Ferdydurke Read Online Free Page B

wisdom, feelings, and character, about all the details of your personality—it's a pit that opens up before the daredevil who drapes his thoughts in print and lets them loose on paper, oh, printed paper, paper, paper! And I'm not even talking about the heartfelt opinions so fondly held by our aunts, no, I mean the opinions of those other aunts—the cultural aunts, those female semi-writers and tacked-on semi-critics who make pronouncements in literary magazines. Indeed, world culture has been beset by a flock of superfluous hens patched-on, pinned-on, to literature, who have become finely tuned to spiritual values and well versed in aesthetics, frequently entertaining views and opinions of their own, who have even caught on to the notions that Oscar Wilde is passé and that Bernard Shaw is a master of paradox. Oh, they are on to the fact that they must be independent, profound, unobtrusively assertive, and filled with auntie kindliness. Auntie, auntie, auntie! Unless you have ever found yourself in the laboratory of a cultural aunt and been dissected, mute and without a groan, by her trivializing mentality that turns all life lifeless, unless you have ever seen an auntie's critique of yourself in a newspaper, you have no concept of triviality, and auntie-triviality in particular.
    Further, let us consider the opinions of men and women of the landed gentry, the opinions of schoolgirls, the narrow-minded opinions of minor office clerks, the bureaucratic opinions of high officials, the opinions of lawyers in the provinces, the hyperbolic opinions of students, the arrogant opinions of little old men, and the opinions of journalists, the opinions of social activists as well as the opinions of doctors' wives, and, finally, the opinions of children listening to their parents' opinions, the opinions of underling chambermaids and of cooks, the opinions of our female cousins, the opinions of schoolgirls—a whole ocean of opinions, each one defining you within someone else, and creating you in another man's soul. It's as if you were being born inside a thousand souls that are too tight-fitting for comfort! But my situation was even more thorny and complex, just as my book was more thorny and complex than the conventionally mature reading matter. It brought me, to be sure, an array of fine friends, and, if only those cultural aunts and other members of the populace could hear how splendidly I was feted in a small circle that was closed to them and not accessible even to their aspirations, a circle of the Esteemed and the Splendiferous, and how, at those lofty heights, I carried on intellectual conversations, they would fall prostrate before me and lick my boots. Yet there must have been something immature in my book, something that encouraged undue intimacy and attracted those transitory individuals who were neither fish nor fowl, that most awful stratum of semi-intelligentsia—as if the time of immaturity had lured the demimonde of culture. It is conceivable that my book, too subtle for dullards, was at the same time not sufficiently lofty or puffed up for the rabble who respond solely to the outer trappings of what is important. And, as so often happened, I would leave one of those hallowed and esteemed places where I had just been pleasantly and reverently celebrated, to be faced, in the street, by some engineer's wife or a schoolgirl who would unceremoniously treat me like one of her own, like an immature kinsman or fellow traveler, slap me on the back and exclaim: "Hello, Joey, you silly, you're, you're—immature!" And so I seemed wise to some, silly to others, notable to some, hardly noticed by others, commonplace to some, aristocratic to others. Spread-eagled between loftiness and lowliness and chummy with both, respected and disparaged, admired and disdained, as chance or circumstances would have it! My life was torn apart as it had never been in the quiet days I spent in the shelter of my home. And I no longer knew whether I