Free Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd Page B

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    ‘Happy people are never brilliant. Art requires friction.’ Who said that? Nonsense. Art is the pursuit of a kind of harmony and integrity. A harmonious life full of integrity is artistic. Ergo. Q.E.D.
    Dream. I was shaving and then in the mirror my face turned into my father’s. How are you, old son? he said. I’m well, father, I said. I miss you. Step through the mirror and join me, then, he said, come on, lad. I touched the mirror and his face turned back to mine.
     
    I remember an argument I had with Blanche because she’d left me a note written in pencil. I said that was disrespectful – she wrote to me as if she were jotting down a list of groceries – you didn’t write in pencil to someone you loved. She called me a silly arrogant prig. She was right – sometimes I think a fundamental priggishness is my worst feature. Not priggishness, so much, as worrying or making a fuss about things that are of no consequence at all.
     
    Great acting is being able to say ‘Pass the salt, please,’ without sounding weird or odd or stupid or portentous. Great acting is being able to say ‘Horror! Horror! Horror!’ without sounding weird or odd or stupid or portentous.
     
    Life is more than love. Turn that around. Love is more than life. Makes just as much sense. This is less true if you say LOVE = SEX-LOVE. Life is more than sex-love. Sex-love is not more than life. True. Didn’t Dostoevsky say something similar? You never step into the same river twice, similarly there is never a simple, single thought. The simplest thought can be qualified again and again and again. I have a headache – because I drank too much schnapps with Wolfram, who made me laugh. The simple headache has its history, its penumbra, and is touched by my pre-headache life and (I hope) my post-headache life. Everything is unbelievably complicated. Everything.
     
     
    14. The Fabulating Function
     
    ‘I read your little book,’ Lysander said, stretching himself out on the divan. ‘Most interesting. I think I understand it. Well, sort of.’
    ‘It’s basically about using your imagination,’ Dr Bensimon said. ‘I’m going to pull the curtains today, if you don’t mind.’
    Lysander heard him drawing the curtains on the three windows and the room grew dim and tenebrous, lit only by the lamp on Bensimon’s desk. As he crossed back to his seat his giant shadow flicked across the wall by the fireplace.
    As far as Lysander was able to comprehend, Bensimon’s theory of ‘Parallelism’ worked approximately along the following lines. Reality was neutral, as he had explained – ‘gaunt’ was a word he used several times to describe it. This world, unperceived by our senses, lay out there like a skeleton, impoverished and passionless. When we opened our eyes, when we smelled, heard, touched and tasted we added the flesh to these bones according to our natures and how well our imagination functioned. Thus the individual transforms ‘the world’ – a person’s mind weaves its own bright covering over neutral reality. This world is created by us as a ‘fiction’, it is ours alone and is unique and unshareable.
    ‘I think I find the idea of the world being “fictive” a bit tricky,’ Lysander said, with some hesitation.
    ‘Pure common sense,’ Bensimon said. ‘You know how you feel when you wake up in a good mood. The first cup of coffee tastes extra delicious. You go out for a stroll – you notice colours, sounds, the effect of sunlight on an old brick wall. On the other hand, if you wake up gloomy and depressed, you have no appetite. Your cigarette tastes sour and burns your throat. In the streets the clanging of the trams irritates you, the passers-by are ugly and selfish. And so on. This happens unreflectingly – what I’m trying to do is make this power, that we all have in us, a conscious one, to bring it to the front of your mind.’
    ‘I see what you mean.’ This made a sort of sense, Lysander acknowledged.