Chapter 2 second quarter

7 However, the next day, he said to him in a reproachful tone: "Peng Defan, you are not just a great theorist of dancers, you are a great dancer yourself." Peng Defan (a bit embarrassed): "You have confused the concepts." Fan Sheng: "When we are together, you and I, and someone joins later, the place we are in is immediately divided into two parts, the newcomer and I are the audience, and you are dancing on the stage." Peng Defan: "I said you confused the concepts. The word dancer is only suitable for exhibitionists in public life. And public life, I hate it very much."

Fan Sheng: "Yesterday you behaved in front of that woman like Baker in front of the camera. You want to get all her attention. You want yourself to be the best and the brightest. For me, you used the lowest extreme of exhibitionism judo moves." Peng Defan: "Maybe it's the judo of exhibitionists. But it's not moral judo! So you shouldn't classify me as a dancer. Because a dancer has to show more morality than others. As for me, I show more morality than you immoral." Fansheng: "The dancer is to appear moral because his vast masses are naive and regard moral behavior as sublime. But our small group is perverted and likes immorality. So you did use moral judo on me , which does not contradict the essence of your dancer at all."

Peng Defan (suddenly changed his tone, speaking very sincerely): "If I hurt you, Fan Sheng, forgive me." Fan Sheng (immediately moved by Peng Defan's apology): "I have nothing to forgive you, I know you are joking." It was no accident that they frequented Café Gasco.Of all the patron saints (note: the patron saint is a Christian saint who is the leader of all walks of life.) Among them, D'Artagnan, who was born in Gascony, was the most important: he was the Lord of Friendship. Saints, in their eyes this is the only sacred value. Peng Defan continued: "In a broad sense (yes, you have a point), of course each of us is a dancer to some extent, and I admit that when I see a woman coming, I am more like a dancer than anyone else." a dancer. What can I do? I can't control it."

Fan Sheng smiled amicably, more and more moved, Peng Defan continued in a contrite tone: "Besides, as you just realized, if I am the great theorist of the dancers, there must be a small relationship between them and me." common ground, otherwise I would not understand them. Yes, I admit it to you, mortal." At this stage, Peng Defan turned from confessional friend back to theorist: "There is only a small commonality, because I am not related to the dancer at all in the precise sense that I use the concept. I think not only It is possible and possible that a dancer, such as Baker and Duberg, has no desire to express himself or seduce her in front of a woman. It would never occur to him to recount that he grabbed the typist by the hair and dragged her to the bed, just because I made a mistake about such a story. Because the audience he wants to attract is not a few women who can touch and see, but a large group of invisible people! Listen, this is the dancer theory. A chapter of The Invisible Crowd! This is where the bluffing modernity of this figure lies! He does not act before you or me, but before the whole world. And what is the whole world? It is endless Man without a face! An abstraction!"

In the middle of the conversation, Gu Jia and Matthew came, and Gu Jia said to Fan Sheng at the door: "You tell me that you are invited to participate in the entomology seminar. I have news for you! Baker will also go." Peng Defan: "It's him again? He's everywhere!" Fan Sheng: "What is he doing there?" Matthew: "You're an entomologist yourself, you should know." Gu Jia: "When he was a student, he attended a class at the Higher Institute of Entomology for a year. In this seminar, everyone will lift him up to the status of a noble master of entomology."

Peng Defan: "We must make a big fuss with him!" He turned to Fan Sheng: "You secretly brought us all in!" 8 Vera was asleep; I opened the window looking out on the garden and thought of the unforgettable course of three stages that Madame T. and her young horse had taken out of the castle. The first stage: They walked, arm in arm, talking, and then saw a bench on the grass and sat down, still arm in arm, still talking.The moonlight is bright at night, and the garden terraces down towards the Seine, where the water whispers and the leaves feed.And let's try to intercept some snippets of the conversation.Ride on to ask for a kiss. Mrs. T replied: "I do: you would be too proud if I refused. Your pride would convince you that I am afraid of you."

All that Madame T. said was the fruit of an art, the art of speaking, and there was no action that was not intelligible and full of meaning; this time, for example, she granted the knight's entreating kiss, but added After an explanation of her consent: if she let him kiss her, it was only to put the pride of the ride on the proper scale. When she wisely transformed a kiss into an act of resistance, no one was fooled, not even a knight, but those words must be taken very seriously, because they are part of the reasoning process and must be interpreted in another way. An inference step to respond.Conversation is not meant to fill time; on the contrary, it organizes it, governs it, and lays down laws that must be obeyed.

The epilogue of the first part of their night: the kiss she promised so as not to make the knight too proud was followed by the next kiss, "one after the other, interrupting the conversation, taking the place of the conversation..." But now she stands Get up and decide to go back to the castle. What an artistic performance!After the first burst of confusion, it must be shown that the joy of love is not yet a ripe fruit, it must be valued to make it more exciting; it must create a sideways branch, a tension, a suspense .While walking back to Chengbao with the knight, Mrs. T pretended nothing happened, she knew that at the last moment she could turn the situation around and prolong the appointment.Just one sentence, one of the more than ten formulas of the speaking art of that century will do.But due to some sudden rebellion and unforeseen lack of inspiration, she couldn't find any of them for a while.She is like an actor who suddenly forgets her words.Because, in fact, she had to know the lines; not like girls say these days, you want it, I want it, let's not waste time!For them, despite the indulgence of ideas, this confession is an insurmountable threshold.If the two did not think of a way in time to find an excuse to prolong their walk, they must, for the simple reason of silence, return to the castle and part ways.The more the two of them saw the urgency to find an excuse to stop and say it aloud, the more their mouths seemed to be sewn shut: all possible sentences were hidden in front of them desperately asking for help.So, at the gate of the castle, "we slowed down because of each other's instincts."

Fortunately, at the last moment, as if the prompter finally woke up, she remembered the line: she attacked the knight, "I'm a little unhappy with you...".Finally, finally!Everything is saved!She is angry!She found an excuse to feign anger in order to prolong the walk: she was sincere with him, but he?Why didn't he say a word about his lover, the Countess?Quick, quick, must explain!Must speak!The conversation continued, and they drifted away from the castle, this time following an unobstructed path leading to a loving embrace. 9 While talking, Mrs. T surveyed the situation, prepared for the next stage, and let her partner know how to think and how to act.She does it with delicacy, with grace, with deviousness, as if she were saying something else.She lets the horse discover the countess's selfish indifference in order to release him from his duty of fidelity and unfold before his eyes the voluptuous evening she had planned.She not only plans the present but also arranges the future, so that the knight understands that she should not become the countess' rival in love anyway, and he should not break up with the countess.She gave him a refined emotional education, taught him her practical philosophy of love, taught him to free himself from the shackles of moral codes and protect himself with secrecy, the highest of all virtues.She even explained to him very naturally how to face her husband the next day.

You must be amazed: In this rationally arranged, measured, simulated, calculated, and measured world, where is the place of instinct, "crazy", where is the mania, where is the blind passion, where the surrealist literati Where is the "crazy love" worshipped, where is the self lost?Where are they, these irrational virtues that make love what we think it is?No, they have nothing to do with it.Because Mrs. T is the queen of sanity.Not the cold reason like Mrs. Meldor, but a gentle and sweet reason, a reason whose highest task is to protect love. I seem to see her leading the knights in the moonlit night.Now, she stopped, and pointed to a patch of roofs in the gloom before them to show him; oh, was not the gazebo a witness of this sweet moment, and it was a pity, she told him, that she had not brought the key to the gazebo with her. On the body.They went to the door (how strange! as if unexpected), and the arbor door was unlocked!

Why didn't she tell him right away that the gazebo door was never locked?Everything is planned, organized, artificial, everything is a show, unreal, or, to put it another way, everything is art; put it this way: the art of sustained suspense, or more To put it aptly: the art of prolonging the excitement for as long as possible. 10 In Denon's pen, we don't see any description of Mrs. T's appearance; but what I can be sure of is: she is not thin, I think she is "full and soft" (this is what Lacroix described in "Dangerous Liaisons") the most coveted womanly figure), and the fullness of her body produces the roundness and slowness of her movements and manners.There was a gentle ease about her.She has a slow wit and has a knack for slowing things down.Especially the second phase of that night in the gazebo reveals this to her: they enter the gazebo, embrace, slump on the sofa, make love.But "it all came a little too quickly, and we all felt our mistakes (…) were too wild to be nuanced. We rushed to the climax and missed all the joy that preceded it." The haste made them lose the sweetness of slowness, and they immediately realized the mistake; but I don't think Mrs. T. was careless, I think she knew that the mistake was inevitable and destined, she already knew, So she designed the pavilion episode as a slowing brake, slowing things down to the expected and predictable speed, so that when the third phase came, in another venue, their affection could be slowed down in perfect slowness. Slow bloom. She interrupted the lingering in the gazebo, stepped out with her on her horse, and the two continued to walk, sat on a bench on the grass and continued to chat, and then took him to the secret room in the castle next to her bedroom; The magic palace of love designed by Mr. T.At the door of the room, the knights were dumbfounded: the mirrors on the entire wall overlapped to reflect their figures, like a long line of lovers hugging and kissing them all at once.But they didn't make love there; Mrs. T, wanting to avoid too intense a sensual explosion and protract the moment of excitement as long as possible, took him into a dark cavernous room next door, full of pillows; they were in The love made there was long and slow until dawn. Slowing down their evening into individual parts, Mrs. T. knew how to present their time together as a wonderful construction, like a form.Giving time to form is not only the pursuit of beauty, but also the pursuit of memory.Because things that have no form cannot be grasped or remembered.To conceive their encounter as a body is especially precious to them, because the night they spent together has no future but is valued only in memory. Between slowness and memory, speed and forgetting, there is a secret connection.Take a very common situation: a person walking down the street.Suddenly, he wanted to remember something but couldn't.At this point, mechanically, he would slow down.On the contrary, if he wants to forget a tragic accident that happened not long ago, he will unconsciously speed up his pace, as if he wants to quickly move away from this event that is too close to him in time. In the rules of existence, this experiment forms two basic equations: the degree of slowness is proportional to the intensity of memory; the speed is proportional to the speed of forgetting. 11 During Mimond Denon's lifetime, perhaps only a small circle of insiders knew that he was the author of No Day Tomorrow; the secret was not fully revealed to the world (perhaps) until long after his death.The fate of this short story is eerily similar to the plot of the novel: it is shrouded in a dark veil of secrecy, concealment, mystery, anonymity. Sculptor, painter, statesman, traveler, connoisseur, central figure in salons, Denon had a proud career and never claimed authorship of the short story.Not only did he refuse this honor, but it also had other meanings; I think the crowd he was interested in and wanted to attract was not a large crowd of strangers like today's writers covet, but a small group of friends who can be known and respected in private.The popularity of his books with his readers is not so different from the pleasure he gets from being around a few listeners in a salon. Glory, there is a huge difference between before and after the invention of film and television.In the fourteenth century, the Czech king Vaclav liked to chat with common people in a small restaurant in Prague incognito.He has power, glory and freedom.Today's British Prince Charles (Charfes) has no power and freedom, but has unlimited glory: no matter in the jungle, or in the bathtub buried in the seventeenth floor of the bunker, he cannot escape the chase and recognize him. Eye.Glory had eaten away all his freedom, and now he knew it: only the unconscious would walk away with an empty can of fame in their arms. You will say that however the character of the glory changes, it is only the elite that are involved.You are wrong.Because glory isn't just about celebrities, it's about everyone.Today, celebrities appear on the front pages of magazines, on television screens, and capture everyone's imagination.Everyone hoped, if only in a dream, that it would be possible to be the object of such glory (not that of the Czech king in and out of the bistro, but that of Prince Charles hiding in the bathtub on the seventeenth floor of the basement).This possibility follows every man like a shadow, and makes him change his personality; for (this is another well-known basic definition of the rules of existence) every new possibility of existence, even the smallest possibility, changes the whole life. 12 If Peng Defan knew that the intellectual Beck was troubled by a certain woman Lmmaculata (Lmmaculata), maybe he would be kinder to him.She was the girl Baker had coveted (in vain) in high school. One day more than twenty years later, Inma Junata saw Baker flicking a fly off the face of a little black girl on the TV screen; this gave her a great revelation.She knew immediately that she had always loved him.On the same day, she wrote him a letter, declaring their "pure love" back then.But Baker remembered all too well that his love for her, which was not at all innocent, was full of greedy desire, and he felt insulted when she refused tactfully.So, inspired by the somewhat amusing name of his parents' Portuguese maid, he nicknamed her, both acerbic and sad, Inmajunata, which means a woman who cannot be stained.He reacted so violently to the letter (strangely after twenty years he still couldn't get over that setback) that he didn't reply. His silence alarmed her, and in the next letter she reminded her of the astonishing number of letters he had written to her.In one of them, he also called her "the little bird that disturbs my dreams at night".He found the long-forgotten sentence stupidly intolerable, and it would be rude of her to remind him of it now.Later, when some rumors spread to his ears, he realized that every time he appeared on TV, this woman he had never defiled was talking about the innocent love of Celebrity Baker at a dinner party somewhere. She can't sleep.He felt naked and helpless.For the first time in his life, he felt a strong desire to remain anonymous. In the third letter she asked him for a favor: not for her but for one of her neighbors, a poor woman who was not cared for by Anshan in the hospital, and who not only nearly died of an anesthesia error, but was denied any compensation afterwards.If Baker cares so much about African children, he'll prove he cares about the little folks back home, even if they might not get him the chance to show off on TV. Afterwards, the woman herself wrote to him, in the name of Inma Junata: "...do you remember, sir, that young woman whom you wrote to say was a pure virgin who disturbed your sleep? Girl." How is that possible? !how is this possible? !Baker ran from end to end of the house, yelling and cursing.He tore up the letter, spat on it, and threw it in the trash. One day, he heard a TV director say that a female director wanted to do his feature report.He angrily remembered the comment that satirized him wanting to show off on TV, because the female director who was going to be his special report was the bird in the night, Inma Junata herself!Frustrating situation: In principle, he would love to have someone do a show to film him, because he always wanted to turn his life into a work of art; but he never thought that this work would be of the comical type!Faced with the danger he suddenly realized, he hoped that Inma Junata would be as far away from his life as possible, and he begged the director of the station (much surprised by the former's modesty) to postpone the plan, for a young man like himself who was so dissatisfied. For important people, it is too early. This incident reminded me of another story I had the good fortune to read in the books that lined the walls of Gu Jia's house.Once when I poured out my melancholy in front of him, he pointed to a bookshelf with his handwriting on it: a casual masterpiece of humor, and with a narrow smile he pulled out a book written in 1972, a A Parisian female reporter describes her love for Kissinger. Do you still remember the most famous politician of this century, an adviser to President Nixon, and a figure who brought about peace between the United States and Vietnam? The story goes like this: She and Kissinger met in Washington, first for a magazine and then for television coverage.They met a few times, but never more than a purely working relationship: a dinner or two for TV coverage, a few visits to his office at the White House, a solo visit to his home, another with a group of staff, etc. .Gradually, Kissinger hated her more and more.He would not be fooled, he knew what it was, and to keep her at a distance he had told her so much about the attraction of power to women that he had to give up all his brilliant insights about the private lives of men and women. She registers all his avoidances with touching sincerity, but it doesn't discourage her, she has an unshakable belief that they are destined to be together: what about his caution and guard?She wasn't surprised: she knew he must think of all the horrible women he'd known; she was sure that once he knew she loved him so much it would ease his doubts and disarm him.Ah, how sure she was of the purity of her love!She could even swear that there was nothing carnal about her love. "Sexually, I don't give a damn." She repeated the sentence several times (with an odd tinge of maternal abuse): he has no taste in clothes, he's not handsome, he has no taste for women; would be a good lover," she vowed, declaring more of her love.She had two young children, and so did he, and she planned a trip to the Côte d'Azur without the slightest suspicion in him, fantasizing happily that Kissinger's two children could learn French with ease. One day, when she and the camera team went to photograph Kisingji's home, he could no longer control himself and drove them out of the house like a bunch of entangled rascals.On another occasion he summoned her to his office and told her in an extremely stern and cold voice that he could no longer bear her flirtation with him.She was very discouraged at first, but soon, she told herself: There is no doubt that they think she is a political danger, and Kissinger has been instructed by the counterintelligence not to associate with her; the office where they meet is full of monitors And he knew it; his unbelievably cruel words were not addressed to her, but to the invisible police officers listening in.She looks at him with a knowing and sad smile; the scene has a tragic beauty (an adjective she often uses): he is forced to hurt her, but at the same time, his eyes speak of love. Gu Jia laughed out loud, but I said to him: The fact of the event presented in the fantasy of the woman in love is not as important as he thought, it is just a mediocre fact, ordinary and vulgar, not important at all, on the contrary, a A higher truth will live on in time: this book.It had been the unacknowledged and unrealized purpose of her love adventure from the moment she first met her idol, sitting invisibly on the little table between them.Book?For what purpose?To paint Kissinger's face?No, she had nothing to say to him!What she cares about is her own truth.She has no desire for Kissinger, still less for his body ("he must not be a good lover"); , turning it into light.To her, Kissinger is a mythical support, a flying horse that allows her self to soar in the blue sky. "She's a stupid woman," Gu Jia concluded coldly, mocking my beautiful explanation. "No," I said, "a lot of people can attest to her intelligence. This is about something other than stupidity. She's sure she'll be picked." 13 "Elector" is a concept in theology, which means: people without merit, by a supernatural judge, by God's free or whimsical will, are chosen to do something strange and special.Based on this belief, the saint endured the cruelest torture with all his strength.Theological ideas are reflected, in a caricature, in the little things of our lives; each of us (more or less) suffers from the mediocrity of too ordinary life and wants to get rid of it and elevate.Each of us has at one time or another the illusion (strongly or weakly) that we are qualified for this ascension, that we have been predestined and chosen for it. The feeling of being chosen is also present in, for example, all love relationships.Because love, by its very definition, is an unearned gift; not being loved for all its worth is not even a proof of true love.If a woman said to me: I love you because you are smart, because you are upright, because you buy me presents, because you don't flirt, because you do the dishes - I would be disappointed; this love seems to be conditional of.And it's so much more beautiful to hear it said: I'm crazy for you, even though you're neither bright nor honest, though you're lying, selfish, and mean. Perhaps from infancy, for the first time, man has the illusion of being chosen, because he doesn't have to do anything to get his mother's love and ask for it.Education freed him from this illusion and taught him that all gains in life come at a price.But often it is too late.You must have seen this little girl of ten, in a moment of refutation, say aloud and with inexplicable pride, "Because I told so"; or "Because I That's it." She felt chosen.But one day in the future, when she says, "Because I'm going to be like this," everyone around will laugh out loud.What can those people who want to be elected, to confirm his election, to convince themselves and others that he is not a vulgar person? This is the era created by the invention of photography, with stars, dancers and celebrities, their images appear on a huge screen, everyone can see it from afar, everyone admires it and everyone can't get close.Those who die-hardly worship celebrities, think they are chosen, and express themselves in a public way as being extraordinary, showing the distance between themselves and the ordinary, meaning that they are with neighbors, colleagues, partners, etc. ( or she) the distance between people who have to live together. Celebrity thus becomes a public facility, like sanitation, like social welfare, like the insurance system, like a sanatorium for the mad.But they only function when they are inaccessible.If someone tried to prove his selection by direct, personal contact with a famous person, he was likely to be driven away like the woman who fell in love with Kissinger.This expulsion is known in theological terms as original sin.This is why the woman who fell in love with Ji Xinji explicitly talks about her tragic love in her book, because original sin, even though Gu Jia, who scoffs at this love, would disagree, is tragic by definition. Until she realized that she was always in love with Baker, Inma Junata lived the life of most women: attended several weddings, heard about several divorces, had several lovers, which brought her stability and peace , an almost gentle sense of loss.This last lover was especially fond of her; she was also the one who tolerated him the most, not only because of his submissiveness but also because of his usefulness: he was a cameraman who had helped her a lot in her early days in television.He was a few years older than her, but he always looked like a college student who adored her; he thought she was the most beautiful, smartest, and above all, the most delicate of all women. The delicate mind of his beloved woman, in his eyes, is like the landscape in the German Romantic paintings: full of twisted and indescribable trees, above, the high and blue sky, the residence of God; every time he walks into this landscape In each of them, there is an irresistible desire to kneel down as if facing a miracle.