Frost: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

except for me and the painter understands what that means. The painter gets up and walks out without saying goodbye to me. I’m not bothered; I’m happy to stay at the table a while longer, and listen.
    The inn was one of that type where you would spend no more than a single night, and only if you had to. The painter, for some reason, had always liked it. It wasn’t any amenity ithad, no, it was the shortcomings of it that delighted him. A loyalty to prewar days, when the inn had given shelter to him and his sister. He had always practiced hunger and primitive living. Unassumingness. “I’m acquainted with even the most unobtrusive sounds in this building,” said the painter. With the palms of his hands at night he could palp the familiar walls, whose every unevenness he knew. “I’ve stayed in every one of the rooms,” he said. “At one time I could have bought the inn. I even had the money for it, then. But that would have been the end, you understand,” he said. When he was fed up with everything, he came here. “If the walls could talk,” he said. “Every room has seen its own atrocity. The war has soaked into these walls. I mean, the room where you’re staying …” He said: “In my present mood, I don’t want to say anymore. It’s a matter of a decision taken by a former occupant of the room. Baffling to everyone. Godless.” There were different ways of doing it, but it was all ancient wisdom. And however antiquated a man’s thoughts might be, they did sometimes have radical consequences. Sometimes cold air entered the house when someone forgot to shut the windows, and everything in it perished. “Even dreams die. Everything turns into cold. The imagination, everything.” Never had he had any sort of “ennobling” idea while staying at the inn. Such thoughts, admittedly, did not come to him often, it was immoral even to
want
to have them. He tended to push them away. “A man can determine the type of thought he wants to entertain.” It was remarkable “how dismissive things can be when you approach them in a spirit of confidence.” Life at the inn was “among the great abuses,” which was where he aligned himself. Self-harm was something he had begun doing in his childhood. “It tired me out a few times. Then I caught fire.” Over the years, he had taken it tothe very edge of insanity. “All in all, the inn is a prosecution witness for my feelings and states. Everything says, ‘This is me,’ … there’s no more virtue, no simplicity, only inbreeding to unimaginable extents.”
    “My time has passed as if I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it. Sickness is a consequence of my lack of interest in my time, lack of interest, lack of productivity, lack of pleasure. Sickness appeared where there wasn’t anything else … My research stalled, and all at once I saw: No, I’ll never surmount this wall! It was like this: I had to find a way I had never gone … The nights were sleepless, dull, gray … sometimes I jumped out of bed, and slowly I saw all thought become impossible, worthless, everything successively, logically, became pointless and meaningless … And I discovered that my surroundings didn’t want to be explained by me.”

Fifth Day
    “My family, my parents, everyone, the whole world I might have tried to cling to, and to which in fact I repeatedly tried to cling, early on dissolved into darkness; overnight it just went black, withdrew from my vision, or else I’d taken myself away from it, into that dark. I’m not quite sure. At any rate, I was left on my own a lot, maybe I was always on my own. Being alone has preoccupied me, ever since I can remember. The idea of solitude too. Being shut up within myself. Theway I was, I couldn’t imagine being alone all the time. I couldn’t get my head around that, I couldn’t get it into my head, and I couldn’t find a way of expressing it either.” He said: “I kept going back to that point. I stood there