The Library

WITHOUT COLORS

Before forming its atmosphere and its oceans, the Earth must have resembled a gray ball revolving in space. As the Moon does now; where the ultraviolet rays radiated by the Sun arrive directly, all colors are destroyed, which is why the cliffs of the lunar surface, instead of being colored like Earth's are of a dead, uniform gray. If the Earth displays a varicolored countenance, it is thanks to the atmosphere, which filters that murderous light.

A bit monotonous,-Qfwfq confirmed,-but restful, all the same. I could go for miles and miles at top speed, the way you can move where there isn't any air about, and all I could see was gray upon gray. No sharp contrasts: the only really white white, if there was any, lay in the center of the Sun and you couldn't even begin to approach it with your eyes; and as far as really black black is concerned, there wasn't even the darkness of night, because all the stars were constantly visible. Uninterrupted horizons opened before me with mountain chains just beginning to emerge, gray mountains, above gray rocky plains; and though I crossed continent after continent I never came to a shore, because oceans and lakes and river were still lying underground somewhere or other.
You rarely met anyone in those days: there were so few of us! To survive with that ultravioler you couldn't be too demanding. Above all the lack of atmosphere asserted itself in many ways, you take meteors for example: they fell like hail from all the points of space, because then we didn't have the stratosphere where nowadays they strike, as if on a roof, and disintegrate. Then there was the silence: no use shouting! Without any air to vibrate, we were all deaf and dumb. The temperature? There was nothing around to retain the Sun's heat: when night fello it was so cold you could freeze stiff. Fortunately, the Earth's crust warmed us from below, with all those molten minerals which were being compressed in the bowels of the planet. The nights were short (like the days: the Earth turned around faster); I slept huddled up to a very warm rock; the dry cold all around was pleasant. In other words, as far as the climate went, to tell you the truth, I wasn't so badly off.
Among the countless indispensable things we had to do without, the absence of colors-as you can imagine-was the least of our problems; even if we had known they existed, we would have considered them an unsuitable luxury. The only drawback was the strain on your eyes when you had to hunt for something or someone, because with everything equally colorless no form could be clearly distinguished from what was behind it or around it. You could barely make out a moving object: a meteor fragment as it rolled, or the serpentine yawning of a seismic chasm, or a lapillus being ejected from a volcano.
That day I was running through a kind of amphitheater of porous, spongy rocks, all pierced with arches beyond which other arches opened; a very uneven terrain where the absence of color was streaked by distinguishable concave shadows. And among the pillars of these colorless arches I saw a kind of colorless flash running swiftly,, disappearing, then reappearing farther on: two flattened glows that appeared and disappeared abruptly; I still hadn't realixed what they were, but I was already in love and running, in pursuit of the eyes of Ayl.
I went into a sandy wasteland: I proceeded, sinking down among dunes which were always somehow different and yet almost the same. Depending on the point from which you looked at them, the crests of the dunes seemed the outlines of reclining bodies. There you could almost make out the form of an arm folded over a tender breast, with the palm open under a resting cheek; farther on, a young foot with a slinder big toe seemed to emerge. As I stopped to observe those possible analogies, a full minute went by before I realized that, before my eyes, I didn't have a sandy ridge but the object of my pursuit.
She was lying, colorless, overcome with sleep, on the colorless sand, I sat down nearby. It was the season-as I know now-when the ultraviolt era was approaching its end on our planet; a way of life about to finish was displaying its supreme peak of beauty. Nothing so beautiful had ever run over the Earth, as the creature I had before my eyes.
Ayl opened her eyes. She saw me. At first I believe she couldn't distinguish me-as had happened to me, with her-from the rest of that sandy world; then she seemed to recognize in me the unknown presence that had pursued her and she was frightened. But in the end she became aware of our common substance and there was a half-timid, half-smiling palpitation in the look she gave me, which caused me to emit a silent whimper of happiness.
I started conversing, all in gestures. "Sand. Not-sand," I said, first pointing to our surroundings, then to the two of us.
She nodded yes, she had understood.
"Rock. Not-rock," I said, to continue that line of reasoning. It was a period in which we didn't have many concepts at our disposal: to indicate what we two were, for example, what we had in common and what was different, was not an easy undertaking.
"I, you, together, run run," I tried to say.
She burst out laughing and ran off.
We ran along the crest of the volcanoes. In the noon grayness Ayl's flying hair and the tongues of flame that rose from the craters were mingled in a wan, identical fluttering of wings.
"Fire. Hair," I said to her. "Fire same hair."
She seemed convinced.
"Not beautiful?" I asked.
"Beautiful,"she answered.
The Sun was already sinking into a whitish sunset. On a crag of opaque rocks, the rays, striking sidelong, made some of the rocks shine.
"Stones there not same. Beautiful, eh?" I said
"No," she answered, and looked away.
"Stones there beautiful, eh?" I insisted, pointing to the shiny gray of the stones.
"No." She refused to look.
"To you, I, stones there!" I offered her.
"No!" Stones here!" Ayl answered and grasped a handful of the opaque ones. But I had already run ahead.
I came back with the glistening stones I had collected, but I had to force her to take them.
"Beautiful!" I tried to persuade her.
"No! she protested, but she looked at them; removed now from the Sun's reflections, they were opaque like the other stones; and only then did she say: "Beautiful!"
Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there.
The day returned, to paint the Earth with gray; and my gaze moved around and didn't see her. I let out a mute cry: "Ayl! Why have you run off?" But she was in front of me and was looking for me, too; she couldn't see me and silently shouted: "Qfwfq! Where are you?" Until our eyesight darkened, examining that sooty luminosity and recognizing the outline of an eyebrow, an elbow, a thigh.
Then I wanted to shower Ayl with presents, but nothing seemed to me worthy of her. I hunted for everything that was in some way detached from the uniform surface of the world, everything marked by a speckling, a stain. But I was soon forced to realize that Ayl and I had different tastes, if not downright opposite ones: I was seeking a new world beyond the pallid patina that imprisoned everything, I examined every sign, every crack (to tell the truth something was beginning to change: in certain points the colorlessness seemed shot through with variegated flashes); instead, Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where al vibtration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual veutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the grayness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than gray.
How could we understand each other? No thing in the world that lay before our eyes was sufficient to express what we felt for each other, but while I was in a fury to wrest unknown vibrations from things, she wanted to reduce everything to the colorless beyond of their ultimate substance.
A meteorite crossed the sky, its trajectory passing in front of the Sun; its fluid and fiery envelope for an instant acted as a filter to the Sun's rays, and all of a sudden the world was immersed in a light never seen before. Purple chasms gaped at the foot of orange cliffs, and my violet hands pointed to the flaming green meteor while a thought for which words did not yet exist tried to burst from my throat: me this for you,yes, yes, beautiful!"
At the same time I wheeled around, eager to see the new way Ayl would surely shine in the general transfiguration; but I didn't see her: as if in that sudden shattering of the colorless glaze, she had found a way to hide herself, to slip off among the crevices in the mosaic.
"Ayl! Don't be frightened, Ayl! Show yourself and look!"
But already the meteorite's arc had moved away from the Sun, and the Earth was reconddquered by its perennial gray, now even grayer to my dazzled eyes, and indistinct, and opaque, and there was no Ayl.
She had really disappeared. I sought her through a long throbbing of days and nights. It was the era when the world was testing the forms it was later to assume: it tested them with the material it had available, even if it wasn't the most suitable, since it was understood that there was nothing definitive about the trials. Trees os smoke-colored lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate. Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daisies. Ayl might be the colorless shadow swinging from a branch of the colorless forest or bending to pick under gray clumps of bushes. A hundred times I thought I glimpsed her and a hundred times I thought I lost her again. From the wastelands I moved to the inhabited localities. At that time, sensing the changes that would take place, obscure builders were shaping premature images of a remote, possible future. I crossed a piled-up metropolis of stones; I went through a mountain pierced with passageways like an anchorites' retreat; I reached a port that opened upon a sea of mud; I enterd a garden where, from sandy beds, tall menhirs rose into the sky.
The gray stone of the menhirs was covered with a pattern of barely indicated gray veins. I stopped. In the center of this park, Ayl was playing with her female companions. They were tossing a qquartz ball into the air and catching it.
Someone threw it to hard, the ballcame withinf my reach, and I caught it. The others scattered to look for it; when I say Ayl alone, I threw the quartz ball, drawing Ayl farther and farther away. Finally I showed mylelf; she scolded me, then laughed; and so we went on, playing, through strange regions.
At that time the strata of the planet were laboriously trying to establish an equilibrium through a series of earthquakes. Every now and then the ground was shasken by one, and between Qyl and me crevasses opened across which we threw the quartz ball back and forth. These chasms gave the elements compressed in the heart of the Earth an avenue of escape, and now we saw outcroppings of rock emerge, or fluid clouds, or boiling jets spurt up.
As I went on playing with Ayl, I noticed that a gassy layer had spread over the Earth's crust, like a low fog slowly rising. A moment before it had reached our ankles, and now we were in it up to our knees, then to our hips...At that sight, a shadow of uncertainty and fear grew in Ayl's eyes; I didn't want to alarm her, and so, as if nothing were happening, I went on with our game; but I, too, was anxious.
It was something never seen before: an immense fluid bubble was swelling around the Earth and completely enfolding it; soon it would cover us from head to foot, and who could say what the consequences would be?
I threw the ball to Ayl beyond a crack ipening in the ground, but my throw proved inexplicably shorter than I had intended and the ball fell into the gap; the ball must have become suddenly very heavy; no, it was the crack that had suddenly yawned enormously, and now Ayl was far away, beyond a liquid, wavy expanse that had opened between us and was foaming against the shore of rocks, and I leaned from this shore, shouting: "Ayl, Ayl!" and my voice, its sound, the very sound of my voice spread loudly, as I had never imagined it, and the waves rumbled still louder than my voice. In other words: it was all beyond understanding.
I put my hands to my deafened ears, and at the same moment I also felt the need to cover my nose and mouth, so as not to breathe the heady blend of oxygen and nitrogen that surrounded me, but strongest of all was the impulse to cover my eyes, which seemed ready to explode.
The liquid mass spread out at my feet had suddenly turned a new color, which blinded me, and I exploded in an articulate cry which, a little later, took on a spedcific meaning: "Ayl! The sea is blue!"
The great change so long awaited had finally taken place. On the Earth now there was air, and water. Aknd over that newborn blue sea, the Sun-also colored-was setting, an absolutely different and even more violent color. So I was driven to go on with my senseless cries, like: "How red the Sun is, Ayl! Ayl! How red!"
Night fell. Even the darkness was different. I ran looking for Ayl, emitting cries without rhyme or reason, to express what I saw: "The stars are yellow, Ayl! Ayl!"
I didn't find her that night or the days and nights that followed. All around, the world poured out colors, constantly new, pink clouds gathered in violet cumuli which unleashed gilded lightning; after the storms long rainbows announced hues that still hadn't been seen, in all possible combinations. And chlorophyll was already beginning its progress: mosses and ferns grew green in the valleys where torrents ran. This was finally the setting worthy of Ayl's beauty; but she wasn't there! And without her all this varicolored sumptuousness seemed useless to me, wasted.
I ran all over the Earth, I saw again the thing I had once known gray, and I was still amazed at discovering fire was red, ice white, the sky pale blue, the earh brown, that rubies were ruby-colored, and topazes the color of topaz, and emeralds emerald. And Ayl? With all my imagination I couldn't picture how she would appear to my eyes.
I found the menhir garden, now green with trees and grasses. In murmuring pools red and blue and yellow fish were swimming. Ayl's friends were still leaping over the lawn, tossing the iridescent ball: but how changed they wer! One was blonde with white skin, one brunette with olive skin, one brown-haired with pink skin, one had red hair and was dotted with countless, enchanting freckles.
"Ayl!" I cried. "Where is she? Where is Ayl? What does she look like? Why isn't she with you?"
Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon.
"Why...Ayl..." they answered. "She's gone...we don't know..." and they went back to their game.
I tried to imagine Ayl's hair and her skin, in every possible color, but I couldn't picture her; and so, as I looked for her, I explored the surface of the globe.
"If she's not up here," I thought, "that means she must be below," and at the first earthquake that came along, I flung myself into a chasm, down down into the bowels of the Earth.
"Ayl! Ayl! I called in the darkness. "Ayl, come see how beautiful it is outside!"
Hoarse, I fell silent. And at that moment Ayl's voice, soft, calm, answered me. "Sssh. I'm still here. Why are you shouting so much? What do you want?
I couldn't see a thing. "ASyl! Come outside with me. If you only knew...Outside..."
"I don't like it, outside..."
"But you, before..."
"Before was before. Now it's different. All that confusion has come."
I lied. "No, no. It was just a passing change of light. Like that time with the meteorite! It's over now. Everything is the way it used to be. Come, don't be afraid..." If she comes out, I thought, after the first moment of bewilderment, she'll become used to the colors, she'll be happy, and she'll understand that I lied for her own good.
"Really?"
"Why should I tell you stories? Come, let me take you outside."
"No, you go ahead. I'll follow you."
"But I'm impatient to see you again."
"You'll see me only the way I like. Go ahead and don't turn around."
The telluric shocks cleared the way for us. The strata of rock opened fanwise and we advanced through the gaps. I heard Ayl's light fotsteps behind me. One more quake and we were outside. I ran along steps of basalt and granite which turned like the pages of a book: already, at the end, the breach that would lead us into the open air was tearing wide, already the Earth's crust was appearing beyond the gap, sunny and green, already the light was forcing its way toward us. There: now I would see the colors brighten also on Ayl's face... I turned to look at her.
I heard her scream as she drew back toward the darkness, my eyes still dazzled by the earlier light could make out nothing, then the rumble of the eartquake drowned everything, and a wall of rock suddenly rose, vertically, separating us.
"Ayl! Where are you? Try to come over to this side, quickly, before the rock settles!" And I ran along the wall looking for an opening, but the smooth, gray surface was compact, without a fissure.
An enormous chain of mountains had formed at that point. As I had been projected outward, into the open, Ayl had remained beyond the rock wall, closed in the bowels of the Earth.
"Ayl! Where are you? Why aren't you out here?" and I looked around at the landscape that stretched away from my feet. Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that
Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone.

Italo Calvino

Fom the newsletter of the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.
Translated from the Hebrew by Nomi Friedman.

A known and ugly phenomenon in zoos all over the world is visitors who willfully throw things at the animals on display, especially at chimpanzees. In the best case, food is thrown, and in the worst, to our regret, we have seen rocks thrown. We are seeing a significant improvement in the public's conduct, but the crowds that throw stones at chimps are not our concern here. In Jerusalem the talk is of rock-throwing chimps.
When a large crowd gathers opposite Niki and Galine, the young chimpanzees leave their other chimp activities, race about looking for stones, and start throwing them at the crowd. Why do they do this? Since this is Jerusalem, it might be a way of blowing off steam, or maybe it's an expression of rebellion and independence.
A separation fence was decided upon. In the past few weeks, the wall was built...green, light, elastic, and high. It fulfills its requirements, and is simple and elegant. It has proven effective in stopping the stones.

The domestic details spring to memory. Early on the evening of February 4, 1974, in her duplex apartment at 2603 Benvenue in Berkeley, Patricia Campbell Hearst, age nineteen, a student of art history at the University of California at Berkeley and a granddaughter of the late William Randolf Hearst, put on a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, heated a can of chicken-noodle soup and made tuna fish sandwiches for herself and her fiance', Steven Weed; watched Mission Impossible and The Magician on television; cleaned up the dishes; sat down to study just as the doorbell rang; was abducted at gunpoint and held blindfolded, by three men and five women who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, for the next fifty-seven days.
From the fifty-eighth day, on which she agreed to join her captors and was photographed in front of the SLA's cobra flag carrying a sawed-off M-1 carbine, until September 18, 1975, when she was arrested in San Francisco, Patricia Cambell Hearst participated actively in the robberies of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco and the Crocker National Bank outside Sacramento; sprayed Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles with a submachine gun to cover a comrade apprehended for shoplifting; and was party or witness to a number of less publicized thefts and several bombings, to which she would later refer as "actions," or "operations."
On trial in San Francisco for the Hibernia Bank operation she appeared in court wearing frosted-white nail polish, and demonstrated for the jury the bolt action neccessary to chamber an M-1. On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she completed the sentence "Most men..." with the words "...are assholes." Seven years later she was living with the body-guard she had married, their infant daughter, and two German Shepherds "behind locked doors in a Spanish-style house equipped with the best electronic security system available," describing herself as "older and wiser," and dedicating her account of these events, *Every Secret Thing*, to "Mom and Dad."

It was a special kind of sentimental education, a public coming-of-age with an insistently literary cast to it, and it seemed at the time to offer a parable for the period. Certain of its images entered the national memory. We had Patricia Campbell Hearst in her first-communion dress, smiling, and we had Patricia Campbell Hearst in the Hibernia Bank surveillance stills, not smiling. We again had her smiling in the engagement picture, an unremarkably pretty girl in a simple dress on a sunny lawn, and we again had her not smiling in the "Tania" snapshot, the famous Polaroid with the M-1. We had her with her father and her sister Anne in a photograph taken at the Burlingame Country Club some months before the kidnapping; all three Hearsts smiling there, not only smiling but wearing leis, the father in maile and orchid leis, the daughters in pikake, that rarest and most expensive kind of lei, strand after strand of tiny Arabian jasmine buds strung like ivory beads.
We had the bank of microphones in front of the Hillsborough house whenever Randolph and Catherine Hearst ("Dad and "Mom" in the first spectral messages from the absent daughter, "pig Hearsts" as the spring progressed) met with the press, the potted flowers on the steps changing with the seasons, domestic upkeep intact in the face of crisis: azaleas, fuchsias, then cymbidium orchids massed for Easter. We had, early on, the ugly images of looting and smashed cameras and frozen turkey legs hurled through windows in West Oakland, the violent result of the Hearst's first attempt to meet the SLA ransom demand, and we had, on television the same night, the news that William Knowland, the former United States senator from California and the most prominent member of the family that had run Oakland for half a century, had taken the pistol he was said to carry as protection against terrorists, positioned himself on a bank of the Russian River, and blown off the top of his head.
All of these pictures told a story, taught a dramatic lesson, carrying as they did the frisson of one another, the invitation to compare and contrast. The image of Patricia Campbell Hearst on the FBI "wanted" fliers was for example cropped from the image of the unremarkably pretty girl in the simple dress on the sunny lawn, schematic evidence that even a golden girl could be pinned in the beam of history. There was no actual connection between turkey legs thrown through windows in West Oakland and William Knowland lying facedown in the Russian River, but the paradigm was manifest, one California busy being born and another busy dying. Those cymbidiums on the Hearsts' doorstep in Hillsborough dissolved before our eyes into the image of a flaming palm tree in south-central Los Angeles (the model again was two Californias), the palm tree above the stucco bungalow in which Patricia Campbell Hearst was believed for a time to be burning to death on live television. (Actually, Patricia Campbell Hearst was in yet a third California, a motel room at Disneyland, watching the palm tree burn as we all were, on television, and it was Donald DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, Patricia Soltysik, Camilla Hall, and William Wolfe, one black escaped convict and five children of the white middle class, who were dying in the stucco bungalow.)
Not only the images but the voice told a story, the voice on the tapes, the depressed voice with the California inflection, the voice that trailed off, now almost inaudible, then a hint of whine, a schoolgirl's sarcasm, a voice every parent recognized: "Mom, Dad. I'm OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up....I just hope you'll do what they say, Dad....If you can get the food thing organized before the nineteenth then that's OK....Whatever you come up with is basically OK, it was never intended that you feed the whole state....I am here because I am a member of a ruling-class family and I think you can begin to see the analogy....People should stop acting like I'm dead, Mom should get out of her black dress, that doesn't help at all....Mom, Dad...I don't believe you're doing all you can...Mom, Dad...I'm starting to think that no one is concerned about me anymore...." And then: " Greetings to the people. this is Tania."

okay, here it is. This one's a bit easier. Thanks for waiting.

WALDEN POND FOR WINOS

The autumn carried along with it, like the roller coaster of a flesh-eating plant, port wine and the people who drank that dark sweet wine, people long since gone, except for me.
Always wary of the police, we drank in the safest place we could find, the park across from the church.
There were three poplar trees in the middle of the park and there was a statue of Benjamin Franklin in front of the trees. We sat there and drank port.
At home my wife was pregnant.
I would call on the telephone after I finished work and say, "I won't be home for a little while. I'm going to have a drink with some friends."
The three of us huddled in the park, talking. They were both broken-down artists from New Orleans where they had drawn pictures of tourists in Pirate's Alley.
Now in San Francisco, with the cold autumn wind upon them, they had decided that the future held only two directions: They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum.
So they talked about how to make little clothes for fleas by pasting pieces of colored paper on their backs.
They said the way that you trained fleas was to make them dependent upon you for their food. This was done by letting them feed off you at an appointed hour.
They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows and pool tables and bicycles.
They would charge fifty-cents admission for their flea circus. The business was certain to have a future to it. Perhaps they would even get on the Ed Sullivan show.
They of course did not have their fleas yet, but they could easily be obtained from a white cat.
Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.
And so it went on until it was exhausted and we went and bought another fifth of port wine and returned to the trees and Benjamin Franklin.
Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the correct manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. They looked at us hurriedly and mentally registerd: winos.
Then the two artists talked about committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter. They talked about how warm it would be in the insane asylum, with television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes, a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes, a locked razor and lovely young student nurses.
Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.

Wow I didnt read one of those. Not any.