Michael Weller
"The Island for the Whites", Book I, Chapter 1.
In the beginning
Lighthouse
Once I dreamed of spending the winter at the lighthouse: or rather, only from autumn to spring. In October, when the foliage is lit by every color of fire, it's nice to be disembark from a boat on a small and uninhabited island. The island is covered with forest, and the lighthouse rises on the shore near the cliff. Nearby there is a house, and a shed for firewood and supplies. A narrow spiral staircase leads to the top platform of the lighthouse. You need to climb it twice a day: to turn the spotlight on in the evening, and turn it off in the morning.
There is a radio in the house, and I will bring a bag of books with me. In the gray morning light, you need to chop the wood and fire the oven. Then boil a coffee pot, read, and sit down at a table by the brightening window, anticipating writing with black ink on a white sheet from where I left off yesterday. Then to smoke, waiting for a slight dizziness from the first morning puff, and to feel the chill spreading inside in order to catch a tuning fork, when the feeling of the fullness of life and unity with the whole world takes shape in thoughts, and to try finding the exact words to express these thoughts.
Then you can wander through the snow among the trees, cook soup, start a gasoline engine in the barn for electricity at dusk, read, and sit for a long time with a glass of whiskey in the hand, to hear from the receiver the distant voices of the continents, their big life and bustle.
And to see no one. The Internet never existed here. Cellular communication is out of reach. Complete calmness: today, tomorrow and next month. Peace and quietness. Resting and focusing on own thoughts, feelings, and memories. I'm tired very much of people, big cities, vanity and endless communications: direct and via networks, exhausting and unnecessary.
That's how beautifully and, I would say, artistically, literary and picturesquely, I imagined my dream. Yes. And then the days will grow longer, the sun will rise higher above the leaden sea horizon, the heavy gloom of the sky will be washed away azure, snow melts in the forest, buds burst on black branches, and by the end of spring a boat will come for me in a sparkling water. And I will go down from the shore, being enlightened and wiser with my brilliant ingenious novel in the bag, a thick stack of sheets.
... Be afraid of your dreams, be afraid of your prayer – it will come true, but not in the way you expected.
I live in a forest hut. The boat will never come. And God forbid it. I hope to live out my days in relieving solitude. I won't even say where my hut is, I won't say the state or the country. The river is a quarter of a mile away, and every time I try to take a different path to it and get off at a new place so as not to tread the path.
And it's not I who wrote this novel: the life did. Different people with different stories did. I have been collecting material for a long time, all my life. Miscellaneous scraps, notes, testimonies. Someone's fantasies, a chronicle of other people's sins.
I flatter myself with the comparison to Robinson Crusoe, who salvaged the meager remains of a shipwreck in order to recreate from them a fragment of civilization on one single and uninhabited island.
A road.
In the evening, tramps dined by the fire telling stories before going to sleep:
"And every time he told me his story differently. Just a little bit, but differently. Once he made his way north through the forests through Idaho; another time he reached the Red River in Minnesota and rafted on a found boat to Winnipeg. Now he removed the bag of letters from the dead mail carrier on the porch, then he took the bag of letters from the empty mailbox for no reason. Paper letters, mind you: one cannot realize it right away. Consequently, I ask: "I wonder who were those who wrote so much on paper and to whom they sent them – instead of text messages or calling?" Didn't the mail stop going prior to the connection cut off? He thought about it and answered that he had a backpack of books hidden in a safe place, almost completely intact, he picked them in a burned-out store, though it was hard to carry, but someday he would definitely return for them. And yet he didn't have a blanket. That's the kind of glitch he had.
The company exchanged replicas in the spirit that there is nothing strange; there are a lot of pranks now.
"We were with one of those, he used to print ads or something like that, we gathered to spend the night on an abandoned farm somehow. The windows were smashed, there was no food at all. But an old, beaten, Ford F-150 remained under a canopy: in moving condition, and half a tank of gasoline. They all left in a different car, I guess. It ought to be enough for some hundred miles, and then we'll see along the way. I throw blankets with me and some of the left-over clothes. However, this one is a fool! – he drags armfuls of newspapers from the attic. I say: "What's with you? Are you, a fool?" And he hugs his newspapers and babbles all sorts of crap: it's documents of the era, memory, his duty to history. I, he says, will write ... well, a thick book ... an epic. In short, in the afternoon we stopped, and I took some of these newspapers to make the fire, to boil water. And this bitch! – jump in the car! – and stepped the gas! I don't know how far he got to. Perhaps he is killed, I guess. If I meet him, I'll kill him myself.
The words "I will kill" makes free people thoughtful. Yes, at least someone dreams about it: everyone has someone to kill. Every body thought about their own. Folks here did have weapons. The fire was dying down, and black-and-red shadows tightened the dome of light. A blond man with a thin and sharp face made a sign. They threw more branches into the fire. The flames licked the branches with white tongues and rose. Everyone moved in, making themselves comfortable.
"Writer," the blond, bored killer ordered, or maybe announced.
There was a movement of glances, and in they focused at a puffed up little man in a museum-style woolen raglan of an indefinable color. He lowered his collar, crossed his legs in Mongolian style, and straightened his back. If we are talking about faces, then his puffy, drunk face had a pitiful and at the same time proud expression. It expressed equal readiness for applause and beatings. The people were ready to listen.
A jester
"His name was Melvin Barrett. And he wanted to be a writer. He graduated from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. But he didn't shine there, except, perhaps, by his patience and stubbornness."
"Was he healthy?"
"Rather not. But he could beat one's face!"
"What did he write?"
"He dreamed of writing a great novel. The novel of the era. They were all very proud there that many future geniuses studied at these courses: Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor and all sorts of others."
There was a brief moment of embarrassment: they didn't know the names he mentioned, and he realized that he knew they didn't know them: why, after all.
"First he taught English at school. Then he spat at it and moved to run a truck. He drove through all the states, getting hemorrhoids on the seat and paid off the loan. Then he found a partner to work two weeks after two, something like this, and he was writing in his free two weeks.
Nobody wanted to take Melvin's scrawl, and in the end, he began to scribble notes for the local newspaper. Then someone died there, either from nonsense, or from sexual exhaustion, and he was hired to the editorial staff. And just as he began to feel sick from this newspaper garbage and ads about the theft of used condoms, the newspaper burst. Then he sat down on welfare, and he liked it.
The narrator made a gesture, and a joint was handed to him. After two puffs, he easily crafted an excellent biography of Melvin Barrett. He made married him to a beauty and the daughter of a billionaire, so he bought a yacht and a Lamborghini. Then he made the billionaire imprisoned for spying for China, the beautiful wife ran away with a black rapper. The billionaire's creditors hired Mexican killers and they began hunting for Melvin, who was hiding in Little Havana to Miami. From there he fled to Kentucky and got lost among the evil white poor. Well, and then the Catastrophe struck, and he, already gray and bald, toothless, wrinkled, but still sharp and determined, began to escape and merged into the streams of the Exodus. Then he decided, or rather, realized that he would finally describe everything, and this would be his great novel: about abandoned houses, ransacked shops and gas stations, and shootings in warehouses, and highways clogged with rusting cars, and how people were slaughtered for a can of gasoline.
Oh, guys, in the past they would have made a movie about this ... and what a movie! An epic blockbuster. Alas, there is no one now to do it. And nothing to do it with. You saw it all on your own. Therefore, everything about Melvin Barrett will be obvious to you, as if you saw it with your own eyes.
After all, we all know how they rummage around in empty apartments, whether a package of cheese was lying behind the refrigerator, or the master's shirt under the bed, or a lighter in the crack of the sofa. How you kick a rat eating a corpse, and it is fat, lazy and impudent. And if the weapon shop is taken out to the last cartridge, the last holster and screwdriver – search all the bushes around, look behind the fences – somewhere there is always an AR-15 lying around with an almost full magazine.
Melvin joined with a family group. A caravan of a dozen armed men with children and wives. They fought off gasoline by force as others were afraid of them: after all, family-minded always fight to the death.
"They all will be killed anyway".
"They were killed in the end. The girls were taken to be fucked and exchanged for what was needed, while the rest were left on the road with empty tanks, without water and food. Melvin delayed behind the group just in time, and then he disappeared in the fog making his way further alone.
And then, one day he comes to search a house. And he sees an old woman there. Sitting in a rocking chair by the window. Half eaten already by rats. Stink overwhelms, of course, flies. There is nothing useful in the rooms: many have already looked into and cleansed through. That's just at the door: an old leather chest, two belts with locks, brown, with banded corners and embossed. Useless and meaningless item, indeed, yet cute. He opens it – and there are several books: paper-books. And the old ones. Hardcover with pictures.
"No luck..."
"What kind of books?"
An old Bible on top, of course. Ancient one, still handwritten. With engravings by Doré. And under it was an Atlas of nautical charts, with marks of the places where the treasures of the famous pirates were kept: Morgan, Flint and Blackbeard. There was also a biography of George Washington and reflections of a French marquis on American democracy. And in the same place – the fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" and poems by the ancient Roman emperor-philosopher about the art of love, sex and seduction.
"Damn, the emperor must have had a good life fucking up to the roof.
"Wait a minute ... But with a map of treasures, you have to go for treasures, since you are so lucky. If this is true, of course. Ah, a writer?"
"You are like kids. Well, how are you going to get there? And how do you know who controls the territory and whom you will meet along the way? Gee, you will be hit a hundred times along the way. Will you assemble a division, with fuel, with weapons? Will you declare war there? Maybe you are the president? And how can you find the indicated place without navigation, without GPS? And even though you have accomplished all the feats and dug up this pile of gold – well, what are you going to do with it? Who will give you food, or gasoline, or cartridges for this gold? You can't even buy a fried rat for it! A treasure hunter!..
There is a time for everything, guys: a time to bury treasures, a time to dig up treasures, and a time to spit on treasures.
So he spat on the treasures. And he thought the following:
…I could tell you in detail what I saw on the long road. How in a bookstore in Laramie, rummaging through piles of school notebooks on the floor, I found a paper map of the United States after all! The electronics are all dead. How I found a blue Mitsubishi Mirage on the sixth floor of an abandoned parking lot and tried to maintain it the best I could – as you can't find another so economical car, and there is nowhere to repaired anything.
In the trunk of a Nissan overturned on the side of the road, I found blue electrical tape and, remembering a movie about the Second World War, I covered the headlights with blue tape, leaving only narrow gaps so that it be imperceptible at night. At dawn, I sought shelter and hid in the ruins, or bushes, or behind a hill, so long as it was not visible from the road. Some are reluctant even to change shirts or canned food for gasoline: why to change your clothes if you are a loner, while you can kill and take everything you need: just have enough ammo.
Life has become geared towards maintaining itself. Security, food, warmth, movement. And all around is a kaleidoscope: plundered towns, burned gas stations, dead empty shops, and doors dangling on one hinge slamming everywhere in the wind. What kind of law of physics is this, that one hinge is necessarily torn off, and the other dangles – it is unknown. I'll spare you the description of corpses and lynching... And who needs lynching, after all? Typically they shoot casually if someone has a lot of cartridges. Otherwise, out of economy – they hang up on everything that sticks out high. One was hung up on a sign "Swiss watch", and they cackled that he would be in time for paradise just in time.
The asphalt began to crack and break very quickly, grass climbed into the cracks of the highway. They got used to the fact that the evening darkness is impenetrable and dangerous, no lanterns lighting in windows; and stay away from rare fires just in case. We got used to the smell of the space from which life has gone.
You have seen so many similar pictures and heard so many similar stories that they are of no interest to anyone, I'll tell you.
Political correctness
All the toilet bowls, and even the floors in the toilets, the corners of the apartments and the staircases were so crapped that a person who had not completely lost his sense of disgust chose a place for discharging a necessary and vital needs somewhere farther and cleaner: with a fresh breeze from above and preferably a flowerbed from below. In so doing, under a narrow strip of shadow, an unshaven man sat in a gibbon position under a palm tree, his pants down. And while his intestines lightened, at the opposite end of the organism, into the organ spiritually opposite to the rectum, that is, into the brain, and through it into the soul (the container of which is not determined for sure, but which surely is the most sublime part in the body – unlike excreted feces), the following information was received. In his hand he held a piece of newspaper that he read, but his intellectual efforts to comprehend the meaning of what he was reading were distracted by the efforts of the physiological process:
"Political correctness is a compensatory system of the prohibitions in a decaying society, objectively trying to structure a system of at least some imperatives and taboos for self-preservation – in order to replace those canceled earlier. When prohibitions are cancelled and permissiveness (i.e. disappearance of system-forming transpersonal values in the form of faith, ideas and ideologies) prevails, a negative autistic idea becomes a system-forming idea: to prohibit anything innocent and insignificant inside oneself – as if it suddenly began to contradict the views and interests of society. Like a savage tattoo, like the strictest prescriptions and prohibitions of behavior in prison, the slightest word, gesture, expression, deed suddenly acquires a hypertrophied and harmful meaning, making you a sinner, culprit, an outcast. The new cruel system of prohibitions is meaningless, and therefore even more cruel and categorical: do not dare to violate any invented provisions".
The somewhat tense face of the man relaxed, his eyes softened, he brought the piece of newspaper to the spot of completion of the process and used it for its intended purpose.
That's to describe the search by Melvin Barrett of materials about the epoch.
Prayer
The longer you live alone, the clearer you experience two feelings – happiness and guilt. Happiness – because the life was so huge, and there were so many different things in it, so many joys and anxieties, so many dreams realized and not, gratitude and anger, overcoming and bliss, and also countless placers of precious living trifles, in the radiance of their diamond sparks; your past life is inexhaustibly beautiful! As to the guilt, it is because you didn't give enough, didn't do enough to those you loved. You rushed forward, you were overwhelmed by plans and passions; by a thirst for life and by the main things – and you didn't have enough time, didn't know how, didn't deign the dear ones with real love. You didn't enter the soul of the beloved or dear one in order to feel life with one's nerves, one's soul, one's feelings and aspirations, and to give one what one so needed; to give one more attention, and warmth, and consent, and gratitude, and support in one's anxiety. You loved; life is irreparable – therefore you are to blame.
That's what think.
The monastery does not need stone walls: those ruins, echoes of the chorale that is in your soul are enough. Don't spare flags! The brethren are not needed, the rector is not needed, the candles are not needed, and even a cross on the roof or above the altar is not needed either. Memory elevates your monastery, it lights candles; and even the grave of conscience is a prayer in itself, as well as a life that has already passed is a repentance.
If I could, I would sculpt a bust of Plato. And I would talk to him. In fact, I talk to him anyway. The Raphael's fresco always annoyed me as a kind of a market fuss instead of displaying the coryphaeus of the ancient philosophy. Sometimes he comes to me and sits on a Coke box, sometimes I go to him to the Academy, and the students silently move into the shadows of colonnades to do not interfere. But those are the details, it doesn't matter...
I just wanted to say that I live in the main world, the primary, determining one – in the world of ideas. From the outside, this may seem pitiful and wild, probably some kind of simulation of madness. But in reality it's great. The main thing is that my world is invulnerable.
In the morning, I live with the idea of coffee and scrambled eggs. The idea of breakfast ends with a cigarette. Then I get dressed ... I can put on a fresh Fantine shirt and Briony jeans. I sit down in a rocking chair that smells of embossed leather... After all, we are interested not in the fact that things are of terribly high quality, but in the fact that they express the idea of quality, i.e. success and pleasure. Here I am dealing directly with the idea of comfort and happiness rather than with its vain paraphernalia.
You just need to fill your belly with something, and you need that in the monastery of mine be warm, and that nothing hurt. All that I need for happiness is within me. Within me! Pain and shame of past years, sins and unfulfilled dreams: gratitude and repentance, immeasurable, inexpressible gratitude for everything in life (well, almost for everything) – and the same immeasurable, boundless, inescapable repentance.
Repentance is love groaning under the whip of conscience – that's a phrase I came up with to insert into my novel.
However, here is a vile thing: you sin in the real life, but you repent in your imagination, in your soul, in your own mind so that no one feels hot or cold from it. It's merely a selfish self-deception. First, you use people crippling their lives, and then, when you are no longer able to enjoy the sweetness of sin, you enjoy the sweetness of repentance. That is, you catch a buzz from both bestial egoism of the consumer, and from its opposite: eh, first I was strong and cruel, then I became weak, but righteous, and I always feel good. It's the path from young mockery to senile admiration. Righteousness is a kind of hedonism I'll tell you; a spiritual masochism as a source of positive emotions.
When you can't love what it is because nothing left anymore, you just have to love what it was. Dreams turn back, and planning for the future is replaced with contemplation of possibilities of the past. (The prognostic information model becomes retrospective, as I would have written at the time, when I wrote articles on social psychology, until it was banned.)
And the love for your parents flares up in you: to them whom you did not understand in your youth. And generally, there was no time for them, and you gave them so little attention. How well do you understand them now, and how short their life was, and how much they could do, if the circumstances were different, while you did not give them what you could then, and will never do anymore.
And suddenly you realize that your first school love was the most beautiful girl in your city, and you with her were the most beautiful couple in school, and you were envied. And you had never told her everything you wanted, and were going to, and had to. Is she still alive in these terrible events? … You were going at least to make a call.
And did you see your best school friend for the last time in twenty-three years. He earned pennies in some office. And he was tall, slender, strong, handsome. Everyone liked him; even the gang from the Five Blocks respected him. He knew how to smile with a threat being able to set back anyone. Everybody were sure in the school that he would make a career, but nothing came out of him.
I repent that I gave them little, that I valued them little and easily departed; that I meant more to them than they did to me... every person I met in my life, who were my life, because life is the warmth that only arises between people, and now I have only a memory about that warmth – and I'm trying to pass on this memory: to whom?..
The love, the sound of which has dissolved in time, and only some moments have survived, separate pictures, like frames of old advertising film that once impressed hearts so much.
My old man, who looked like a gray-haired gangster or sailor, who has gone through two wars, was ruined by two crises, yet not bent by anything; from whom I have never heard a word of praise, yet who boasted about me to his friends; I was young, I had no time, I had a good luck in my life; I was callous with him, but he had the wisdom to not reproach me, and to endure the pain. He still lives in me: beloved, in my repentant memory.
My girls, my beautiful, tender girls! Their time is ruled by a ruthless envious witch, who turns young beauties into disgusting snags, and only in memory they live in their true form: ask for their forgiveness, get on your knees, put everything at their feet, all trophies of your dissolute life; wake up and appreciate the given to you treasures from the distance of past years, look back at what you have left at the end of a long journey.
And your enemies, your competitors and envious people are essential to you; the memory of them is dear, and hatred to them is dear to you – for this is also your life, and it was good.
Everything done will remain with you, yet everything not done will torment you until your last hour: such is the human fate.
How I Became an American
Today, if you say that you are an American, they can kill you. And you surely will be hated, so that you even forgot what it meant before, long ago.
Today you must say that you are a socialist. Or Cosmopolitan. Or black. Or a muslim. Or transgender. Or a cleaner. Or an activist – it doesn't matter of what as it can usually remain unspecified.
This is a terrible thing – deprivation of memory: substituting your memory by a fictional biography and other people's thoughts. Those bastards are pecking at your head with their propaganda until you start seeing yourself and your life through their eyes. And then you believe them, not yourself. They replace you in your own eyes. That's why I want to kill them.
Old time. Middle class. People read books.
Tales of Uncle Remus. How Brer Rabbit outwitted Brer Fox. Brother Bear and Sister Frog. The monkey that never scratched himself.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Well, this Thomas Sawyer has a gang – just rags!
Jack London. When you live in this damned country as long as me, son, then you will understand that Christmas happens only once a year. He got used to endure such blows for half a dollar one-time or three dollars a week – a hard school, but it did him good.
Hemingway, a great myth, the man. Life breaks everyone, but then some only get stronger at the break, while others get good for nothing after that.
Charlie Chaplin, Earl Flynn, Burt Lancaster, Yul Brynner.
Founding Fathers. Conquest of the Wild West.
Freedom and the Constitution: We the People of the United States!
Airplane. Atomic bomb. Apollo 11, Moon.
We were the most courageous, hardworking and fair.
Justice is you: here and now.
And when it becomes your essence, you are ready.
And if you have read Kipling[1] (not an American), then you can remember and understand:
So what they ha' got by the skin o' their teeth
They sell for their teeth again.
Dao[2]
Since childhood, I dreamed about what all boys dream of: about fame and love. If the great Thomas Woolf said this about himself, I'm not ashamed either. And I don't care that it got outdated and went out of fashion. It's you who got outdated, as the life has demonstrated. The American Dream existed in many forms, and it is was one of the best.
Whatever you dream about, you dream of happiness. And happiness of my life, the embodiment of my American dreams looked like this: I will write a great novel. Huge, thick, complex, deep, filled with wise insights and written in brilliant language. For many years my books are rejected: with disdain, edification, ridicule. For many years I suffered, endured and continued to work. I overcame hardship, poverty, depression, I avoided friends – not to feel their humiliating sympathy. And in the end I managed to create an unheard of masterpiece, and in the end the recognition came. And it brought wealth and fame. Interviews, press conferences, speeches in huge halls… I didn't think about the Nobel Prize – it has long become such a contractual egalitarian shit ... it's a pity: before the Age of Revolution it meant a lot, a sign of the highest caste.
And love will happen by itself, as real love should. The best girl in the world, thin and blue-eyed, with wheaten hair and a shy smile, would love me once and for all. She will be affectionate and patient; she will believe in me at first sight and will forgive me everything. She will endure poverty and wanderings with me; she will rejoice at every little thing and share all my aspirations.
And when I get rich, we will buy a beautiful house and give birth to four children: three sons and a daughter. And three brothers will protect their only sister. And then the grandchildren will come, children with families will come to visit us, and we will grow old happily, remembering the past: peaceful gray-haired patriarchs in the family circle.
Well, there's no harm in dreaming. And now – what really happened. Nothing happened, as usual. If you want to make the Lord laugh, tell Him about your plans.
All the publishers sent me to hell at the beginning, and kept sending me there all my life. Hm, maybe I'm untalented yet not understanding that. Therefore, I'm a graphomaniac: stubborn and convinced. This will lead whoever to blissful dreams: one little prick – and you flew into that coveted parallel universe, where everyone gets according to the needs of one's tormented soul.
And as for the faithful companion for life – she was strong, dark-eyed, quick-tempered, and was not going at all to endure all her life with a loser who persists in his bullshit. Well, there were other girls, but only one clearly expressed her desire to endure and hope to the winning end. In the morning, and after the hangover, this unfortunate woman happened to appear for me so disgusting, that it was I who could not bear it. Nobody's perfect.
Having in character patience and perseverance in achieving goals, I realized that fate has determined love for me in that sector of paradise, where slender muscular men understand each other at first sight, and strong friendship is inseparable from spiritual unity and bodily enjoyment. Damn, if life matched the poetic ideas about it, then sexologists and psychoanalysts would have no work. We met in a gay bar, we went to him, he was nice and tactful, but my penis turned out to be an inveterate homophobe, while other body parts used in sex did not show the slightest tolerance either.
Cognitive dissonance is when the conscious and subconscious send each other to fuck away, but the dick does not get up. Subconscious always wins. You can rape the subconscious but it's even worse than raping the body in the ass: the torn anus heals fast, but with a mental trauma you will be tormented so much that you will lose potency whatsoever. Thus, my creative and loving careers both cannot be called successful. But there is still one area in which my searches and demands called out for finding harmony in life. Isn't it too hard for you? I was not exactly looking for the meaning of life, though not without this. I was trying to figure out what the hell is going on around here. A reason why I'm unhappy – that does not matter so much. But why are so many different idiocies going on around? Why are intellectuals talking so much nonsense – while rednecks in a southern drawl express reasonable things quite often?
Why is everything imperfect and bad gradually replaced with perfect and good – and then vice versa, the good is replaced with idiotic and bad? Why do bastards succeed? Why do women love villains more? Why are people, when ruining their countries, sincerely sure that they are doing the best thing? How is this all?
Heraclitus, who, by the right of the royal family, wore a scarlet cloak, in the end, out of contempt for people, retired into the mountains and died alone. Heraclitus the Dark, known for "the unity and the struggle of opposites", "one cannot enter twice in the same river".
Two thousand years later, Shakespeare wrote:
Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy Nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And Folly (Doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d Simplicity,
And captive good attending Captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
There are many stories about hermits. And about the fire keepers. Hermit, wisdom, fire – such a triad. And along with it there is another triad: poverty, old age, nature. And more: defeat, repentance, humility. I walked, I wandered, and I came to that point in the world where in the midst of these three tripods stands my hut in the forest, a quarter of a mile from the river.
[1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea-wife". These lines in the Russian original of the novel appeared in another form:
But what was gained at the cost of teeth –
It for the same price goes!
[2] As conceived in the context of East Asian philosophy, Dao or Tao is an intuitive knowing of life which cannot be grasped as a concept. Rather, it is known through actual living experience of one's everyday being.