Ferdydurke Read Online Free

dreaming, I felt that my body was not homogeneous, that some parts were still those of a boy, and that my head was laughing at my leg and ridiculing it, that my leg was laughing at my head, that my finger was poking fun at my heart, my heart at my brain, that my nose was thumbing itself at my eye, my eye chuckling and bellowing at my nose—and all my parts were wildly raping each other in an all-encompassing and piercing state of pan-mockery. Nor did my fear lessen one iota when I reached full consciousness and began reflecting on my life. On the contrary, it intensified even as it was interrupted (or accentuated) by a giggle my mouth could not hold back. I was halfway down the path of my life when I found myself in a dark forest. But this forest, worse luck, was g r e e n.
    For in my waking life I was just as unsettled and torn apart—as in the dream. I had recently crossed the unavoidable Rubicon of thirty, I had passed that milestone and, according to my birth certificate and to all appearances, I was a mature human being, and yet I wasn't—what was I then? A thirty-year-old bridge player? Someone who happened to be working, attending to life's trivia, meeting deadlines? What was my status? I frequented bars and cafés where I exchanged a few words, occasionally even ideas, with people I ran into, but my status was not at all clear, and I myself did not know whether I was a mature man or a green youth; at this turning point of my life I was neither this nor that—I was nothing—and my contemporaries, already married and established, if not in their views on life, at least at various government agencies, treated me with understandable mistrust. My aunts, those numerous quarter-mothers, tacked-on, patched-on, though they loved me dearly, had long been urging me to settle down and be somebody, a lawyer, or a civil servant—they seemed exceedingly irked by my vagueness, and, not knowing what to make of me, they didn't know how to talk to me, so they just babbled.
    "Joey," they would say between one babble and another, "it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something ... be something definite ..."
    And I heard them whispering to one another that I was socially awkward, inexperienced, and, as they wearied of the blank that I was creating in their heads, they would resume their babbling. True, this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. The hands on nature's clock move relentlessly, inexorably. When I cut my last teeth, my wisdom teeth, my development was supposed to be complete, and it was time for the inevitable kill, for the man to kill the inconsolable little boy, to emerge like a butterfly and leave behind the remains of the chrysalis that had spent itself. I was supposed to lift myself out of mists and chaos, out of murky swamps, out of swirls and roars, out of reeds and rushes, out of the croaking of frogs, and emerge among clear and crystallized forms: run a comb through my hair, tidy up my affairs, enter the social life of adults and deliberate with them.
    Oh, sure! But I had already given it a try, I had already made that effort, yet I could only shake with laughter at the results. And therefore, to make myself presentable, my hair neatly combed, and to explain myself as best I could, I set out to write a book—strange that I should think my entrance into the world needed an explanation, even though no one has yet seen an explanation that was anything but obfuscation. I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their souls a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature. So why did my pen betray me? Why did holy shame forbid me to write a notoriously trivial novel? Instead of spinning lofty