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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

=William Gass on the instability of identity=

I can believe those who argue that memory is not enough to establish the reality of the self, because the selves I remember I remember like photos in the family album: that knickered kid, that bald scrawny brat, that fuzz-and-fat-faced second louie, that solemn owl in his flat black hat—they are relatives of mine at best, school chums scarcely recollected, unidentified individuals who have somehow slunk into the group and grin at the blank beside their name.

I can long for you no longer in the old way—that pain is also past—since the lover who lingered over you like a nurse through an illness is another man, no longer a lover of any kind, just as you are a different set of lips, another pair of breasts, some further furry tunnel.

How odd it must seem to that murderer of Jews who is apprehended in his watch shop in Ulm and his ghost dragged away to justice. I am not that man, he wants to say. Those letters and diaries that accuse me accuse a photograph—a faded paper image.

—from The Tunnel

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