experimented with many different reading venues and positions: cafés, trains, bathtubs, rooftops, and cemeteries; sitting, standing, leaning, suspended in a hammock, balanced against a wall on his head, but finally he came to the conclusion that he was happiest at home, lying on his back on the floor. Maximilian would stare at page after page for ten hours at a stretch, finding that this method allowed him to finish a threehundred-page book in a single day. Consequently, three-hundredpage books tended to become his favourites, and he found himself accumulating quite a few.
From time to time, Maximilian wondered whether there was something wrong, even perverse, perhaps hypocritical about his reliance on routine. Yes, he did like to control every element of his domestic life, for every last detail to be planned, for every inch of his living quarters to be entirely under his control; and certainly many people would have criticised his lifestyle as being unhealthy, a subject worthy of mockery. But these doubts never lasted very long. Maximilian was content. This was how he wanted to live. The hypocrites were the ones who believed they were any different. (Not, of course, that he had ever actually conversed with any such people, nor been subject to their criticisms.) Most people’s lives were ordered to precisely the same degree. The difference was that he chose to order his life, quite consciously, and in a form that might be termed “idiosyncratic,” not at all on the model of “ordinary” life and its concerns.
He never really asked himself why he had such a great need for solitude, feeling that there was no other way in which he could comfortably live. Social niceties would steal precious hours away from his work, leaving his creations neglected. A single sentence addressed to Maximilian—even those routinely fired in his direction by shop assistants—could throw him off balance and upset the rhythm of his work for the rest of the day. When he thought about the way in which most people lived, he could not help but recoil. The quotidian world sprawling about him in all directions was enormously depressing, if not terrifying. For him it was a place in which the imagination had been destroyed in favour of empty ritual; his rituals, by contrast, being heavy with purpose. He could not bear to open his mouth there, in that larger world. On some days even to walk down a perfectly ordinary street, populated with shops and traffic and pedestrians, would be enough to topple him into despair. After weeks of forgetting that the quotidian existed, he would come across a certain face or street corner and this would return him forcefully to the lives of others. So often he could separate himself from these lives, holding them at arm’s length, but when he could not continue to do so, however transient his lapse, it often felt as though the ugliness of everyone else’s realities had fallen upon him in some horrible, tumbling profusion, and he would retreat into himself once more.
(1961)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
