall the unholy joy with which he pronounced this phrase. A great phrase, according to this bald-pated, goggle-eyed son of a bitch. We scanned it and we parsed it, we repeated it after him, we swallowed it like cod liver oil, we chewed it like dyspepsia tablets, we opened wide our mouths as he did and we reproduced the miracle day after day five days in the week, year in and year out, like worn-out records, until Vergil was done for and out of our lives for good and all.
But every time this goggle-eyed bastard opened wide his mouth and the glorious phrase rolled out I heard what was most important for me to hear at that moment—what time is it? Soon time to go to Math. Soon time for recess. Soon time to wash up. … I am one individual who is going to be honest about Vergil and his fucking rari nantes in gurgite vasto. I say without blushing or stammering, without the least confusion, regret or remorse that recess in the toilet was worth a thousand Vergils, always was and always will be. At recess we came alive. At recess we who were Gentile and had no better sense grew delirious: in and out of the cabinets we ran, slamming the doors and breaking the locks. We seemed to have been taken with delirium tremens. As we pelted each other with food and shouted and cursed and tripped each other up, we muttered now and then—rari nantes in gurgite vasto. The din we created was so great, and the damage so vast, that whenever we Gentiles went to the toilet the Latin teacher went with us, or if he were eating out that day then the History teacher followed us in. And a wry face they could make, standing in the toilet with delicate, buttered sandwich in hand listening to the pooping and squawking of us brats. The moment they left the toilet to get a breath of fresh air we raised our voices in song, which was not considered reprehensible, but which no doubt was a condition greatly envied by the bespectacled professors who had to use the toilet now and then themselves, learned as they were.
O the wonderful recesses in the toilet! To them I owe my knowledge of Boccaccio, of Rabelais, of Petronius, of The Golden Ass. All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. At the worst, Ulysses, or a detective story. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content. And this is not to denigrate the talent of the author. This is simply to move him a little closer to the good company of Abelard, Petrarch, Rabelais, Villon, Boccaccio—all the fine, lusty genuine spirits who recognized dung for dung and angels for angels. Fine company, and no rari nantes in gurgite vasto. And the more ramshackle the toilet, the more dilapidated it be, the better. (Same for urinals.) To enjoy Rabelais, for example—such a passage as “How to Rebuild the Walls of Paris”—I recommend a plain, country toilet, a little outhouse in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door. No buttons to push, no chain to pull, no pink toilet paper. Just a rough-carved seat big enough to frame your behind, and two other holes of dimensions suitable for other behinds. If you can bring a friend along and have him sit beside you, excellent! A good book is always more enjoyable in good company. A beautiful half-hour you can while away sitting in the outhouse with a friend—a half-hour which will remain with you all your life, and the book it contained, and the odor thereof.
No harm, I say, can ever be done a great book by taking it with you to the toilet. Only the little books suffer thereby. Only the little books make ass wipers. Such a one is Little Caesar, now translated into French and forming one of the Passions series. Turning the pages over it seems to me that I am back home again reading the headlines, listening to the goddamned radios, riding tin buggies, drinking cheap gin, buggering virgin harlots with a corn cob, stringing up niggers and burning them alive. Something to give one diarrhoea. And the same goes for the Atlantic Monthly, or any other monthly, for Aldous Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dreiser, etc., etc. … I hear no bell ringing inside me when I bring these birds to the water closet. I pull the chain and down the sewer they go. Down the Seine and into the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe a year hence they will bob up again—on the shores of Coney Island, or Midland Beach, or Miami, along with dead jelly fish, snails, clams, used condoms, pink toilet paper, yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s suicides.…
No more peeping through keyholes! No more masturbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and
