At last I got rid of every bit of the grand style, the old church.
I came to the pure sensation without a thought in my head.
Just a harp in the wind. And a lot of my stuff was good. Purest
go-as-you-please.
And I sold it too. I made more money then than I ever did again.
People like impressionism. Still do, because it hasn't any idea
in it. Because it doesn't ask anything from them—because
it's just a nice sensation, a little song. Good for the drawing-room.
Teacakes.
But I got tired of sugar. I grew up.
And when they showed me a room full of my own confections, I felt
quite sick. Like grandpa brought to a nursery tea. As for icing
any more eclairs, I couldn't bring myself to it. I gradually stopped
painting and took to arguing instead. Arguing and reading and drinking;
politics, philosophy and pub-crawling; all the things chaps do who
can't do anything else. Who've run up against the buffers. And I got
in such a low state that I was frightened of the dark. Yes, as every
night approached, I fairly trembled. I knew what it would be like.
A vacuum sucking one's skull into a black glass bottle; all in silence.
I used to go out and get drunk, to keep some kind of illumination going
in my dome.
All manner of people grew interested in Kino — people with
things to sell and people with favors to ask. Kino had found
the Pearl of the World. The essence of pearl mixed with the
essence of men and a curious dark residue precipitated. Every
man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl, and Kino's pearl
went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans,
the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers,
of everyone, and only one person stood in the way, and that
was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy. The
news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town;
the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in
the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld.
The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the
town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it.
After the argument that I had lost but pretended to win, I
stormed out of the HUD house, jumped into the car, and
prepared to drive off in victory, which was also known as
defeat. But I realized that I hadn't grabbed my keys. At that
kind of moment, a person begins to realize how he can be
fooled by his own games. And at that kind of moment, a
person begins to formulate a new game to compensate for the
failure of the first.
“Honey, I'm home,” I yelled as I walked back into the
house.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects
that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of
utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills
the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally
pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we
take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication
into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the
timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the
splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's
scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner
feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only
we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we
feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd
into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.