United States or Rwanda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Therefore I am pleased to look at trees or at anything that grows, unhandicapped by the mediocritizing force of reason, and note how contorted such things are." Mallare's point of view toward his world the attitude that went mad was nothing more involved than his egoism. His infatuation with self was destined to arrive at a peak on whose height he became overcome with a dizziness.
There lived with him as a servant a little monster whom he called Goliath and who was a dwarfed and paralytic negro. Goliath's age was unknown. His deformities gave him the air of an old man and his hunched back made him seem too massive for a boy. But in studying him Mallare had concluded that he was a boy. Goliath had been one of the first symptoms of Mallare's madness.
Turning a page a month later he would meticulously set down the date, the hour of the day, the direction of the wind and under it write out, "I have a stomach ache from eating peaches." The Journal bristled with innocuous informations. An acquaintance of the period, interested in Mallare's work as an artist, smiled and commented, "These are, no doubt, symbols.
Mallare's hands had reached suddenly to his throat and their fingers, like inviolable decisions, closed on it. The ragged one screamed. A man with a slant of black hair across his forehead who had stood smiling at him had without sound or warning reached out his hands to murder him. The beggar gasped and writhed, his eyes staring with horror into the immobile face of his assailant.
His relation to the phantoms and ideas which peopled his mind was a lucid one. Mallare's world was his thought. He had retired within himself, dragging his senses after him. The street through which he walked was like an unremembered dream. The faces that passed him vanished before his eyes. He walked, seeing nothing that was visible, hearing nothing that had sound.
Mallare's mind grappling with the nightmare shadows engulfing it, distorted his reason to give them outline and was saved. The writing, however, becomes more labored in appearance as if the letters of words were now decorations in themselves. "I have listened for years to the prattle of men who call themselves egoists. It is a title by which they have sought to identify me.
I must remember this. Write 'Forbidden' over its black doors. To succumb to my madness would be to lose it." He resumed his walk. "She intruded," he remembered. "Perhaps I have killed her. That would be pleasant. Except that she was necessary as an image. I am the mirror and she is an image alive in me. Her desire is a happy shadow I embrace." Mallare's eyes opened to the night.
I am grateful to them and have therefore preserved them carefully." The history of Mallare's madness, however, is to be found in this Journal. There are two empty pages that stare significantly. The empty pages are a lapse. It was during this lapse that Mallare smiled with interest at the spectacle of his disintegration. There follows, then, a sudden excited outburst, undated.
From the depths of their non-existence they contemplate their fellowman and perceive him a dwarf prostrate forever before solacing arrangements of words; an homunculus riding vaingloriously on the tiny river of ink that flows between monstrous yesterdays and monstrous tomorrows; a baboon strutting through a mirage." The history of Mallare's madness begins thus. And the pages continue.
This is my face, but I am no longer there. And whose are these eyes looking back at me? The eyes of Mallare's friend, red and gleaming. His friend who betrayed him. Hair slanting over a forehead. Mouth wide and thin. No longer mine. They belong to the mirror. Mallare's words whimper before them. "Weep ... weep, impotent one. The feet of your madness walk solemnly over you.
Word Of The Day