This is something that actually happened several years ago. I have altered the names on account of certain circumstances, but other than that it's entirely true.
I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about 2 years. At that time, I got to know this architect--a handsome guy, just past fifty, about half of his hair was white. He wasn't very tall. He enjoyed swimming a lot, swam everyday, and consequently was in very good shape. He played tennis once in a while as well. As for his name--let's call him Casey. He was single, and lived in this old mansion in Lexington, a suburb of Boston, together with an extremely reticent, sallow-faced piano tuner. His name was Jeremy: probably mid-thirties, tall, slender as a willow, hair thinning a little. In addition to being a piano tuner he also played tolerably.
A few of my stories had been translated into English, and then had appeared in a magazine. Casey had read these and sent me a letter through my publisher.
"I'm very interested in your work, and curious what kind of person you are," he wrote. I don't usually meet people who send me fan mail (in my experience, these kinds of meetings are never very fun or interesting), but I thought that meeting this guy Casey would probably be OK. His letter was really interesting, and imbued with a his rich sense of humor. I also had the optimism that comes with living overseas. We lived quite close to each other. Still, all of these circumstances didn't match up to one other, peripheral reason. The single biggest reason I wanted to meet this guy Casey was that he was the owner of a magnificent collection of old jazz records.
"If you searched the whole country over, you probably wouldn't find a single private collection that is so complete. I understand that you like jazz a lot, or are at least interested in it," he wrote. Just so. I am certainly interested in it. After reading his letter, I wanted to see this record collection so badly I couldn't stand it. When I get ensnared by a collection of old jazz records, all my psychological powers of resistance disappear, like a horse bewitched by the scent of some special tree.
Casey's house was in Lexington. That's about 30 minutes by car from where I lived. When I called him, he faxed me a detailed map with directions. One afternoon in April, I got in my green Volkswagen and drove to his house alone. I quickly picked it out. It's was a huge, old three-story house. It had probably been standing there for at least 100 years. Even in Boston's swank residential neighborhoods, where stately mansions stand side-by-side and all have long histories, this splendid house particularly stuck out. It was good enough for a postcard.
The garden was like a vast forest, and blue jays jumped from branch to branch, raising their sharp, merry voices all the while. There was a new BMW parked in the driveway. When I parked the car behind the BMW, a large mastiff who had been sleeping on the welcome mat on the front porch slowly got to his feet and barked dutifully two or three times. His bark seemed to suggest "It's not that I really want to bark, so I'll do it sort of halfway."
Casey came out and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake that seemed to confirm something. While he was shaking my hand, he patted my shoulder gently with his other hand. This was a frequent mannerism of his. "Hi. I'm glad you came. It's really nice to meet you," he said. He was wearing a fashionable white Italian shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a light brown cashmere cardigan, and soft cotton pants. He also had on a pair of small Georgio Armani-style glasses. All very smart.
Casey took me inside, sat me down on a sofa in the living room, and brought out a freshly-made pot of excellent coffee.
Casey wasn't overly forward; he'd had a good upbringing and was well-educated. Having traveled all over the world when he was young, he was a great conversationalist. We got to be good friends, and I went over to his house to hang out about once a month. And he shared the blessing of that splendid record collection with me. When I was there, I was able to listen to incredibly rare and valuable music as much as I liked, which I otherwise never would have heard. Compared to that record collection, the stereo system wasn't so great, but the old vacuum-tube amp produced a warm, nostalgic sound.
Casey used the house's study as his office, and drew up building plans on a big computer there. But he didn't tell me very much about his work. "It's not particularly important," he said with a laugh, as if making an excuse. I have no idea what kind of buildings he designed. He never appeared to be particularly busy. The Casey I knew was always sitting on the sofa in the living room, his wine glass tilted elegantly, reading a book or straining to hear Jeremy's piano. Or perhaps sitting in his garden chair playing with the dog. It's just a feeling I have, but I think that he didn't work that hard.
His deceased father had been a nationally famous psychologist, and had written five or six books, all of which were well on their way to becoming classics. Also a devoted jazz fan, he was a close friend of Prestige Records founder and producer Bob Weinstock, and on account of that his collection of jazz vinyl from the 1940's to the 1960's was, as Casey 's letter had said, astonishingly complete. While it's sheer volume was particularly impressive, one couldn't complain about the outstanding quality of the records either. Almost all the records were first editions and in perfect condition. Neither the jackets nor the disks themselves had the slightest blemish. It was very close to miraculous. Casey took great care with their preservation, and he handled each one as if he were bathing an infant.
Casey had no siblings, and his mother died when he was young. His father had never remarried. Hence, when his father had succumbed to pancreatic cancer 15 years before, he alone had inherited the house and all it's various heirlooms, including the complete record collection. Because Casey respected his father more than anyone, and loved him too, he didn't get rid of a single record, and preserved the whole collection with great care, just as it was. Casey liked to listen to jazz, but he wasn't as ardent a fan as his father. He really preferred classical music, and whenever Seiji Ozawa was conducting the Boston Symphony, he and Jeremy never failed to attend.
After I had known him for about a year, Casey asked me to take care of his house while we was away. Although it happened very rarely, he had to go to London for about a week on business. When Casey went away on trips, Jeremy usually looked after the house, but this time he couldn't. Jeremy's mother, who lived in West Virginia, was in declining health, and a short time before he had gone back home. So Casey called me.
"Sorry to do this to you, but I couldn't think of anyone else," he said. "And while I say ‘house-sitter,' aside from giving Miles (that was the dog's name) his food twice a day, there's not really anything else to do. You can listen to whatever records you like. And there's plenty of food and drink, so help yourself."
It didn't sound like a bad proposition. I was living alone at that time on account of certain circumstances, and the house next to my apartment in Cambridge was under construction, so there was an unbearable racket everyday. I got some extra clothes, my MacIntosh Powerbook, and a couple of books and went to Casey's house early in the afternoon one Friday. Casey had just finished packing and was about to call a taxi.
Have a good time in London, I said
"Yeah, of course," Casey said smiling. "Enjoy the house and the records. It's not a bad place."
After Casey had gone, I went to the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee. Then I set up my computer on a table in the music room, which adjoined the living room and, listening to some of the records Casey's father had left behind, I worked for about an hour. It seemed like I should be able to get a lot of work done during the coming week.
The desk, a huge mahogany affair, had drawers on either side. It was from quite an ancient time. It was by far the oldest thing in the room, and beside anything from a different era, like the MacIntosh I had brought with me, it seemed as if it had remained there unmoved for an unimaginably long period of time. After his father had died, Casey hadn't added so much as a postage stamp to the music room--it was as if he regarded it as some holy shrine or reliquary. While the whole house was prone to dust on account of it's age, in the music room it was as if the flow of time had stopped until moments before. It was in perfect order. There wasn't a speck of dust on the shelves, and the desk was polished to sparkling.
Miles came in and lay down at my feet. I patted his head a few times. He was a terribly lonely dog, and couldn't stand to be alone for very long. He'd been trained to sleep on his own bed in the kitchen, but the rest of the time he was always at someone's side, unaffectedly attaching himself to some part of his companion's body.
The living room and the music room were separated by a high door-less doorway. In the living room there was a large brick fireplace, and a very comfortable three-person leather sofa. There were four mismatched arm-chairs, and three coffee tables, also all distinct. A fancy, but now somewhat faded, Persian carpet had been laid on the floor, and from the high ceiling dangled a chandelier of ancient origin. I went in and sat down on the sofa, taking in my surroundings. The clock above the fireplace chopped up the minutes with a tick-tock that sounded like someone smashing a window on tip-toes.
The tall wooden bookshelves against the wall were lined art books and volumes on all sorts of specialties. A couple of oil paintings of some unknown coastline hung on three walls, kind of haphazardly. The general impression created by this scenery was somehow fitting. No human form could be seen in any of these pictures, just lonely sea-scapes. They looked as though, if you brought your ear up close enough, you'd be able to hear the sound of the chill wind and the rough seas. Splendid pieces, all, but not a one that particularly stood out. There wafted from each one the smell of moderate, New England-style, but still quite detached, Old Money.
The record shelf was against one broad wall of the music room, and all of those old records were lined up neatly, in alphabetical order according to the performers' names. Even Casey didn't know exactly how many there were. It's probably around six or seven thousand, he had said. But there are the same number again, packed in cardboard boxes and stored in the attic. "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole place sank into the ground someday on account of the weight of all those old records, like the House of Usher."
I set an old Lee Connitz 10" on the turntable, and as I sat at the desk writing, time passed comfortably and tranquilly. I had a very pleasant sensation, like I had buried myself in a perfectly-fitting mould. As time passed, I felt like I developed a special, carefully-constructed intimacy with this room. The reverberation of the music permeated everything: every nook of the room, every tiny cavity in the walls, right down to the creases in the curtains.
That evening I opened a bottle of Montepulciano that Casey had left specially for me, poured it into a crystal wine glass, and drank several glasses, sitting on the sofa reading a new-release novel I had just bought. Even disregarding Casey's recommendation, the wine was great. I got a wedge of Brie out of the refrigerator and ate about a quarter of it with crackers. All the while, it was quiet as a mouse. Apart from the tick-tock of the aforementioned clock, the only sound that could be heard was the occasional car passing on the street out front. The street closest to the house was just a cul-de-sac, though, so traffic was limited just to people in the neighborhood. When evening came, it dropped off to almost nothing. Coming from Cambridge, with it's noisy student crowds, it felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean. As per my usual, when the clock struck 11 I began to feel a little tired. Putting the book aside, I set my wine glass in the kitchen sink and said goodnight to Miles. The dog curled up on top of his bed with resignation and, after a slight groan, shut his eyes. I turned out the lights and went up to the guest bedroom on the second floor. I changed into my pajamas and was soon fast asleep.
When I woke up, I was in a formless void. I didn't know where I was. For a little while I was senseless, like a wilted vegetable. Like a vegetable that's forgotten and left forgotten in a dark cupboard for a long time. At length I finally remembered that I was house-sitting for Casey. Oh, yeah. I'm in Lexington. I fumbled around for the wristwatch I had left on the pillow. When I pushed the button, the time appeared with a blue glow. It was 1:15.
I quietly raised myself from the bed and turned on a small reading lamp. It took me a minute to find the switch. The lamp was made of polished glass in the shape of a lily, and produced a yellow light. I rubbed my temples strongly with the palms of both hands, heaved a big sigh, and looked around the inside of the brightened room. I inspected the walls, gazed across the carpet, and looked up at the ceiling. Then, like collecting beans that had spilled out on the floor, I gathered up the fragments of my consciousness one-by-one, and got reacquainted with the reality of my body. Gradually, I became aware of something: there was a sound. A low rumble, like waves crashing against the shore--that sound is what had roused me from my deep sleep.
Someone is downstairs.
I tip-toed to the door and held my breath. Soon, I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat. There was no mistaking that there was someone in the house besides me. And it wasn't just one or two people. A sound like music could also be faintly heard. I had no idea why. A cold sweat began to trickle from my armpits. What in the world had gone on while I was asleep?
The first thing that popped into my head was that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. Casey had only pretended to go to London, but in reality had stayed behind, and had organized a party in the middle of the night just to scare me. No matter how I thought it about it though, I couldn't convince myself that Casey was the type to play such a childish prank. His sense of humor was more refined, more elegant.
Or perhaps--I thought, as I stood there still leaning on the door--the people down there were acquaintances of Casey's whom I didn't know. They knew that Casey was going out of town (but not that I was house-sitting for him), and had decided to stop by his house in his absence. At any rate, I was pretty sure that they weren't burglars. When burglars break into someone's house, they usually don't play their music so loud.
I took off my pajamas and picked up my pants. I put on my sneakers and pulled a sweater over my T-shirt. But I was only one person. I wanted something in my hands. Glancing around the room, nothing suitable presented itself. There wasn't a baseball bat or a set of fire tongs. The only things I could see were the bed, the dresser, a small book shelf, and a framed picture.
When I went out into the hall, I could hear the noise more clearly. The sound of cheerful old-time music floated up like steam into the hallway from the bottom of the stairs. The melody was quite familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the tune.
I could hear voices, too. Since there were a lot of people's voices mixed up together, I couldn't make out what they were talking about. Occasionally there was a laugh. It was a pleasant, airy laugh. It seemed like there was a party going on downstairs, and by the sound of it, it was just getting good. As if coloring the whole scene, the clinking of champagne glasses and wine glasses resounded merrily. There were probably people dancing, too; I could hear what sounded like the rhythmical creaking of leather on the wood floor.
I crept down the hallway to the landing of the staircase. Leaning forward over the banister, I looked down. Light spilled out from the high vertical window in the foyer, filling it with a queer, ghastly light. There were no shadows. The doors that separated the living room from the hall were shut tight. I know that I had left them open when I went to bed. I am absolutely certain of that. There was no alternative but that someone had shut them after I had gone upstairs to bed.
I was completely at a loss about what to do. One possibility was to return to my second-floor bedroom and hide. Lock the door from the inside, crawl into bed and... When I considered the matter calmly, this seemed like the most prudent course of action. And yet, standing at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of that cheery music and laughter, it was something of a shock to realize that it seemed to be growing quieter, like ripples on the surface of a pond subsiding. Judging by that atmosphere, I surmised that perhaps these were not an ordinary kind of people.
I took one long, deep breath and descended the stairs to the entrance hall. The rubber soles of my sneakers silently passed from one of those old wooden steps to the next. When I came to the foyer, I immediately turned left and went into the kitchen. Turning on the lights, I opened a drawer and retrieved a heavy meat cleaver. Casey was a cooking enthusiast and had a set of expensive German-made kitchen knives. The finely-polished stainless steel blade gleamed voluptuous and true in my hand.
But when I tried to imagine myself walking into that rollicking party gripping an enormous meat cleaver, I quickly realized that it was a bad idea. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and returned the meat cleaver to the drawer.
Wait:
What happened to the dog?
I realized for the first time that Miles was nowhere to be found. He wasn't on his usual pillow on the floor. Where in the world could he have gone? Wasn't it his job to bark or something if someone broke into the house in the middle of the night? Bending over, I felt the depression in the fur-covered pillow where he usually lay. No warmth remained. It seemed he'd gotten out of his bed long before and gone off somewhere.
I left the kitchen, went out into the foyer, and sat down on a small bench there. The music continued without a break and the conversation continued as well. Like waves, they swelled up from time to time, and then quieted down again, but they never stopped altogether. How many people were in there? It seemed like there had to be at least 15. Or maybe it was more like 20. At any rate, it seemed like that big living room was pretty nearly filled.
I thought for a second about whether I should throw open the doors and go in. That was a strange and difficult decision. I was the caretaker of the house after all, and as such it's management was my responsibility. On the other hand, I hadn't been invited .
I strained my ears to catch fragments of the conversation that crept through the cracks in the door, but it was impossible. The conversation blended into one monotonous whole, and I couldn't distinguish any individual words. While I knew that there was a conversation, it was like there was a thick plaster wall in front of me. There was no room for me to enter there. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out a quarter. I twiddled it around in my fingers absently. That silver coin's solidity and reality restored me to my senses. Then something hit me, like a blow on the head from a fluffy mallet:
They were ghosts.
The folks assembled in the living room, listening to music and amiably chatting away weren't real people. The air pressure changed like a phase shift had taken place, and my ears were buzzing. I tried to swallow, but my throat had gone dry and I couldn't. I put the coin back in my pocket and looked around me. My heart began to thump heavily in my chest.
It seemed very odd that I hadn't realized this until now. How totally ridiculous to think that someone would break into the house and have a party. The sound of so many cars parking near the house, and the tramp of so many feet from the front gate to the house would certainly have woken me up. The dog probably would have barked. In short, there was no way that they could have entered the house.
I wanted Miles by my side. I wanted to put my hands around his big neck, smell that smell, feel the warmth of his skin. But the dog wasn't anywhere to be seen. I went and sat back down on the bench in the foyer by myself, as if I were under a spell. Naturally, I was terrified. But it surpassed the fear of any one particular thing. The fear was deep and mysterious like some vast desert.
Taking in a couple of deep breaths, I quietly replenished the air in my lungs. Little by little, my normal senses returned. It was a feeling like many cards were being turned over deep inside my consciousness.
Then I stood up, and muffling the sound of my footsteps exactly like before, I crept up the stairs. I returned to the bedroom and, without changing my clothes, got into bed.
The music and conversation meandered on. I couldn't sleep well, so I had no choice but to lie there, until almost day-break. Leaving the light on, I leaned against the headboard and stared at the ceiling, trying to hear the sounds of the never-ending party below. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, it was raining. It was a quiet drizzle, whose sole purpose was to soak the earth. The blue jays sang from under the eaves. The clock's hour hand showed a little before nine. The doors between the foyer and the living room were again standing open, as I had left them when I went to bed. The living room was not disordered. The book that I had been reading lay open on the couch. Fine cracker crumbs were still scattered across the top of the coffee table. Just as I had anticipated, there were no traces of the party.
Miles was curled up on the kitchen floor, sound asleep. He got up and I gave him his dog food. Shaking his ears, he ate greedily and with relish, as if nothing had happened.
The bizarre party in the middle of the night took place the first night I stayed at Casey's house. After that, nothing unusual transpired. Lexington's quiet, secretive nights returned without incident. But for some reason, almost every night I was there I'd wake up in the middle of the night. It was always between 1:00 and 2:00. I guess I was just high-strung, staying in someone else's house. Or perhaps I was anxious about a recurrence of that strange party.
When I woke up like this, I'd hold my breath, and strain to hear anything in the darkness. But there was never a sound. Occasionally, I'd hear the sound of leaves rustling in the garden. At those times I'd go downstairs and get a drink of water in the kitchen. Miles was always curled up asleep on the floor, and when he saw me he'd get up happily, wag his tail, and lay his head on my feet.
I'd take the dog with me into the living room, turn on the lights, and carefully look around. I never felt anything there, though. The sofa and the coffee table were always lined up silently in their places. Those cold oil paintings of the New England coast hung on the walls as always. I'd sit down on the couch for 10 or 15 minutes and just kill time. And when I wasn't able to discover any clue as to what had happened, I'd close my eyes and focus on my consciousness. But I couldn't feel anything. I was simply in the suburbs on a quiet and peaceful night. I'd open the window that looked out on the garden and breathe in the flower-laden spring air. The curtains would flap slightly in the night breeze, and in the woods, owls would hoot.
When Casey returned after a week in London, I decided not to say anything about what had happened that night, for the time being. I can't really explain why. I just had a feeling that it was better that way. Anyway.
"So, how was it? Anything happen while I was gone?" Casey asked me as we stood in the foyer.
"No, nothing special. It was really quiet and I got a lot of work done." That was totally the truth.
"That's great," Casey said with a happy look on his face. Then he pulled a bottle of expensive scotch out of his bag that he'd gotten for me as a souvenir. We shook hands and parted, and I drove the Volkswagen back to my apartment in Cambridge.
After that, I didn't see Casey for about six months. We talked on the phone a few times. Jeremy's mother had died, so that reticent piano tuner had returned to West Virginia permanently. At that time, I was in the final stages of a long novel, so except for matters of utter necessity, I didn't have room to meet anyone or go anywhere. I was spending more than twelve hours a day at my desk working, and I don't think I was ever more that a kilometer away from my house.
The last time I met Casey was at a cafe near the Charles River boathouse. I walked there to meet him and we had a cup of coffee together. I don't know why, but Casey had aged considerably since our last meeting. He was almost unrecognizable. He looked like he had gained ten years. The white in his hair had increased, and he had dark bags under his eyes. The backs of his hands had also become more wrinkled. I couldn't reconcile him with the Casey I had known before, who had always taken such care about his appearance. Perhaps he had some kind of disease. But Casey didn't say anything about it, so I didn't ask.
Jeremy probably won't come back to Lexington, Casey said to me with a sinking voice, gently shaking his head from left to right. I call West Virginia once in a while and talk to him on the phone. The shock of his mother's death changed him somehow, he said. He's different from the Jeremy of the old days. He only talks about the constellations now. From beginning to end, this unfortunate astrology talk. How the constellations are positioned today, and so what it's OK to do today, what should be avoided, that kind of thing. When he was here, he never mentioned the stars even once.
"I'm really sorry," I said. But I didn't really know who in the world he was talking about.
"When my mother died, I was only ten years old," Casey began, his eyes fixed on his coffee cup. "Since I didn't have any brothers of sisters, it was just the two of, my father and I, left behind. She died in a yachting accident in the early fall one year. We were totally unprepared psychologically for the shock of my mother's death. She was young and vivacious; more than ten years younger than my father. It had never occurred to either my father or myself that one day my mother would die. But then one day she was suddenly gone from this world. Poof. Like she'd vanished into thin air. She was clever and gorgeous and everybody liked her. She like to go out walking, and had a great stride, with her back stretched, her chin thrust forward slightly, and both hands clasped behind her. She walked with such an air of pleasure. She usually sang songs while she walked. I loved to go walking with her, the two of us together. Whenever I think of my mother, I see her walking along the boardwalk by the sea in Newport, bathed in the vivid light of a summer morning. The hem of her long summer dress fluttered coolly in the breeze. It was a cotton flower-print dress. That scene is burned into my mind like a photograph.
"She was very dear to my father, and he valued her tremendously. I think he probably loved her even more deeply than he loved me. He was that kind of person. He loved things that he had gained by his own hand. To him, I was something obtained by a natural string of events. This is not to say that he didn't love me: I was his one and only son. But he never loved me as much as he loved my mother. This is something I understood well. There was no one that my father loved like my mother. After my mother died, he never remarried.
"For three weeks after my mother's funeral, my father slept continuously. That's not an exaggeration. Literally, for three weeks straight.
"Occasionally, he would stagger out of bed and, without saying anything, drink a glass of water and eat a little food. He looked like a sleepwalker or a ghost. It was always only for the shortest possible time, and then he'd get back into bed. With the shutters shut tight, and the air stagnant in that dark room, he slept like an enchanted princess. He hardly moved at all. He didn't roll over and his expression remained the same. Being very uneasy about him, I went back to his side time after time to check up on him. I was afraid he would suddenly die in his sleep. When I came in to fluff his pillow and bring him food, I looked closely at his face.
"But he didn't die. He just slept deeply, like a stone buried in the ground. I think he probably didn't dream. In that dark, quiet room, only the sound of his regular breathing could be heard. That sleep, so long and deep, was unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a person departed for another world. I remember being very afraid. Completely alone in that huge mansion, I felt like I had been abandoned by the whole world.
"15 years ago, when my father passed away, I was obviously very sad, but frankly I wasn't that surprised. My father looked just the same dead as he had during that deep sleep. He's just like he was then, I thought to myself. It was deja vu. This overwhelming deja vu, like something deep inside of me had shifted. From a distance of 30 years, I retraced the past just as it had been. Only this time, I couldn't hear the sound of his breathing.
"I loved my father. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. I respected him, too. But even more than that, I was strongly bound to him, both emotionally and spiritually. I know this may sound strange, but when my father died I, too, got in bed and slept for many days, exactly like my father had when my mother died. It was like I had succeeded to some special ritual of my bloodline.
"It probably lasted for about two weeks. During that time I slept and slept and slept... I slept until time decayed and melted away into nothing. No matter how much I slept, it was never enough. At that time, the world of sleep was the real world, and the everyday world became nothing more than a vain and temporary place. It was a superficial world devoid of the color of life. I thought that I didn't want to live anymore in such a world. Gradually, I came to understand what I imagine my father must have felt like when my mother died. Do you get what I'm saying? Things take on a different shape all together. Without these new shapes, they can't exist."
Casey was then silent for a moment as if he was thinking about something. It was late fall, and the sound of acorns falling and hitting the ground with a thud occasionally reached my ears.
"There's only one thing I can say," Casey said raising his head, his familiar stylish smile returning to his lips. "When I die, there is not one person in the world who will have to sleep that deep sleep."
Sometimes I think about the Lexington ghosts: about their unknown character and number, and about that lively party they had in the living room of Casey's old mansion in the middle of the night. And I think about Casey and his long, solitary deep sleep, as if in preparation for death, in the second floor bedroom, with the shutters shut tight. And I think about his father. I think about Miles, the lonely dog, and that breathtaking record collection. Jeremy playing Shubert. The blue BMW wagon parked in front of the front door. But they all have the feeling of things that happened a terribly long time ago in a place terribly far away. Even though they just happened recently.
I've never told these things to anyone until now. Whenever I try to think about it, although it seems like a very strange tale indeed, perhaps on account of the distance, it doesn't seem very strange to me at all.
Translated by Christopher Allison
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami
TONY TAKITANI by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani.
Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. But Tony Takitani's mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was just a day's boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo, or anywhere else in Japan, that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai's elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.
And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest inclination to influence, or even to reflect upon, history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.
Shozaburo was also blessed (though he did not realize it) with a talent for making "useful" friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just "clicked." And they took special care of him whenever problems came up.
But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended, Shozaburo's connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I've lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought. I've slept with tons of women. I've eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There isn't so much in life that I'm sorry I missed. Besides, I'm not in any position to complain about being killed. It's just the way it goes. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them in far more terrible ways.
As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on his cell's filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance he thought, Life: I'll never understand it.
Emaciated, with no possessions to speak of, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war had ended. He discovered that his parents' house had burned down in the great Tokyo air raid of March, 1945, and they were dead. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo was now alone in the world. This was not a great shock to him, however; nor did it make him feel particularly sad. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he was convinced that everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was in his thirties, and beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had suddenly aged several years at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
One way or another, Shozaburo had managed to survive, and he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.
Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian-American from New Jersey who played a mean clarinet himself. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the records he wanted, straight from the United States, and Shozaburo would go to the major's quarters and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were difficult to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, Shozaburo thought, not a bad time to be alive.
In 1947, he married a distant cousin on his mother's side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. Before long they ended up living together, probably because she had become pregnant. At least, that was the way that Tony Takitani heard it from his father. His mother was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not very healthy. She gave birth to Tony the year after she was married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, quickly and quietly. She had experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.
Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what death was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole, as a fait accompli. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disklike thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn't say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more about what had happened. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby that he had left in the hospital.
The major took Shozaburo under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together at the base nearly every day. "You've got to get ahold of yourself," the major would tell Shozaburo. "The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right." The words meant nothing to Shozaburo, who merely nodded in silence. "Hey, I know," the major added suddenly one day. "Why don't you let me be the boy's godfather? I'll give him a name." Oh, Shozaburo thought, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.
The major suggested his own first name - Tony. Tony was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major's mind. When Shozaburo got home, he wrote the name Tony Takitani on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He stared at it for the next several days. Tony Takitani. Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last awhile, he thought, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.
For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was not much fun. The other kids at school called him a "half-breed," and whenever he told people his name they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face to face with a child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds.
Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any close friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. His father was always traveling with the band, and when Tony was little a housekeeper had come to take care of him during the day. But by the time he was in his last years at elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. This seemed preferable to having someone fussing over him all the time.
Shozaburo Takitani never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he didn't bring any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as different from each other as one might imagine. But, being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.
Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours every day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate, and highly detailed drawings of bicycles, radios, engines, and the like. If he drew a plant, he would capture every vein in every leaf. It was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually won first prize in school art contests.
So it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to art school to a career as an illustrator. There was never any need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were agonizing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And, because it was a time when most young people were acting out against the establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art-school professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony himself could not see what was so great about their work, with its ideological content. To him it looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.
Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. "They look realer than the real thing," everyone said. His sketches were more detailed than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator everybody had to have. And he took on everything - from the covers of automobile magazines to advertising illustrations. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He bought a big house in Setagaya, an affluent Tokyo suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.
By this point in his life, Tony had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them, for a short time. But he had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry he could manage for himself, and when his work interfered with those things he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He lacked his father's special charm, and he had no real friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. But he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others, and just about everybody who knew him liked him. He saw his father no more than once every two or three years, on some matter of business. When the business was over, neither man had much to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani's life went by, quietly and calmly.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. She worked part time for a publishing company, and she came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile. Her features were pleasant enough but, objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani's heart a violent punch. The moment he first saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could say what it was about her that had struck him with such force.
The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. He generally took no particular interest in what people wore, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.
After she left, he sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.
The next day, he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though they were fifteen years apart in age, they found they had much in common, almost strangely so. They agreed on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. She was a little nervous at first, but she gradually relaxed, until she was laughing and talking freely.
"You really know how to dress," Tony said when they parted.
"I like clothes," she answered, with a bashful smile. "Most of my money goes on clothing."
They went on a few dates after that. They didn't go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours - about their pasts, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other's emptiness.
The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been seeing since high school. The relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, she admitted, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere near as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but, still, that didn't mean that she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And, besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that age gap might mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.
Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn't work. He drank, alone. Suddenly, his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thick, cold walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn't want to marry me, I might just kill myself.
He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.
She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had thought well of him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this "love" she didn't know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.
By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she wasn't there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: What would he do? Sometimes this fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of his wife's suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the anxiety gradually eased. In the end, he settled down and wrapped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.
One day, she said that she wanted to hear what kind of music her father-in-law was making. "Do you think he would mind if we went to hear him?" she asked.
"Probably not," Tony said.
They went to a Ginza night club where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time that Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony had heard so often on records when he was a boy. Shozaburo's style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art, but it was music made by the skillful hand of a professional, and it could put a crowd in a good mood.
Soon, however, something began to constrict Tony Takitani's breathing, as though he were a narrow pipe that was filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge, and he found it difficult to remain seated. He couldn't help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. He had heard it years ago, of course, and he had been listening with a child's ears, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infinitesimal but crucial. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, "What is it, Father? What has changed?" But he did nothing of the sort. He would never have been able to explain what was in his mind. Instead, he stayed at his table until the end of his father's set, drinking much more than he usually did. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.
The couple's married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and they spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, traveling. Tony Takitani's work continued as successfully as ever, and, for someone so young, his wife was remarkably capable at running their home. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill. He had noticed it before their marriage, but it wasn't until their honeymoon that it began to seem serious. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. In Milan and Paris, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferr¨¦. Mesmerized, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.
Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house, and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvelous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody's perfect, he told himself.
When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.
He took the plunge one night after dinner. "I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes," he said. "It's not a question of money. I'm not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?"
His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, "You're right, of course. I don't need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can't help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can't stop myself." She promised to try to hold back. "If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long."
And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn't stand it.
She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. "Certainly, Madam," she was told. She was one of the store's best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.
A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.
Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife's clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.
Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife's, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.
Tony Takitani told the woman, "The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies - that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I've recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It's just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I'm pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead."
Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request - so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife's having died. And she understood the part about the wife's having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife's clothes. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn't look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.
"I think I understand," she said. "And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size."
"Of course," Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.
"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I've never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I'm sorry." She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
"If it's all right with you, I'd like to have you start at the office tomorrow," Tony said in a businesslike manner. "Pick out a week's worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you."
The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days' worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.
"Take a coat, too," Tony Takitani said. "You don't want to be cold."
She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.
When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife's closet, shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
These dresses had once clung to his wife's body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room's air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again, like a lukewarm broth. It's all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it's over.
He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing.
"But how can that be?" the woman asked, stunned.
"I'm sorry, but the situation has changed," he said. "You can have the clothes and shoes you took home, and the suitcase, too. I just want you to forget that this ever happened, and please don't tell anyone about it."
The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed.
"I see," she said finally, and hung up.
For a few minutes, she felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the beginning. She was sorry to have lost the job but she figured she would manage somehow or other.
She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani's house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by her front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a completely different type of matter, fashioned of materials from another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the room full of clothes she had seen at Tony Takitani's house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that "closet": it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind.
The woman's friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together - each one a sophisticated, expensive brand.
"Where did you ever get a dress like that?" they would ask her.
"I promised not to tell," she would say, shaking her head. "Besides, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
In the end, Tony Takitani had another used-clothing dealer take away everything that his wife had left behind. The dealer gave Tony less than a twentieth of what he had paid for the clothes, but that didn't matter to him. He would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where he would never see them again.
Once in a while, Tony would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife's shadows. But, as the months went by, he lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it was gone. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished fell back, as if retreating from the province of his mind. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
Sometimes he could barely recall his wife's face. What he did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent-leather shoes. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman's name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.
Two years after Tony Takitani's wife died, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense, he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the boxes supplied by the moving company and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because they smelled of mold, he had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to air it out. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.
A year went by this way, but having the boxes of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often, the mere thought of them sitting in there made him feel that he was suffocating. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.
Tony Takitani called a record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable disks that were long out of print, he received a remarkably high payment, enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.
Once the records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.
Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.
Copyright © 2004 by Ò»¸¯Èå
Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani.
Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. But Tony Takitani's mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was just a day's boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo, or anywhere else in Japan, that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai's elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.
And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest inclination to influence, or even to reflect upon, history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.
Shozaburo was also blessed (though he did not realize it) with a talent for making "useful" friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just "clicked." And they took special care of him whenever problems came up.
But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended, Shozaburo's connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I've lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought. I've slept with tons of women. I've eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There isn't so much in life that I'm sorry I missed. Besides, I'm not in any position to complain about being killed. It's just the way it goes. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them in far more terrible ways.
As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on his cell's filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance he thought, Life: I'll never understand it.
Emaciated, with no possessions to speak of, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war had ended. He discovered that his parents' house had burned down in the great Tokyo air raid of March, 1945, and they were dead. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo was now alone in the world. This was not a great shock to him, however; nor did it make him feel particularly sad. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he was convinced that everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was in his thirties, and beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had suddenly aged several years at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
One way or another, Shozaburo had managed to survive, and he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.
Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian-American from New Jersey who played a mean clarinet himself. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the records he wanted, straight from the United States, and Shozaburo would go to the major's quarters and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were difficult to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, Shozaburo thought, not a bad time to be alive.
In 1947, he married a distant cousin on his mother's side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. Before long they ended up living together, probably because she had become pregnant. At least, that was the way that Tony Takitani heard it from his father. His mother was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not very healthy. She gave birth to Tony the year after she was married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, quickly and quietly. She had experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.
Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what death was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole, as a fait accompli. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disklike thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn't say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more about what had happened. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby that he had left in the hospital.
The major took Shozaburo under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together at the base nearly every day. "You've got to get ahold of yourself," the major would tell Shozaburo. "The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right." The words meant nothing to Shozaburo, who merely nodded in silence. "Hey, I know," the major added suddenly one day. "Why don't you let me be the boy's godfather? I'll give him a name." Oh, Shozaburo thought, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.
The major suggested his own first name - Tony. Tony was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major's mind. When Shozaburo got home, he wrote the name Tony Takitani on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He stared at it for the next several days. Tony Takitani. Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last awhile, he thought, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.
For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was not much fun. The other kids at school called him a "half-breed," and whenever he told people his name they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face to face with a child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds.
Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any close friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. His father was always traveling with the band, and when Tony was little a housekeeper had come to take care of him during the day. But by the time he was in his last years at elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. This seemed preferable to having someone fussing over him all the time.
Shozaburo Takitani never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he didn't bring any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as different from each other as one might imagine. But, being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.
Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours every day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate, and highly detailed drawings of bicycles, radios, engines, and the like. If he drew a plant, he would capture every vein in every leaf. It was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually won first prize in school art contests.
So it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to art school to a career as an illustrator. There was never any need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were agonizing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And, because it was a time when most young people were acting out against the establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art-school professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony himself could not see what was so great about their work, with its ideological content. To him it looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.
Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. "They look realer than the real thing," everyone said. His sketches were more detailed than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator everybody had to have. And he took on everything - from the covers of automobile magazines to advertising illustrations. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He bought a big house in Setagaya, an affluent Tokyo suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.
By this point in his life, Tony had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them, for a short time. But he had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry he could manage for himself, and when his work interfered with those things he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He lacked his father's special charm, and he had no real friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. But he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others, and just about everybody who knew him liked him. He saw his father no more than once every two or three years, on some matter of business. When the business was over, neither man had much to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani's life went by, quietly and calmly.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. She worked part time for a publishing company, and she came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile. Her features were pleasant enough but, objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani's heart a violent punch. The moment he first saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could say what it was about her that had struck him with such force.
The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. He generally took no particular interest in what people wore, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.
After she left, he sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.
The next day, he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though they were fifteen years apart in age, they found they had much in common, almost strangely so. They agreed on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. She was a little nervous at first, but she gradually relaxed, until she was laughing and talking freely.
"You really know how to dress," Tony said when they parted.
"I like clothes," she answered, with a bashful smile. "Most of my money goes on clothing."
They went on a few dates after that. They didn't go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours - about their pasts, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other's emptiness.
The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been seeing since high school. The relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, she admitted, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere near as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but, still, that didn't mean that she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And, besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that age gap might mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.
Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn't work. He drank, alone. Suddenly, his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thick, cold walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn't want to marry me, I might just kill myself.
He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.
She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had thought well of him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this "love" she didn't know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.
By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she wasn't there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: What would he do? Sometimes this fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of his wife's suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the anxiety gradually eased. In the end, he settled down and wrapped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.
One day, she said that she wanted to hear what kind of music her father-in-law was making. "Do you think he would mind if we went to hear him?" she asked.
"Probably not," Tony said.
They went to a Ginza night club where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time that Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony had heard so often on records when he was a boy. Shozaburo's style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art, but it was music made by the skillful hand of a professional, and it could put a crowd in a good mood.
Soon, however, something began to constrict Tony Takitani's breathing, as though he were a narrow pipe that was filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge, and he found it difficult to remain seated. He couldn't help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. He had heard it years ago, of course, and he had been listening with a child's ears, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infinitesimal but crucial. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, "What is it, Father? What has changed?" But he did nothing of the sort. He would never have been able to explain what was in his mind. Instead, he stayed at his table until the end of his father's set, drinking much more than he usually did. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.
The couple's married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and they spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, traveling. Tony Takitani's work continued as successfully as ever, and, for someone so young, his wife was remarkably capable at running their home. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill. He had noticed it before their marriage, but it wasn't until their honeymoon that it began to seem serious. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. In Milan and Paris, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferr¨¦. Mesmerized, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.
Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house, and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvelous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody's perfect, he told himself.
When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.
He took the plunge one night after dinner. "I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes," he said. "It's not a question of money. I'm not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?"
His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, "You're right, of course. I don't need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can't help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can't stop myself." She promised to try to hold back. "If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long."
And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn't stand it.
She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. "Certainly, Madam," she was told. She was one of the store's best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.
A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.
Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife's clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.
Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife's, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.
Tony Takitani told the woman, "The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies - that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I've recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It's just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I'm pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead."
Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request - so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife's having died. And she understood the part about the wife's having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife's clothes. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn't look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.
"I think I understand," she said. "And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size."
"Of course," Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.
"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I've never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I'm sorry." She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
"If it's all right with you, I'd like to have you start at the office tomorrow," Tony said in a businesslike manner. "Pick out a week's worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you."
The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days' worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.
"Take a coat, too," Tony Takitani said. "You don't want to be cold."
She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.
When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife's closet, shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
These dresses had once clung to his wife's body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room's air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again, like a lukewarm broth. It's all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it's over.
He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing.
"But how can that be?" the woman asked, stunned.
"I'm sorry, but the situation has changed," he said. "You can have the clothes and shoes you took home, and the suitcase, too. I just want you to forget that this ever happened, and please don't tell anyone about it."
The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed.
"I see," she said finally, and hung up.
For a few minutes, she felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the beginning. She was sorry to have lost the job but she figured she would manage somehow or other.
She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani's house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by her front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a completely different type of matter, fashioned of materials from another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the room full of clothes she had seen at Tony Takitani's house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that "closet": it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind.
The woman's friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together - each one a sophisticated, expensive brand.
"Where did you ever get a dress like that?" they would ask her.
"I promised not to tell," she would say, shaking her head. "Besides, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
In the end, Tony Takitani had another used-clothing dealer take away everything that his wife had left behind. The dealer gave Tony less than a twentieth of what he had paid for the clothes, but that didn't matter to him. He would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where he would never see them again.
Once in a while, Tony would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife's shadows. But, as the months went by, he lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it was gone. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished fell back, as if retreating from the province of his mind. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
Sometimes he could barely recall his wife's face. What he did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent-leather shoes. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman's name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.
Two years after Tony Takitani's wife died, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense, he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the boxes supplied by the moving company and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because they smelled of mold, he had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to air it out. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.
A year went by this way, but having the boxes of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often, the mere thought of them sitting in there made him feel that he was suffocating. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.
Tony Takitani called a record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable disks that were long out of print, he received a remarkably high payment, enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.
Once the records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.
Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.
Copyright © 2004 by Ò»¸¯Èå
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Friday, November 07, 2008
Geekness and Comics
For almost five years I've been around geeks, I've finally learned their humor and wit. That's why I definitely loved the little gamers comic strips, it's utter geekness.
Check the guys out at http://www.little-gamers.com/
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Barack Obama won
Like heck do I care about the US elections while I'm from the poor Philippines? I care a lot. Because Obama will not be different from his predecessors: he will also continue US Imperialism.
Change my as*. Let's see.
Change my as*. Let's see.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Stop the fake Windows Security Center
New spyware system mimics Windows Security Center (Fri Oct 17, 2008 5:22PM EDT )
from Yahoo!
What's wrong with the screenshot to the right? Ignoring those red boxes added for emphasis, it looks identical to the Windows Security Center... only it's not. In fact it's a spyware hoax designed to mimic the Security Center almost identically, not to mention trick you into purchasing WinDefender 2008 software, a phony security app which will clear up only the phony security alerts its malware component creates.
WinDefender is just the latest in a series of malware attacks designed to look like legitimate Windows components. But people have finally started to wise up to those smallish "alert" pop-ups, so malware creators are upping the ante with full-blown knockoffs of real security apps. Computer Associates has the details.
In addition to the fake Security Center, WinDefender nags you further by blocking web pages from opening (blaming the blockage on "adware/spyware on your PC"). It adds a yellow drop-down box to Internet Explorer like you get when you try to download something from the web, again with text urging you to install WinDefender 2008 in order to unblock the sites. Just $40 of extortion money makes it all go away...
Most anti-malware software ought to be able to scrub WinDefender 2008 off your machine, but the more important lesson is that you pay close attention to the interface of anything security-related on your PC to ensure that you aren't being scammed while you're actually trying to address any security problems. Anything you see in Windows that recommends a specific program to solve any sort of problem should immediately be considered suspect.
from Yahoo!
What's wrong with the screenshot to the right? Ignoring those red boxes added for emphasis, it looks identical to the Windows Security Center... only it's not. In fact it's a spyware hoax designed to mimic the Security Center almost identically, not to mention trick you into purchasing WinDefender 2008 software, a phony security app which will clear up only the phony security alerts its malware component creates.
WinDefender is just the latest in a series of malware attacks designed to look like legitimate Windows components. But people have finally started to wise up to those smallish "alert" pop-ups, so malware creators are upping the ante with full-blown knockoffs of real security apps. Computer Associates has the details.
In addition to the fake Security Center, WinDefender nags you further by blocking web pages from opening (blaming the blockage on "adware/spyware on your PC"). It adds a yellow drop-down box to Internet Explorer like you get when you try to download something from the web, again with text urging you to install WinDefender 2008 in order to unblock the sites. Just $40 of extortion money makes it all go away...
Most anti-malware software ought to be able to scrub WinDefender 2008 off your machine, but the more important lesson is that you pay close attention to the interface of anything security-related on your PC to ensure that you aren't being scammed while you're actually trying to address any security problems. Anything you see in Windows that recommends a specific program to solve any sort of problem should immediately be considered suspect.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Click here to download.
To be able to read it, click save page as (as soon as the gibberish appears on your screen), then open it in ms reader. orayt?Ü
To be able to read it, click save page as (as soon as the gibberish appears on your screen), then open it in ms reader. orayt?Ü
Monday, October 20, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Empire's 500 Greatest Movies of All Time
(From the Empire magazine's poll with 10,000 of their readers, 200 critics)
500. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
499. Saw (2004)
498. Back to the Future Part 2 (1989)
497. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
496. Superman Returns (2006)
495. Jailhouse Rock (1957)
494. Sideways (2004)
493. In The Company Of Men (1997)
492. Amores Perros (2000)
491. Ben-Hur (1959)
490. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007)
489. Brick (2005)
488. Princess Mononoke (1997)
487. Superbad (2007)
486. Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)
485. The Wicker Man (1973)
484. The Fountain (2001)
483. The Big Red One (1980)
482. Scream (1996)
481. Topsy-Turvy (1999)
480. The Son's Room (2001)
479. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947)
478. Flesh (1968)
477. Rebel Without A Cause (1955)
476. Santa Sangre (1989)
475. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
474. Enter The Dragon (1973)
473. Into The Wild (2007)
472. Le Doulos (1962)
471. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004)
470. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
469. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
468. The Crow (1994)
467. The Deer Hunter (1978)
466. Snatch (2000)
465. 12 Monkeys (1995)
464. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)
463. Juno (2007)
462. Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
461. Halloween (1978)
460. Crash (2004)
459. Ikiru (1952)
458. Batman (1989)
457. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
456. 28 Days Later (2002)
455. Top Gun (1986)
454. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
453. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
452. Unbreakable (2000)
451. Speed (1994)
450. King Kong (2005)
449. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
448. A History Of Violence (2005)
447. Ten (2002)
446. High Fidelity (2000)
445. Dumb And Dumber (1994)
444. Hairspray (1988)
443. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
442. Atonement (2007)
441. Being John Malkovich (1973)
440. Akira (1988)
439. Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
438. The Lost Boys (1987)
437. Spider-Man (2002)
436. Beauty And The Beast (1991)
435. American Psycho (2000)
434. The Cat Concerto (1947)
433. Good Will Hunting (1997)
432. X-Men 2 (2003)
431. Electra Glide In Blue (1973)
430. Big Trouble In Little China (1986)
429. Danger: Diabolik (1968)
428. The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
427. Spring In A Small Town (1948)
426. Enduring Love (2004)
425. Wonder Boys (2000)
424. To Have And Have Not (1944)
423. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
422. A Man Escaped (1956)
421. Lethal Weapon (1987)
420. Jerry Maguire (1996)
419. Days Of Heaven (1978)
418. V For Vendetta (2005)
417. Lords Of Dogtown (2005)
416. Bad Taste (1987)
415. Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
414. The Double Life Of Véronique (1991)
413. Finding Nemo (2003)
412. Heathers (1989)
411. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
410. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
409. Men In Black (1997)
408. Zelig (1983)
407. The Jungle Book (1967)
406. Iron Man (2008)
405. Dirty Dancing (1987)
404. RoboCop (1987)
403. Do The Right Thing (1989)
402. Little Miss Sunshine (1947)
401. Batman Returns (1992)
400. The Incredibles (2004)
399. Greed (1924)
398. Killer Of Sheep (1977)
397. Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
396. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)
395. Casino (1995)
394. Cloverfield (2008)
393. Garden State (2004)
392. Paris, Texas (1984)
391. Mulholland Drive (2001)
390. 2 Days In Paris (2007)
389. Election (1999)
388. The English Patient (1996)
387. Rain Man (1988)
386. The Great Silence (1968)
385. Ace In The Hole (1951)
384. The Shop Around The Corner (1940)
383. Serenity (2005)
382. Caché (2005)
381. Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)
380. Children Of Men (2006)
379. Ratatouille (2007)
378. The Goonies (1985)
377. Mean Streets (1973)
376. Zodiac (2007)
375. Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)
374. Hot Fuzz (2007)
373. Wall-E (2008)
372. Army Of Darkness (1992)
371. Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003)
370. Rocky (1976)
369. The Breakfast Club (1985)
368. Airplane! (1980)
367. Cabaret (1972)
366. Predator (1987)
365. The Bourne Identity (2002)
364. Natural Born Killers (1994)
363. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
362. The Elephant Man (1980)
361. Clerks (1994)
360. The Return (2003)
359. The Lady Eve (1941)
358. Russian Ark (2002)
357. The Long Goodbye (1973)
356. Napoléon (1927)
355. Sunshine (2007)
354. Un Chien Andalou (1929)
353. Bugsy Malone (1976)
352. Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
351. Zulu (1964)
350. Planet Of The Apes (1968)
349. Arthur (1981)
348. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
347. All About Eve (1950)
346. Leave Her To Heaven (1945)
345. Fatal Attraction (1987)
344. The Last Waltz (1978)
343. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
342. The Gold Rush (1925)
341. The Passenger (1975)
340. High And Low (1963)
339. Spirited Away (2001)
338. Jules Et Jim (1962)
337. 300 (2006)
336. Titanic (1997)
335. The Seventh Seal (1957)
334. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
333. Grease (1978)
332. The Sixth Sense (1999)
331. The Green Mile (1999)
330. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)
329. The Lives Of Others (2006)
328. The Truman Show (1998)
327. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
326. Out Of Sight (1998)
325. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)
324. Lone Star (1996)
323. The Last Seduction (1994)
322. Aladdin (1992)
321. Funny Face (1957)
320. Braveheart (1995)
319. The Lion King (1994)
318. Rebecca (1940)
317. Midnight Run (1988)
316. Trainspotting (1996)
315. Sense And Sensibility (1995)
314. Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
313. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
312. Suspiria (1977)
311. American History X (1998)
310. Gremlins (1984)
309. Transformers (2007)
308. The Terminator (1984)
307. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
306. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (2007)
305. The Prestige (2006)
304. Radio Days (1987)
303. Together (2000)
302. The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)
301. Love And Death (1975)
300. Sawdust And Tinsel (1953)
299. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
298. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
297. It Happened One Night (1934)
296. All The President’s Men (1976)
295. The Untouchables (1987)
294. The Red Balloon (1956)
293. La Maman Et La Putain (1973)
292. La Belle Et La Bête (1946)
291. Rocco And His Brothers (1960)
290. Rashomon (1950)
289. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)
288. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
287. Secrets And Lies (1996)
286. L’Avventura (1960)
285. Solaris (1972)
284. Scarface (1983)
283. Ran (1985)
282. The Godfather Part III (1990)
281. Interview With The Vampire (1994)
280. Mad Max 2 (1982)
279. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
278. Carlito’s Way (1993)
277. On The Town (1949)
276. Layer Cake (2004)
275. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
274. Sin City (2005)
273. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
272. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970)
271. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
270. The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
269. A Place In The Sun (1951)
268. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
267. Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989)
266. Ghost World (2001)
265. A. I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
264. American Graffiti (1973)
263. Das Boot (1981)
262. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
261. Roman Holiday (1953)
260. Field Of Dreams (1989)
259. Groundhog Day (1993)
258. The Blues Brothers (1980)
257. The Black Cat (1997)
256. Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)
255. Ninotchka (1939)
254. The Verdict (1982)
253. First Blood (1982)
252. The Leopard (1963)
251. Darling (1965)
250. Sunrise (1927)
249. My Darling Clementine (1946)
248. Pandora’s Box (1929)
247. All That Jazz (1979)
246. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
245. Downfall (2004)
244. Dazed And Confused (1993)
243. Heimat (1984)
242. King Kong (1933)
241. Brighton Rock (1947)
240. Forrest Gump (1994)
239. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
238. Requiem For A Dream (2000)
237. Delicatessen (1991)
236. Black Narcissus (1947)
235. Battle Royale (2000)
234. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
233. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984)
232. Jurassic Park (1993)
231. Shaun Of The Dead (2004)
230. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
229. Festen (1998)
228. No Country For Old Men (2007)
227. Léon (1994)
226. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
225. Get Carter (1971)
224. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
223. Safe (1995)
222. Mother And Son (1997)
221. McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)
220. Far From Heaven (2002)
219. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
218. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)
217. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
216. Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
215. Jackie Brown (1997)
214. Army Of Shadows (1969)
213. Songs From The Second Floor (2000)
212. M (1931)
211. Moulin Rouge! (2001)
210. Platoon (1986)
209. Local Hero (1983)
208. The Departed (2006)
207. The Misfits (1961)
206. The Exorcist (1973)
205. The Addiction (1995)
204. The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)
203. Life Of Brian (1979)
202. The Killer (1989)
201. JFK (1991)
200. Before Sunrise (1995)
199. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
198. Fargo (1996)
197. Point Break (1991)
196. Amélie (1999)
195. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
194. Bicycle Thieves (1948)
193. Ed Wood (1994)
192. Eraserhead (1977)
191. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
190. Big (1988)
189. Ghostbusters (1984)
188. School Of Rock (2003)
187. The Big Country (1958)
186. United 93 (2006)
185. Paths Of Glory (1957)
184. Dirty Harry (1971)
183. Le Samourai (1967)
182. Performance (1970)
181. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970)
180. To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
179. Toy Story 2 (1999)
178. Hellzapoppin' (1941)
177. City Of God (2002)
176. A Canterbury Tale (1944)
175. Rushmore (1998)
174. Superman The Movie (1978)
173. Memento (2000)
172. The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
171. Brief Encounter (1945)
170. La Haine (1995)
169. Viridiana (1961)
168. Tootsie (1982)
167. Don't Look Now (1973)
166. Goldfinger (1964)
165. Partie De Campagne (1936)
164. The Searchers (1956)
163. The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
162. A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
161. The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)
160. Being There (1979)
159. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
158. Unforgiven (1992)
157. True Romance (1993)
156. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
155. Badlands (1973)
154. Betty Blue (1986)
153. The Innocents (1961)
152. Boogie Nights (1997)
151. Gladiator (2000)
150. The French Connection (1971)
149. The Red Shoes (1948)
148. Z (1969)
147. Notorious (1946)
146. Shampoo (1975)
145. Sophie's Choice (1982)
144. There Will Be Blood (2007)
143. Cyrano De Bergerac (1991)
142. Almost Famous (2000)
141. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
140. As Good As It Gets (1997)
139. Blow Out (1981)
138. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
137. Dances With Wolves (1990)
136. Amadeus (1984)
135. Duck Soup (1933)
134. Seven (1995)
133. Double Indemnity (1944)
132. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
131. The Last Of The Mohicans (1992)
130. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
129. Harvey (1950)
128. Lost In Translation (2003)
127. The Sting (1973)
126. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973)
125. A Bout De Souffle (1960)
124. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)
123. A Woman Under The Influence (1974)
122. The Princess Bride (1987)
121. Los Olvidados (1950)
120. The Battle Of Algiers (1966)
119. The Wages Of Fear (1953)
118. Withnail And I (1987)
117. Miller's Crossing (1990)
116. Rio Bravo (1959)
115. Blazing Saddles (1974)
114. The Conversation (1974)
113. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy (2004)
112. I Am Cuba (1964)
111. Fitzcarraldo (1982)
110. Before Sunset (2004)
109. Touch Of Evil (1958)
108. The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978)
107. An American Werewolf In London (1981)
106. A Man For All Seasons (1966)
105. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
104. The Rules Of The Game (1939)
103. Rear Window (1954)
102. The Hustler (1961)
101. Raising Arizona (1987)
TOP 1OO
100. Network (1976)
99. Toy Story (1995)
98. North By Northwest (1959)
97. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
96. American Beauty (1999)
95. Yojimbo (1961)
94. The Wild Bunch (1969)
93. Spirit Of The Beehive (1973)
92. Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
91. Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi (1983)
90. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
89. Magnolia (1999)
88. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
87. The King Of Comedy (1983)
86. Carrie (1976)
85. Blue Velvet (1986)
84. L. A. Confidential (1997)
83. Brazil (1985)
82. The Great Escape (1963)
81. Batman Begins (2005)
80. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)
79. The Thin Red Line (1998)
78. Rosemary’s Baby (1996)
77. Spartacus (1960)
76. Manhattan (1979)
75. A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
74. The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948)
73. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)
72. 12 Angry Men (1957)
71. The Night Of The Hunter (1955)
70. Stand By Me (1986)
69. Three Colours Red (1994)
68. Annie Hall (1977)
67. Tokyo Story (1953)
66. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
65. Harold And Maude (1971)
64. Oldboy (2003)
63. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
62. The Graduate (1967)
61. The Usual Suspects (1995)
60. Come And See (1985)
59. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
58. His Girl Friday (1940)
57. Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)
56. Casino Royale (2006)
55. La Dolce Vita (1960)
54. The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
53. Donnie Darko (2001)
52. The Shining (1980)
51. 8 1/2 (1963)
50. Seven Samurai (1954)
49. Evil Dead 2 (1987)
48. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
47. E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
46. On The Waterfront (1954)
45. Psycho (1960)
44. Schindler's List (1993)
43. The Big Lebowski (1998)
42. Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949)
41. The 400 Blows (1959)
40. Vertigo (1958)
39. The Matrix (1999)
38. Heat (1995)
37. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
36. Andrei Rublev (1969)
35. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
34. The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King (2003)
33. Alien (1979)
32. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
31. Gone With The Wind (1939)
30. Aliens (1986)
29. Die Hard (1988)
28. Citizen Kane (1941)
27. Some Like It Hot (1959)
26. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
25. The Good The Bad And The Ugly (1967)
24. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
23. Back To The Future (1985)
22. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
21. The Third Man (1949)
20. Blade Runner (1982)
19. The Godfather Part II (1974)
18. Casablanca (1942)
17. Taxi Driver (1976)
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
15. The Dark Knight (2007)
14. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
13. Chinatown (1974)
12. The Apartment (1960)
11. Raging Bull (1980)
10. Fight Club (1999)
9. Pulp Fiction (1994)
8. Singin’ In The Rain (1952)
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
6. GoodFellas (1990)
5. Jaws (1975)
4. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
1. The Godfather (1972)
Go check the whole list, and the individual films' reviews here.
500. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
499. Saw (2004)
498. Back to the Future Part 2 (1989)
497. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
496. Superman Returns (2006)
495. Jailhouse Rock (1957)
494. Sideways (2004)
493. In The Company Of Men (1997)
492. Amores Perros (2000)
491. Ben-Hur (1959)
490. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007)
489. Brick (2005)
488. Princess Mononoke (1997)
487. Superbad (2007)
486. Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)
485. The Wicker Man (1973)
484. The Fountain (2001)
483. The Big Red One (1980)
482. Scream (1996)
481. Topsy-Turvy (1999)
480. The Son's Room (2001)
479. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947)
478. Flesh (1968)
477. Rebel Without A Cause (1955)
476. Santa Sangre (1989)
475. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
474. Enter The Dragon (1973)
473. Into The Wild (2007)
472. Le Doulos (1962)
471. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004)
470. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
469. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
468. The Crow (1994)
467. The Deer Hunter (1978)
466. Snatch (2000)
465. 12 Monkeys (1995)
464. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)
463. Juno (2007)
462. Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
461. Halloween (1978)
460. Crash (2004)
459. Ikiru (1952)
458. Batman (1989)
457. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
456. 28 Days Later (2002)
455. Top Gun (1986)
454. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
453. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
452. Unbreakable (2000)
451. Speed (1994)
450. King Kong (2005)
449. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
448. A History Of Violence (2005)
447. Ten (2002)
446. High Fidelity (2000)
445. Dumb And Dumber (1994)
444. Hairspray (1988)
443. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
442. Atonement (2007)
441. Being John Malkovich (1973)
440. Akira (1988)
439. Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
438. The Lost Boys (1987)
437. Spider-Man (2002)
436. Beauty And The Beast (1991)
435. American Psycho (2000)
434. The Cat Concerto (1947)
433. Good Will Hunting (1997)
432. X-Men 2 (2003)
431. Electra Glide In Blue (1973)
430. Big Trouble In Little China (1986)
429. Danger: Diabolik (1968)
428. The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
427. Spring In A Small Town (1948)
426. Enduring Love (2004)
425. Wonder Boys (2000)
424. To Have And Have Not (1944)
423. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
422. A Man Escaped (1956)
421. Lethal Weapon (1987)
420. Jerry Maguire (1996)
419. Days Of Heaven (1978)
418. V For Vendetta (2005)
417. Lords Of Dogtown (2005)
416. Bad Taste (1987)
415. Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
414. The Double Life Of Véronique (1991)
413. Finding Nemo (2003)
412. Heathers (1989)
411. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
410. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
409. Men In Black (1997)
408. Zelig (1983)
407. The Jungle Book (1967)
406. Iron Man (2008)
405. Dirty Dancing (1987)
404. RoboCop (1987)
403. Do The Right Thing (1989)
402. Little Miss Sunshine (1947)
401. Batman Returns (1992)
400. The Incredibles (2004)
399. Greed (1924)
398. Killer Of Sheep (1977)
397. Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
396. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)
395. Casino (1995)
394. Cloverfield (2008)
393. Garden State (2004)
392. Paris, Texas (1984)
391. Mulholland Drive (2001)
390. 2 Days In Paris (2007)
389. Election (1999)
388. The English Patient (1996)
387. Rain Man (1988)
386. The Great Silence (1968)
385. Ace In The Hole (1951)
384. The Shop Around The Corner (1940)
383. Serenity (2005)
382. Caché (2005)
381. Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)
380. Children Of Men (2006)
379. Ratatouille (2007)
378. The Goonies (1985)
377. Mean Streets (1973)
376. Zodiac (2007)
375. Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)
374. Hot Fuzz (2007)
373. Wall-E (2008)
372. Army Of Darkness (1992)
371. Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003)
370. Rocky (1976)
369. The Breakfast Club (1985)
368. Airplane! (1980)
367. Cabaret (1972)
366. Predator (1987)
365. The Bourne Identity (2002)
364. Natural Born Killers (1994)
363. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
362. The Elephant Man (1980)
361. Clerks (1994)
360. The Return (2003)
359. The Lady Eve (1941)
358. Russian Ark (2002)
357. The Long Goodbye (1973)
356. Napoléon (1927)
355. Sunshine (2007)
354. Un Chien Andalou (1929)
353. Bugsy Malone (1976)
352. Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
351. Zulu (1964)
350. Planet Of The Apes (1968)
349. Arthur (1981)
348. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
347. All About Eve (1950)
346. Leave Her To Heaven (1945)
345. Fatal Attraction (1987)
344. The Last Waltz (1978)
343. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
342. The Gold Rush (1925)
341. The Passenger (1975)
340. High And Low (1963)
339. Spirited Away (2001)
338. Jules Et Jim (1962)
337. 300 (2006)
336. Titanic (1997)
335. The Seventh Seal (1957)
334. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
333. Grease (1978)
332. The Sixth Sense (1999)
331. The Green Mile (1999)
330. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)
329. The Lives Of Others (2006)
328. The Truman Show (1998)
327. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
326. Out Of Sight (1998)
325. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)
324. Lone Star (1996)
323. The Last Seduction (1994)
322. Aladdin (1992)
321. Funny Face (1957)
320. Braveheart (1995)
319. The Lion King (1994)
318. Rebecca (1940)
317. Midnight Run (1988)
316. Trainspotting (1996)
315. Sense And Sensibility (1995)
314. Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
313. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
312. Suspiria (1977)
311. American History X (1998)
310. Gremlins (1984)
309. Transformers (2007)
308. The Terminator (1984)
307. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
306. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (2007)
305. The Prestige (2006)
304. Radio Days (1987)
303. Together (2000)
302. The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)
301. Love And Death (1975)
300. Sawdust And Tinsel (1953)
299. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
298. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
297. It Happened One Night (1934)
296. All The President’s Men (1976)
295. The Untouchables (1987)
294. The Red Balloon (1956)
293. La Maman Et La Putain (1973)
292. La Belle Et La Bête (1946)
291. Rocco And His Brothers (1960)
290. Rashomon (1950)
289. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)
288. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
287. Secrets And Lies (1996)
286. L’Avventura (1960)
285. Solaris (1972)
284. Scarface (1983)
283. Ran (1985)
282. The Godfather Part III (1990)
281. Interview With The Vampire (1994)
280. Mad Max 2 (1982)
279. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
278. Carlito’s Way (1993)
277. On The Town (1949)
276. Layer Cake (2004)
275. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
274. Sin City (2005)
273. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
272. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970)
271. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
270. The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
269. A Place In The Sun (1951)
268. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
267. Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989)
266. Ghost World (2001)
265. A. I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
264. American Graffiti (1973)
263. Das Boot (1981)
262. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
261. Roman Holiday (1953)
260. Field Of Dreams (1989)
259. Groundhog Day (1993)
258. The Blues Brothers (1980)
257. The Black Cat (1997)
256. Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)
255. Ninotchka (1939)
254. The Verdict (1982)
253. First Blood (1982)
252. The Leopard (1963)
251. Darling (1965)
250. Sunrise (1927)
249. My Darling Clementine (1946)
248. Pandora’s Box (1929)
247. All That Jazz (1979)
246. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
245. Downfall (2004)
244. Dazed And Confused (1993)
243. Heimat (1984)
242. King Kong (1933)
241. Brighton Rock (1947)
240. Forrest Gump (1994)
239. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
238. Requiem For A Dream (2000)
237. Delicatessen (1991)
236. Black Narcissus (1947)
235. Battle Royale (2000)
234. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
233. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984)
232. Jurassic Park (1993)
231. Shaun Of The Dead (2004)
230. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
229. Festen (1998)
228. No Country For Old Men (2007)
227. Léon (1994)
226. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
225. Get Carter (1971)
224. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
223. Safe (1995)
222. Mother And Son (1997)
221. McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)
220. Far From Heaven (2002)
219. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
218. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)
217. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
216. Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
215. Jackie Brown (1997)
214. Army Of Shadows (1969)
213. Songs From The Second Floor (2000)
212. M (1931)
211. Moulin Rouge! (2001)
210. Platoon (1986)
209. Local Hero (1983)
208. The Departed (2006)
207. The Misfits (1961)
206. The Exorcist (1973)
205. The Addiction (1995)
204. The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)
203. Life Of Brian (1979)
202. The Killer (1989)
201. JFK (1991)
200. Before Sunrise (1995)
199. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
198. Fargo (1996)
197. Point Break (1991)
196. Amélie (1999)
195. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
194. Bicycle Thieves (1948)
193. Ed Wood (1994)
192. Eraserhead (1977)
191. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
190. Big (1988)
189. Ghostbusters (1984)
188. School Of Rock (2003)
187. The Big Country (1958)
186. United 93 (2006)
185. Paths Of Glory (1957)
184. Dirty Harry (1971)
183. Le Samourai (1967)
182. Performance (1970)
181. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970)
180. To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
179. Toy Story 2 (1999)
178. Hellzapoppin' (1941)
177. City Of God (2002)
176. A Canterbury Tale (1944)
175. Rushmore (1998)
174. Superman The Movie (1978)
173. Memento (2000)
172. The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
171. Brief Encounter (1945)
170. La Haine (1995)
169. Viridiana (1961)
168. Tootsie (1982)
167. Don't Look Now (1973)
166. Goldfinger (1964)
165. Partie De Campagne (1936)
164. The Searchers (1956)
163. The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
162. A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
161. The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)
160. Being There (1979)
159. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
158. Unforgiven (1992)
157. True Romance (1993)
156. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
155. Badlands (1973)
154. Betty Blue (1986)
153. The Innocents (1961)
152. Boogie Nights (1997)
151. Gladiator (2000)
150. The French Connection (1971)
149. The Red Shoes (1948)
148. Z (1969)
147. Notorious (1946)
146. Shampoo (1975)
145. Sophie's Choice (1982)
144. There Will Be Blood (2007)
143. Cyrano De Bergerac (1991)
142. Almost Famous (2000)
141. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
140. As Good As It Gets (1997)
139. Blow Out (1981)
138. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
137. Dances With Wolves (1990)
136. Amadeus (1984)
135. Duck Soup (1933)
134. Seven (1995)
133. Double Indemnity (1944)
132. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
131. The Last Of The Mohicans (1992)
130. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
129. Harvey (1950)
128. Lost In Translation (2003)
127. The Sting (1973)
126. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973)
125. A Bout De Souffle (1960)
124. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)
123. A Woman Under The Influence (1974)
122. The Princess Bride (1987)
121. Los Olvidados (1950)
120. The Battle Of Algiers (1966)
119. The Wages Of Fear (1953)
118. Withnail And I (1987)
117. Miller's Crossing (1990)
116. Rio Bravo (1959)
115. Blazing Saddles (1974)
114. The Conversation (1974)
113. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy (2004)
112. I Am Cuba (1964)
111. Fitzcarraldo (1982)
110. Before Sunset (2004)
109. Touch Of Evil (1958)
108. The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978)
107. An American Werewolf In London (1981)
106. A Man For All Seasons (1966)
105. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
104. The Rules Of The Game (1939)
103. Rear Window (1954)
102. The Hustler (1961)
101. Raising Arizona (1987)
TOP 1OO
100. Network (1976)
99. Toy Story (1995)
98. North By Northwest (1959)
97. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
96. American Beauty (1999)
95. Yojimbo (1961)
94. The Wild Bunch (1969)
93. Spirit Of The Beehive (1973)
92. Once Upon A Time In America (1984)
91. Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi (1983)
90. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
89. Magnolia (1999)
88. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
87. The King Of Comedy (1983)
86. Carrie (1976)
85. Blue Velvet (1986)
84. L. A. Confidential (1997)
83. Brazil (1985)
82. The Great Escape (1963)
81. Batman Begins (2005)
80. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)
79. The Thin Red Line (1998)
78. Rosemary’s Baby (1996)
77. Spartacus (1960)
76. Manhattan (1979)
75. A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
74. The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948)
73. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)
72. 12 Angry Men (1957)
71. The Night Of The Hunter (1955)
70. Stand By Me (1986)
69. Three Colours Red (1994)
68. Annie Hall (1977)
67. Tokyo Story (1953)
66. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
65. Harold And Maude (1971)
64. Oldboy (2003)
63. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
62. The Graduate (1967)
61. The Usual Suspects (1995)
60. Come And See (1985)
59. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
58. His Girl Friday (1940)
57. Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)
56. Casino Royale (2006)
55. La Dolce Vita (1960)
54. The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
53. Donnie Darko (2001)
52. The Shining (1980)
51. 8 1/2 (1963)
50. Seven Samurai (1954)
49. Evil Dead 2 (1987)
48. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
47. E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
46. On The Waterfront (1954)
45. Psycho (1960)
44. Schindler's List (1993)
43. The Big Lebowski (1998)
42. Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949)
41. The 400 Blows (1959)
40. Vertigo (1958)
39. The Matrix (1999)
38. Heat (1995)
37. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
36. Andrei Rublev (1969)
35. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
34. The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King (2003)
33. Alien (1979)
32. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
31. Gone With The Wind (1939)
30. Aliens (1986)
29. Die Hard (1988)
28. Citizen Kane (1941)
27. Some Like It Hot (1959)
26. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
25. The Good The Bad And The Ugly (1967)
24. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
23. Back To The Future (1985)
22. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
21. The Third Man (1949)
20. Blade Runner (1982)
19. The Godfather Part II (1974)
18. Casablanca (1942)
17. Taxi Driver (1976)
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
15. The Dark Knight (2007)
14. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
13. Chinatown (1974)
12. The Apartment (1960)
11. Raging Bull (1980)
10. Fight Club (1999)
9. Pulp Fiction (1994)
8. Singin’ In The Rain (1952)
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
6. GoodFellas (1990)
5. Jaws (1975)
4. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
1. The Godfather (1972)
Go check the whole list, and the individual films' reviews here.
Whatchawanna microwave?
I think everybody (who owns a microwave and a crazy mind) wanted to try different things with the microwave but were just too afraid to do so. But fear no more! Some geeks did what we all wanted to do with the mic and even captured it on video!
On this site you can see what will happen if you put deodorants, christmas lights, marshmallows, gummy worms, breath mints, gums, glue, foam, soap, fresh eggs and other things on your microwave.
Wanna see now?
Click here.
On this site you can see what will happen if you put deodorants, christmas lights, marshmallows, gummy worms, breath mints, gums, glue, foam, soap, fresh eggs and other things on your microwave.
Wanna see now?
Click here.
Friday, October 17, 2008
I love ebooks
I could hardly find good copies of books here in Baguio so I resort to getting ebooks muna before I get a hard copy for my collection. So far, I've found tons of ebooks sites na, and here's my list:
1. http://www.truly-free.org/
2. http://www.planetebook.com/
3. http://www.free-ebooks.net
4. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
5. http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty.html
happy reading!
1. http://www.truly-free.org/
2. http://www.planetebook.com/
3. http://www.free-ebooks.net
4. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
5. http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty.html
happy reading!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Hang-over
I never really drink until I'm wasted, but last Sunday, due to Chico's binyag, I had to drink a little too much. haha
Thus, the feeling of malaise yesterday. I wanted to kill myself. I had to take a bath with ice-cold water just to shake the feeling off, then slept again.
Thank Bathala for the long weekends. haha
Thus, the feeling of malaise yesterday. I wanted to kill myself. I had to take a bath with ice-cold water just to shake the feeling off, then slept again.
Thank Bathala for the long weekends. haha
Cupid and Psyche
This is my most favorite Greek mythology piece. I just can't help falling in love with the two. hay
_____________________________________________________________________________________
A certain king had three daughters. (This seems to be one of the
latest fables of the Greek mythology. It has not been found
earlier than the close of the second century of the Christian
era. It bears marks of the higher religious notions of that
time.) The two elder were charming girls, but the beauty of the
youngest was so wonderful that language is too poor to express
its due praise. The fame of her beauty was so great that
strangers from neighboring countries came in crowds to enjoy the
sight, and looked on her with amazement, paying her that homage
which is due only to Venus herself. In fact, Venus found her
altars deserted, while men turned their devotion to this young
virgin. As she passed along, the people sang her praises, and
strewed her way with chaplets and flowers.
This perversion to a mortal of the homage due only to the
immortal powers gave great offence to the real Venus. Shaking
her ambrosial locks with indignation, she exclaimed, "Am I then
to be eclipsed in my honors by a mortal girl? In vain then did
that royal shepherd, whose judgment was approved by Jove himself,
give me the palm of beauty over my illustrious rivals, Pallas and
June. But she shall not so quietly usurp my honors. I will give
her cause to repent of so unlawful a beauty."
Thereupon she calls her winged son Cupid, mischievous enough in
his own nature, and rouses and provokes him yet more by her
complaints. She points out Psyche to him, and says, "My dear
son, punish that contumacious beauty; give thy mother a revenge
as sweet as her injuries are great; infuse into the bosom of that
haughty girl a passion for some low, mean, unworthy being, so
that she may reap a mortification as great as her present
exultation and triumph."
Cupid prepared to obey the commands of his mother. There are two
fountains in Venus's garden, one of sweet waters, the other of
bitter. Cupid filled two amber vases, one from each fountain,
and suspending them from the top of his quiver, hastened to the
chamber of Psyche, whom he found asleep. He shed a few drops
from the bitter fountain over her lips, though the sight of her
almost moved him to pity; then touched her side with the point of
his arrow. At the touch she awoke, and opened eyes upon Cupid
(himself invisible) which so startled him that in his confusion
he wounded himself with his own arrow. Heedless of his wound his
whole thought now was to repair the mischief he had done, and he
poured the balmy drops of joy over all her silken ringlets.
Psyche, henceforth frowned upon by Venus, derived no benefit from
all her charms. True, all eyes were cast eagerly upon her, and
every mouth spoke her praises; but neither king, royal youth, nor
plebeian presented himself to demand her in marriage. Her two
elder sisters of moderate charms had now long been married to two
royal princes; but Psyche, in her lonely apartment, deplored her
solitude, sick of that beauty, which, while it procured abundance
of flattery, had failed to awaken love.
Her parents, afraid that they had unwittingly incurred the anger
of the gods, consulted the oracle of Apollo, and received this
answer: "The virgin is destined for the bride of no mortal lover.
Her future husband awaits her on the top of the mountain. He is
a monster whom neither gods nor men can resist."
This dreadful decree of the oracle filled all the people with
dismay, and her parents abandoned themselves to grief. But
Psyche said, "Why, my dear parents, do you now lament me? You
should rather have grieved when the people showered upon me
undeserved honors, and with one voice called me a Venus. I now
perceive that I am a victim to that name. I submit. Lead me to
that rock to which my unhappy fate has destined me." Accordingly,
all things being prepared, the royal maid took her place in the
procession, which more resembled a funeral than a nuptial pomp,
and with her parents, amid the lamentations of the people,
ascended the mountain, on the summit of which they left her
alone, and with sorrowful hearts returned home.
While Psyche stood on the ridge of the mountain, panting with
fear and with eyes full of tears, the gentle Zephyr raised her
from the earth and bore her with an easy motion into a flowery
dale. By degrees her mind became composed, and she laid herself
down on the grassy bank to sleep. When she awoke, refreshed with
sleep, she looked round and beheld nearby a pleasant grove of
tall and stately trees. She entered it, and in the midst
discovered a fountain, sending forth clear and crystal waters,
and hard by, a magnificent palace whose August front impressed
the spectator that it was not the work of mortal hands, but the
happy retreat of some god. Drawn by admiration and wonder, she
approached the building and ventured to enter. Every object she
met filled her with pleasure and amazement. Golden pillars
supported the vaulted roof, and the walls were enriched with
carvings and paintings representing beasts of the chase and rural
scenes, adapted to delight the eye of the beholder. Proceeding
onward she perceived that besides the apartments of state there
were others, filled with all manner of treasures, and beautiful
and precious productions of nature and art.
While her eyes were thus occupied, a voice addressed her, though
she saw no one, uttering these words: "Sovereign lady, all that
you see is yours. We whose voices you hear are your servants,
and shall obey all your commands with our utmost care and
diligence. Retire therefore to your chamber and repose on your
bed of down, and when you see fit repair to the bath. Supper
will await you in the adjoining alcove when it pleases you to
take your seat there."
Psyche gave ear to the admonitions of her vocal attendants, and
after repose and the refreshment of the bath, seated herself in
the alcove, where a table immediately presented itself, without
any visible aid from waiters or servants, and covered with the
greatest delicacies of food and the most nectareous wines. Her
ears too were feasted with music from invisible performers; of
whom one sang, another played on the lute, and all closed in the
wonderful harmony of a full chorus.
She had not yet seen her destined husband. He came only in the
hours of darkness, and fled before the dawn of morning, but his
accents were full of love, and inspired a like passion in her.
She often begged him to stay and let her behold him, but he would
not consent. On the contrary, he charged her to make no attempt
to see him, for it was his pleasure, for the best of reasons, to
keep concealed. "Why should you wish to behold me?" he said.
"Have you any doubt of my love? Have you any wish ungratified?
If you saw me, perhaps you would fear me, perhaps adore me, but
all I ask of you is to love me. I would rather you would love me
as an equal than adore me as a god."
This reasoning somewhat quieted Psyche for a time, and while the
novelty lasted she felt quite happy. But at length the thought
of her parents, left in ignorance of her fate, and of her
sisters, precluded from sharing with her the delights of her
situation, preyed on her mind and made her begin to feel her
palace as but a splendid prison. When her husband came one
night, she told him her distress, and at last drew from him an
unwilling consent that her sisters should be brought to see her.
So calling Zephyr, she acquainted him with her husband's
commands, and he, promptly obedient, soon brought them across the
mountain down to their sister's valley. They embraced her and
she returned their caresses. "Come," said Psyche, "enter with me
my house and refresh yourselves with whatever your sister has to
offer." Then taking their hands she led them into her golden
palace, and committed them to the care of her numerous train of
attendant voices, to refresh them in her baths and at her table,
and to show them all her treasures. The view of these celestial
delights caused envy to enter their bosoms, at seeing their young
sister possessed of such state and splendor, so much exceeding
their own.
They asked her numberless questions, among others what sort of a
person her husband was. Psyche replied that he was a beautiful
youth, who generally spent the daytime in hunting upon the
mountains. The sisters, not satisfied with this reply, soon made
her confess that she had never seen him. Then they proceeded to
fill her bosom with dark suspicions. "Call to mind," they said,
"the Pythian oracle that declared you destined to marry a direful
and tremendous monster. The inhabitants of this valley say that
your husband is a terrible and monstrous serpent, who nourishes
you for a while with dainties that he may by and by devour you.
Take our advice. Provide yourself with a lamp and a sharp knife;
put them in concealment that your husband may not discover them,
and when he is sound asleep, slip out of bed bring forth your
lamp and see for yourself whether what they say is true or not.
If it is, hesitate not to cut off the monster's head, and thereby
recover your liberty."
Psyche resisted these persuasions as well as she could, but they
did not fail to have their effect on her mind, and when her
sisters were gone, their words and her own curiosity were too
strong for her to resist. So she prepared her lamp and a sharp
knife, and hid them out of sight of her husband. When he had
fallen into his first sleep, she silently rose and uncovering her
lamp beheld not a hideous monster, but the most beautiful and
charming of the gods, with his golden ringlets wandering over his
snowy neck and crimson cheek, with two dewy wings on his
shoulders, whiter than snow, and with shining feathers like the
tender blossoms of spring. As she leaned the lamp over to have a
nearer view of his face a drop of burning oil fell on the
shoulder of the god, startled with which he opened his eyes and
fixed them full upon her; then, without saying one word, he
spread his white wings and flew out of the window. Psyche, in
vain endeavoring to follow him, fell from the window to the
ground. Cupid, beholding her as she lay in the dust, stopped his
flight for an instant and said, "O foolish Psyche, is it thus you
repay my love? After having disobeyed my mother's commands and
made you my wife, will you think me a monster and cut off my
head? But go; return to your sisters, whose advice you seem to
think preferable to mine. I inflict no other punishment on you
than to leave you forever. Love cannot dwell with suspicion."
So saying he fled away, leaving poor Psyche prostrate on the
ground, filling the place with mournful lamentations.
When she had recovered some degree of composure she looked around
her, but the palace and gardens had vanished, and she found
herself in the open field not far from the city where her sisters
dwelt. She repaired thither and told them the whole story of her
misfortunes, at which, pretending to grieve, those spiteful
creatures inwardly rejoiced; "for now," said they, "he will
perhaps choose one of us." With this idea, without saying a word
of her intentions, each of them rose early the next morning and
ascended the mountain, and having reached the top, called upon
Zephyr to receive her and bear her to his lord; then leaping up,
and not being sustained by Zephyr, fell down the precipice and
was dashed to pieces.
Psyche meanwhile wandered day and night, without food or repose,
in search of her husband. Casting her eyes on a lofty mountain
having on its brow a magnificent temple, she sighed and said to
herself, "Perhaps my love, my lord, inhabits there," and directed
her steps thither.
She had no sooner entered than she saw heaps of corn, some in
loose ears and some in sheaves, with mingled ears of barley.
Scattered about lay sickles and rakes, and all the instruments of
harvest, without order, as if thrown carelessly out of the weary
reapers' hands in the sultry hours of the day.
This unseemly confusion the pious Psyche put an end to, by
separating and sorting every thing to its proper place and kind,
believing that she ought to neglect none of the gods, but
endeavor by her piety to engage them all in her behalf. The holy
Ceres, whose temple it was, finding her so religiously employed,
thus spoke to her: "O Psyche, truly worthy of our pity, though I
cannot shield you from the frowns of Venus, yet I can teach you
how best to allay her displeasure. Go then, voluntarily
surrender yourself to your lady and sovereign, and try by modesty
and submission to win her forgiveness; perhaps her favor will
restore you the husband you have lost."
Psyche obeyed the commands of Ceres and took her way to the
temple of Venus, endeavoring to fortify her mind and thinking of
what she should say and how she should best propitiate the angry
goddess, feeling that the issue was doubtful and perhaps fatal.
Venus received her with angry countenance. "Most undutiful and
faithless of servants," said she, "do you at last remember that
you really have a mistress? Or have you rather come to see your
sick husband, yet suffering from the wound given him by his
loving wife? You are so ill-favored and disagreeable that the
only way you can merit your lover must be by dint of industry and
diligence. I will make trial of your housewifery." Then she
ordered Psyche to be led to the storehouse of her temple, where
was laid up a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, vetches,
beans, and lentils prepared for food for her doves, and said,
"Take and separate all these grains, putting all of the same kind
in a parcel by themselves, and see that you get it done before
evening." Then Venus departed and left her to her task.
But Psyche, in perfect consternation at the enormous work, sat
stupid and silent, without moving a finger to the inextricable
heap.
While she sat despairing, Cupid stirred up the little ant, a
native of the fields, to take compassion on her. The leader of
the ant-hill, followed by whole hosts of his six-legged subjects,
approached the heap, and with the utmost diligence taking grain
by grain, they separated the pile, sorting each kind to its
parcel; and when it was all done, they vanished out of sight in a
moment.
Venus at the approach of twilight returned from the banquet of
the gods, breathing odors and crowned with roses. Seeing the
task done she exclaimed, "This is no work of yours wicked one,
but his, whom to your own and his misfortune you have enticed."
So saying, she threw her a piece of black bread for her supper
and went away.
Next morning Venus ordered Psyche to be called, and said to her,
"Behold yonder grove which stretches along the margin of the
water. There you will find sheep feeding without a shepherd,
with golden-shining fleeces on their backs. Go, fetch me a
sample of that precious wool gathered from every one of their
fleeces.
Psyche obediently went to the river-side, prepared to do her best
to execute the command. But the river-god inspired the reeds
with harmonious murmurs, which seemed to say, "O maiden, severely
tried, tempt not the dangerous flood, nor venture among the
formidable rams on the other side, for as long as they are under
the influence of the rising sun, they burn with a cruel rage to
destroy mortals with their sharp horns or rude teeth. But when
the noontide sun has driven the flock to the shade, and the
serene spirit of the flood has lulled them to rest, you may then
cross in safety, and you will find the woolly gold sticking to
the bushes and the trunks of the trees."
Thus the compassionate river-god gave Psyche instructions how to
accomplish her task, and by observing his directions she soon
returned to Venus with her arms full of the golden fleece; but
she received not the approbation of her implacable mistress, who
said, "I know very well it is by none of your own doings that you
have succeeded in this task, and I am not satisfied yet that you
have any capacity to make yourself useful. But I have another
task for you. Here, take this box, and go your way to the
infernal shades, and give this box to Proserpine, and say, 'My
mistress Venus desires you to send her a little of your beauty,
for in tending her sick son she has lost come of her own.' Be
not too long on your errand, for I must paint myself with it to
appear at the circle of the gods and goddesses this evening."
Psyche was now satisfied that her destruction was at hand, being
obliged to go with her own feet directly down to Erebus.
Wherefore, to make no delay of what was not to be avoided, she
goes to the top of a high tower to precipitate herself headlong,
thus to descend the shortest way to the shades below. But a
voice from the tower said to her, "Why, poor unlucky girl, dost
thou design to put an end to thy days in so dreadful a manner?
And what cowardice makes thee sink under this last danger, who
hast been so miraculously supported in all thy former?" Then the
voice told her how by a certain cave she might reach the realms
of Pluto, and how to avoid all the dangers of the road, to pass
by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and prevail on Charon, the
ferryman, to take her across the black river and bring her back
again. But the voice added, "When Proserpine has given you the
box, filled with her beauty, of all things this is chiefly to be
observed by you, that you never once open or look into the box
nor allow your curiosity to pry into the treasure of the beauty
of the goddesses.
Psyche encouraged by this advice obeyed it in all things, and
taking heed to her ways travelled safely to the kingdom of Pluto.
She was admitted to the palace of Proserpine, and without
accepting the delicate seat or delicious banquet that was offered
her, but contented with coarse bread for her food, she delivered
her message from Venus. Presently the box was returned to her,
shut and filled with the precious commodity. Then she returned
the way she came, and glad was she to come out once more into the
light of day.
But having got so far successfully through her dangerous task a
longing desire seized her to examine the contents of the box.
"What," said she, "shall I, the carrier of this divine beauty,
not take the least bit to put on my cheeks to appear to more
advantage in the eyes of my beloved husband!:" So she carefully
opened the box, but found nothing there of any beauty at all, but
an infernal and truly Stygian sleep, which being thus set free
from its prison, took possession of her, and she fell down in the
midst of the road, a sleepy corpse without sense or motion.
But Cupid being now recovered from his wound, and not able longer
to bear the absence of his beloved Psyche, slipping through the
smallest crack of the window of his chamber which happened to be
left open, flew to the spot where Psyche lay, and gathering up
the sleep from her body closed it again in the box, and waked
Psyche with a light touch of one of his arrows. "Again," said
he, "hast thou almost perished by the same curiosity. But now
perform exactly the task imposed on you by my mother, and I will
take care of the rest."
Then Cupid, as swift as lightning penetrating the heights of
heaven, presented himself before Jupiter with his supplication.
Jupiter lent a favoring ear, and pleaded the cause of the lovers
so earnestly with Venus that he won her consent. On this he sent
Mercury to bring Psyche up to the heavenly assembly, and when she
arrived, handing her a cup of ambrosia, he said, "Drink this,
Psyche, and be immortal; nor shall Cupid ever break away from the
knot in which he is tied, but these nuptials shall be perpetual."
Thus Psyche became at last united to Cupid, and in due time they
had a daughter born to them whose name was Pleasure.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
A certain king had three daughters. (This seems to be one of the
latest fables of the Greek mythology. It has not been found
earlier than the close of the second century of the Christian
era. It bears marks of the higher religious notions of that
time.) The two elder were charming girls, but the beauty of the
youngest was so wonderful that language is too poor to express
its due praise. The fame of her beauty was so great that
strangers from neighboring countries came in crowds to enjoy the
sight, and looked on her with amazement, paying her that homage
which is due only to Venus herself. In fact, Venus found her
altars deserted, while men turned their devotion to this young
virgin. As she passed along, the people sang her praises, and
strewed her way with chaplets and flowers.
This perversion to a mortal of the homage due only to the
immortal powers gave great offence to the real Venus. Shaking
her ambrosial locks with indignation, she exclaimed, "Am I then
to be eclipsed in my honors by a mortal girl? In vain then did
that royal shepherd, whose judgment was approved by Jove himself,
give me the palm of beauty over my illustrious rivals, Pallas and
June. But she shall not so quietly usurp my honors. I will give
her cause to repent of so unlawful a beauty."
Thereupon she calls her winged son Cupid, mischievous enough in
his own nature, and rouses and provokes him yet more by her
complaints. She points out Psyche to him, and says, "My dear
son, punish that contumacious beauty; give thy mother a revenge
as sweet as her injuries are great; infuse into the bosom of that
haughty girl a passion for some low, mean, unworthy being, so
that she may reap a mortification as great as her present
exultation and triumph."
Cupid prepared to obey the commands of his mother. There are two
fountains in Venus's garden, one of sweet waters, the other of
bitter. Cupid filled two amber vases, one from each fountain,
and suspending them from the top of his quiver, hastened to the
chamber of Psyche, whom he found asleep. He shed a few drops
from the bitter fountain over her lips, though the sight of her
almost moved him to pity; then touched her side with the point of
his arrow. At the touch she awoke, and opened eyes upon Cupid
(himself invisible) which so startled him that in his confusion
he wounded himself with his own arrow. Heedless of his wound his
whole thought now was to repair the mischief he had done, and he
poured the balmy drops of joy over all her silken ringlets.
Psyche, henceforth frowned upon by Venus, derived no benefit from
all her charms. True, all eyes were cast eagerly upon her, and
every mouth spoke her praises; but neither king, royal youth, nor
plebeian presented himself to demand her in marriage. Her two
elder sisters of moderate charms had now long been married to two
royal princes; but Psyche, in her lonely apartment, deplored her
solitude, sick of that beauty, which, while it procured abundance
of flattery, had failed to awaken love.
Her parents, afraid that they had unwittingly incurred the anger
of the gods, consulted the oracle of Apollo, and received this
answer: "The virgin is destined for the bride of no mortal lover.
Her future husband awaits her on the top of the mountain. He is
a monster whom neither gods nor men can resist."
This dreadful decree of the oracle filled all the people with
dismay, and her parents abandoned themselves to grief. But
Psyche said, "Why, my dear parents, do you now lament me? You
should rather have grieved when the people showered upon me
undeserved honors, and with one voice called me a Venus. I now
perceive that I am a victim to that name. I submit. Lead me to
that rock to which my unhappy fate has destined me." Accordingly,
all things being prepared, the royal maid took her place in the
procession, which more resembled a funeral than a nuptial pomp,
and with her parents, amid the lamentations of the people,
ascended the mountain, on the summit of which they left her
alone, and with sorrowful hearts returned home.
While Psyche stood on the ridge of the mountain, panting with
fear and with eyes full of tears, the gentle Zephyr raised her
from the earth and bore her with an easy motion into a flowery
dale. By degrees her mind became composed, and she laid herself
down on the grassy bank to sleep. When she awoke, refreshed with
sleep, she looked round and beheld nearby a pleasant grove of
tall and stately trees. She entered it, and in the midst
discovered a fountain, sending forth clear and crystal waters,
and hard by, a magnificent palace whose August front impressed
the spectator that it was not the work of mortal hands, but the
happy retreat of some god. Drawn by admiration and wonder, she
approached the building and ventured to enter. Every object she
met filled her with pleasure and amazement. Golden pillars
supported the vaulted roof, and the walls were enriched with
carvings and paintings representing beasts of the chase and rural
scenes, adapted to delight the eye of the beholder. Proceeding
onward she perceived that besides the apartments of state there
were others, filled with all manner of treasures, and beautiful
and precious productions of nature and art.
While her eyes were thus occupied, a voice addressed her, though
she saw no one, uttering these words: "Sovereign lady, all that
you see is yours. We whose voices you hear are your servants,
and shall obey all your commands with our utmost care and
diligence. Retire therefore to your chamber and repose on your
bed of down, and when you see fit repair to the bath. Supper
will await you in the adjoining alcove when it pleases you to
take your seat there."
Psyche gave ear to the admonitions of her vocal attendants, and
after repose and the refreshment of the bath, seated herself in
the alcove, where a table immediately presented itself, without
any visible aid from waiters or servants, and covered with the
greatest delicacies of food and the most nectareous wines. Her
ears too were feasted with music from invisible performers; of
whom one sang, another played on the lute, and all closed in the
wonderful harmony of a full chorus.
She had not yet seen her destined husband. He came only in the
hours of darkness, and fled before the dawn of morning, but his
accents were full of love, and inspired a like passion in her.
She often begged him to stay and let her behold him, but he would
not consent. On the contrary, he charged her to make no attempt
to see him, for it was his pleasure, for the best of reasons, to
keep concealed. "Why should you wish to behold me?" he said.
"Have you any doubt of my love? Have you any wish ungratified?
If you saw me, perhaps you would fear me, perhaps adore me, but
all I ask of you is to love me. I would rather you would love me
as an equal than adore me as a god."
This reasoning somewhat quieted Psyche for a time, and while the
novelty lasted she felt quite happy. But at length the thought
of her parents, left in ignorance of her fate, and of her
sisters, precluded from sharing with her the delights of her
situation, preyed on her mind and made her begin to feel her
palace as but a splendid prison. When her husband came one
night, she told him her distress, and at last drew from him an
unwilling consent that her sisters should be brought to see her.
So calling Zephyr, she acquainted him with her husband's
commands, and he, promptly obedient, soon brought them across the
mountain down to their sister's valley. They embraced her and
she returned their caresses. "Come," said Psyche, "enter with me
my house and refresh yourselves with whatever your sister has to
offer." Then taking their hands she led them into her golden
palace, and committed them to the care of her numerous train of
attendant voices, to refresh them in her baths and at her table,
and to show them all her treasures. The view of these celestial
delights caused envy to enter their bosoms, at seeing their young
sister possessed of such state and splendor, so much exceeding
their own.
They asked her numberless questions, among others what sort of a
person her husband was. Psyche replied that he was a beautiful
youth, who generally spent the daytime in hunting upon the
mountains. The sisters, not satisfied with this reply, soon made
her confess that she had never seen him. Then they proceeded to
fill her bosom with dark suspicions. "Call to mind," they said,
"the Pythian oracle that declared you destined to marry a direful
and tremendous monster. The inhabitants of this valley say that
your husband is a terrible and monstrous serpent, who nourishes
you for a while with dainties that he may by and by devour you.
Take our advice. Provide yourself with a lamp and a sharp knife;
put them in concealment that your husband may not discover them,
and when he is sound asleep, slip out of bed bring forth your
lamp and see for yourself whether what they say is true or not.
If it is, hesitate not to cut off the monster's head, and thereby
recover your liberty."
Psyche resisted these persuasions as well as she could, but they
did not fail to have their effect on her mind, and when her
sisters were gone, their words and her own curiosity were too
strong for her to resist. So she prepared her lamp and a sharp
knife, and hid them out of sight of her husband. When he had
fallen into his first sleep, she silently rose and uncovering her
lamp beheld not a hideous monster, but the most beautiful and
charming of the gods, with his golden ringlets wandering over his
snowy neck and crimson cheek, with two dewy wings on his
shoulders, whiter than snow, and with shining feathers like the
tender blossoms of spring. As she leaned the lamp over to have a
nearer view of his face a drop of burning oil fell on the
shoulder of the god, startled with which he opened his eyes and
fixed them full upon her; then, without saying one word, he
spread his white wings and flew out of the window. Psyche, in
vain endeavoring to follow him, fell from the window to the
ground. Cupid, beholding her as she lay in the dust, stopped his
flight for an instant and said, "O foolish Psyche, is it thus you
repay my love? After having disobeyed my mother's commands and
made you my wife, will you think me a monster and cut off my
head? But go; return to your sisters, whose advice you seem to
think preferable to mine. I inflict no other punishment on you
than to leave you forever. Love cannot dwell with suspicion."
So saying he fled away, leaving poor Psyche prostrate on the
ground, filling the place with mournful lamentations.
When she had recovered some degree of composure she looked around
her, but the palace and gardens had vanished, and she found
herself in the open field not far from the city where her sisters
dwelt. She repaired thither and told them the whole story of her
misfortunes, at which, pretending to grieve, those spiteful
creatures inwardly rejoiced; "for now," said they, "he will
perhaps choose one of us." With this idea, without saying a word
of her intentions, each of them rose early the next morning and
ascended the mountain, and having reached the top, called upon
Zephyr to receive her and bear her to his lord; then leaping up,
and not being sustained by Zephyr, fell down the precipice and
was dashed to pieces.
Psyche meanwhile wandered day and night, without food or repose,
in search of her husband. Casting her eyes on a lofty mountain
having on its brow a magnificent temple, she sighed and said to
herself, "Perhaps my love, my lord, inhabits there," and directed
her steps thither.
She had no sooner entered than she saw heaps of corn, some in
loose ears and some in sheaves, with mingled ears of barley.
Scattered about lay sickles and rakes, and all the instruments of
harvest, without order, as if thrown carelessly out of the weary
reapers' hands in the sultry hours of the day.
This unseemly confusion the pious Psyche put an end to, by
separating and sorting every thing to its proper place and kind,
believing that she ought to neglect none of the gods, but
endeavor by her piety to engage them all in her behalf. The holy
Ceres, whose temple it was, finding her so religiously employed,
thus spoke to her: "O Psyche, truly worthy of our pity, though I
cannot shield you from the frowns of Venus, yet I can teach you
how best to allay her displeasure. Go then, voluntarily
surrender yourself to your lady and sovereign, and try by modesty
and submission to win her forgiveness; perhaps her favor will
restore you the husband you have lost."
Psyche obeyed the commands of Ceres and took her way to the
temple of Venus, endeavoring to fortify her mind and thinking of
what she should say and how she should best propitiate the angry
goddess, feeling that the issue was doubtful and perhaps fatal.
Venus received her with angry countenance. "Most undutiful and
faithless of servants," said she, "do you at last remember that
you really have a mistress? Or have you rather come to see your
sick husband, yet suffering from the wound given him by his
loving wife? You are so ill-favored and disagreeable that the
only way you can merit your lover must be by dint of industry and
diligence. I will make trial of your housewifery." Then she
ordered Psyche to be led to the storehouse of her temple, where
was laid up a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, vetches,
beans, and lentils prepared for food for her doves, and said,
"Take and separate all these grains, putting all of the same kind
in a parcel by themselves, and see that you get it done before
evening." Then Venus departed and left her to her task.
But Psyche, in perfect consternation at the enormous work, sat
stupid and silent, without moving a finger to the inextricable
heap.
While she sat despairing, Cupid stirred up the little ant, a
native of the fields, to take compassion on her. The leader of
the ant-hill, followed by whole hosts of his six-legged subjects,
approached the heap, and with the utmost diligence taking grain
by grain, they separated the pile, sorting each kind to its
parcel; and when it was all done, they vanished out of sight in a
moment.
Venus at the approach of twilight returned from the banquet of
the gods, breathing odors and crowned with roses. Seeing the
task done she exclaimed, "This is no work of yours wicked one,
but his, whom to your own and his misfortune you have enticed."
So saying, she threw her a piece of black bread for her supper
and went away.
Next morning Venus ordered Psyche to be called, and said to her,
"Behold yonder grove which stretches along the margin of the
water. There you will find sheep feeding without a shepherd,
with golden-shining fleeces on their backs. Go, fetch me a
sample of that precious wool gathered from every one of their
fleeces.
Psyche obediently went to the river-side, prepared to do her best
to execute the command. But the river-god inspired the reeds
with harmonious murmurs, which seemed to say, "O maiden, severely
tried, tempt not the dangerous flood, nor venture among the
formidable rams on the other side, for as long as they are under
the influence of the rising sun, they burn with a cruel rage to
destroy mortals with their sharp horns or rude teeth. But when
the noontide sun has driven the flock to the shade, and the
serene spirit of the flood has lulled them to rest, you may then
cross in safety, and you will find the woolly gold sticking to
the bushes and the trunks of the trees."
Thus the compassionate river-god gave Psyche instructions how to
accomplish her task, and by observing his directions she soon
returned to Venus with her arms full of the golden fleece; but
she received not the approbation of her implacable mistress, who
said, "I know very well it is by none of your own doings that you
have succeeded in this task, and I am not satisfied yet that you
have any capacity to make yourself useful. But I have another
task for you. Here, take this box, and go your way to the
infernal shades, and give this box to Proserpine, and say, 'My
mistress Venus desires you to send her a little of your beauty,
for in tending her sick son she has lost come of her own.' Be
not too long on your errand, for I must paint myself with it to
appear at the circle of the gods and goddesses this evening."
Psyche was now satisfied that her destruction was at hand, being
obliged to go with her own feet directly down to Erebus.
Wherefore, to make no delay of what was not to be avoided, she
goes to the top of a high tower to precipitate herself headlong,
thus to descend the shortest way to the shades below. But a
voice from the tower said to her, "Why, poor unlucky girl, dost
thou design to put an end to thy days in so dreadful a manner?
And what cowardice makes thee sink under this last danger, who
hast been so miraculously supported in all thy former?" Then the
voice told her how by a certain cave she might reach the realms
of Pluto, and how to avoid all the dangers of the road, to pass
by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and prevail on Charon, the
ferryman, to take her across the black river and bring her back
again. But the voice added, "When Proserpine has given you the
box, filled with her beauty, of all things this is chiefly to be
observed by you, that you never once open or look into the box
nor allow your curiosity to pry into the treasure of the beauty
of the goddesses.
Psyche encouraged by this advice obeyed it in all things, and
taking heed to her ways travelled safely to the kingdom of Pluto.
She was admitted to the palace of Proserpine, and without
accepting the delicate seat or delicious banquet that was offered
her, but contented with coarse bread for her food, she delivered
her message from Venus. Presently the box was returned to her,
shut and filled with the precious commodity. Then she returned
the way she came, and glad was she to come out once more into the
light of day.
But having got so far successfully through her dangerous task a
longing desire seized her to examine the contents of the box.
"What," said she, "shall I, the carrier of this divine beauty,
not take the least bit to put on my cheeks to appear to more
advantage in the eyes of my beloved husband!:" So she carefully
opened the box, but found nothing there of any beauty at all, but
an infernal and truly Stygian sleep, which being thus set free
from its prison, took possession of her, and she fell down in the
midst of the road, a sleepy corpse without sense or motion.
But Cupid being now recovered from his wound, and not able longer
to bear the absence of his beloved Psyche, slipping through the
smallest crack of the window of his chamber which happened to be
left open, flew to the spot where Psyche lay, and gathering up
the sleep from her body closed it again in the box, and waked
Psyche with a light touch of one of his arrows. "Again," said
he, "hast thou almost perished by the same curiosity. But now
perform exactly the task imposed on you by my mother, and I will
take care of the rest."
Then Cupid, as swift as lightning penetrating the heights of
heaven, presented himself before Jupiter with his supplication.
Jupiter lent a favoring ear, and pleaded the cause of the lovers
so earnestly with Venus that he won her consent. On this he sent
Mercury to bring Psyche up to the heavenly assembly, and when she
arrived, handing her a cup of ambrosia, he said, "Drink this,
Psyche, and be immortal; nor shall Cupid ever break away from the
knot in which he is tied, but these nuptials shall be perpetual."
Thus Psyche became at last united to Cupid, and in due time they
had a daughter born to them whose name was Pleasure.
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