Mr. Gwyn Read Online Free

cure from anyone.
    The girl smiled again, then she was silent, looking at the street.
    â€œNo,” she said finally, “that’s my business.”
    â€œOf course,” said Jasper Gwyn.
    They rolled. Probably that was the right verb. They rolled around the steering wheel.

10
    In the days that followed, Jasper Gwyn tried to stay calm, and in the attempt to find a salve for the crises, which were becoming more and more frequent, he relied on an exercise that he recalled seeing in a film. It consisted of living slowly, concentrating on every single gesture. As a rule it might seem rather vague, but Jasper Gwyn had a way of observing it that made it surprisingly concrete. So when he put on his shoes he looked at them first, assessing their fine lightness and appreciating the softness of the leather. As he laced them he avoided lapsing into an automatic action and examined in detail the splendid movement of his fingers, with a rounded gesture whose assurance he admired. Then he stood up, and at the first steps he made sure to register the solid grip of the shoe on the instep. In the same way, he concentrated on noises that are usually taken for granted, hearing again the click of a lock, the hoarseness of tape, or the faintest clatter of hinges. Much time was given to registering colors, even when the object had no usefulness, and in particular he was careful to admire the random palettes produced by the placement of things—whether it was the inside of a drawer, or the area of a parking lot. Often he counted the objects he came across—steps, streetlights, shouts—and with his fingers he checked surfaces, rediscovering the infinite range between roughand smooth. He stopped to look at shadows on the ground. He felt every coin between his fingers.
    All this gave a luxurious rhythm to his daily movements, like those of an actor, or an African animal. Others seemed to recognize in his elegant slowness the natural tempo of things; and in the precision of his gestures a dominion over objects that most had forgotten returned to the surface. Jasper Gwyn wasn’t even aware of it, and yet it was very clear to him that that meticulous pacing restored to him some solidity—that center of gravity which had evidently failed.

11
    It lasted a couple of months. Then, weary, he returned to normal living, but right away the familiar sensation of vanishing gripped him, and he was defenseless against the incurable feeling of emptiness that assailed him. Besides, that obsessive care in approaching the world—that way of tying his shoes—wasn’t, after all, very different from writing things rather than living them, from lingering over adjectives and adverbs, and so Jasper Gwyn had to admit to himself that abandoning books had produced an emptiness that he didn’t know how to remedy except by practicing imperfect and provisional substitute liturgies, like putting sentences together in his mind or tying his shoes at an idiotically slow pace. It had taken years to admit that the profession of writer had become impossible for him, and now he found himself forced to register that without that profession it was very difficult for him to go on. So in the endhe realized that he was in a situation known to many humans, but not therefore less painful: that which alone makes them feel alive is something that is, slowly, fated to kill them. Children, for parents; success, for artists; mountains too high, for mountain climbers. Writing books, for Jasper Gwyn.
    Realizing this made him feel lost, and helpless the way only children are, the intelligent ones. He was surprised to feel an instinct that wasn’t habitual with him, something like the urgent necessity to talk to someone. He thought about it for a while, but the only person who came to mind was the old woman with the rain scarf, in the clinic. It would be much more natural to talk to Tom, he knew, and for a moment it even seemed possible to ask for help,