Here’s an extended passage from Keith Johnstone’s Impro. Published in 1961, it remains one of the most notable books concerning improvisation.

Space

Space is very difficult to talk about, but easy to demonstrate.

When I was commissioned to write my first play I’d hardly been inside a theatre, so I watched rehearsals to get the feel of it. I was struck by the way space flowed around the actors like a fluid. As the actors moved I could feel imaginary iron filings marking out the force fields. This feeling of space was strongest when the stage was uncluttered, and during the coffee breaks, or when they were discussing some difficulty. When they weren’t acting, the bodies of the actors continually readjusted. As one changed position so all the others altered their postures. Something seemed to flow between them. When they were ‘acting’ each actor would pretend to relate to the others, but his movements would stem from himself. They seemed ‘encapsulated’. In my view it’s only when they actor’s movements are related to the space he’s in, and to the other actors, that the audience feel ‘at one’ with the play. The very best actors pump space out and suck it in, or at least that’s what it feels like.

….The movement teacher Yat Malmgren told me that as a child he’d discovered that he didn’t end at the surface of his body, but was actually an oval ‘Swiss cheese’ shape. To me, this is ‘closed-eye’ space, and you experience it when you shut your eyes and let your body feel outwards into the surrounding darkness. Yat also talked about people who were cut off from sensing areas of themselves. ‘He has no arms,’ he would say, or ‘She has no legs’, and you could see what he meant. When I investigated myself I found many areas that I wasn’t experiencing, and my feelings are still defective. What I did find was another shape besides the ‘Swiss cheese’ shape: a parabola sweeping ahead of me like a comet’s tail. When I panic, this parabola crushes in. In stage fright space contracts into a narrow tunnel down which you can just about walk without bumping into things. In cases of extreme stage fright the space is like a plastic skin pressing on to you and making your body rigid and bound. The opposite of this is seen when a great actor makes a gesture, and it’s as if his arm has swept right over the heads of the people sitting at the back of the audience.

Many acting teachers have spoke of ‘radiations’, and they often sound like mystics. Here’s Jean-Louis Barrault:

“Just as the earth is surrounded by an atmosphere, the living human being is surrounded by a magnetic aura which makes contact with the external objects without any concrete contact with the human body. This aura, or atmosphere, varies in depth according to the vitality of the human beings….
“The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves about causes ripples in the ambient world in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water.” (The Theatre of Jean-Louis Barrault, Barrie and Rockcliff, 1961)

This isn’t very scientific, but like all magical language it does communicate a way an actor can ‘feel’. If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they’re likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don’t move they’ll begin to feel love or hate as their ‘space’ streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they’ll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they’ll move back so that the force isn’t so powerful. High-status players…will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating oneself are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it’s such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil.

Imagine a man sitting neutrally and symmetrically on a bench. If he crosses his left leg lover his right then you’ll see his space flowing over to the right as if his leg was an aerofoil. If he rests his right arm along the back of the bench you’ll see his space flowing out more strongly. If he turns his head to the right, practically all his space will be flowing in this same direction. Someone who is sitting neutrally in the ‘beam’ will seem lower-status. Every movement of the body modifies its space. If a man who is sitting neutrally crosses his left wrist over his right the space flows to his right, and vice versa. It’s very obvious that the top hand gives the direction. But the class are amazed. The difference seems so trivial, yet they can see it’s a quite strong effect.

The body has reflexes that protect it from attack. We have a ‘fear-crouch’ position in which the shoulders lift to protect the jugular and the body curls forward to protect the underbelly. It’s more effective against carnivores than against policemen jabbing at your kidneys, but it evolved a long time ago. The opposite to this fear crouch is the ‘cherub posture’, which opens all the planes of the body: the head turns and tilts to offer the neck, the shoulders turn the other way to expose the chest, the spine arches slightly backwards and twists so that the pelvis is in opposition to the shoulders exposing the underbelly—and so on. This is the position I usually see cherubs carved in, and the opening of the body planes is a sign of vulnerability and tenderness, and has a powerful effect on the onlooker. High-status people often adopt it and straighten, but they won’t adopt the fear crouch. Challenge a low-status player and he’ll show some tendency to slide into postures related to the fear crouch.

[This image recalls to mind the trendiness in practicing yoga. “Heart-opening” positions such as “up-dog” promote high-status positions, which may be one reason yoga has become so popular among the ambitious classes.]

….Imagine an empty beach. The first family to arrive can sit anywhere, but they’ll either take up position against some rocks, or sit a third of the way in—supposing it’s all equally sandy. In my part of England, where there are many small beaches, the next family to appear might well move on to the next beach, regarding the first one as ‘claimed’. If they do move in they’ll stake out ‘their part of the beach’, away from the first group. If they sat close to the first group then they’d have to make friends, which could be difficult. If they sat close without making friends, then the first group would react with alarm. ‘Close’ is a concept related to the amount of space available. Once the beach fills up with people you can sit very close to the original family. The space people demand around them contracts as more people are added. Finally as the beach reaches saturation people stare at the sky, or roll in to face their friends, or cover their faces with newspaper or whatever.

People will travel a long way to visit a ‘view’. The essential element of a good view is distance, and preferably with nothing human in the immediate foreground. When we stand on a hill and look across fifty miles of emptiness at the mountains, we are experiencing the pleasure of having our space flow out unhindered. As people come in sigh of a view, it’s normal for their posture to improve and for them to breathe better. You can see people remarking on the freshness of the air, and taking deep breaths, although it’s the same air as it was just below the brow of the hill. Trips to the sea, and our admiration of mountains are probably symptoms of overcrowding.

Approach distances are related to space. If I approach someone on open moorland I have to raise an arm and shout ‘excuse me’ as soon as I’m within shouting distance. In a crowded street I can actually brush against people without having to interact.

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It’s straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made a hundred yards or more before it actually ‘needs’ to be. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they’re equal, both move aside, but the position nearest the wall is actually the strongest. If each person believes himself to be dominant a very curious thing happens. They approach until they stop face to face, and do a sideways dance, while muttering confused apologies. If a little old half-blind lady wanders into your path this ‘mirror’ dance doesn’t happen. You move out of her way. It’s only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs, and such incidents are likely to stick in the mind. I remember doing it in a shop doorway with a man who took me by my upper arms and moved me gently out of his path. It still rankles. Old people who don’t want to give way, and who cling to the status they used to have, will walk along the street hugging the wall, and ‘not noticing’ anyone who approaches them. If, as an experiment, you also hug the wall very funny scenes occur when you stop face to face—but the sideways dance doesn’t happen because you’re conscious of what you’re doing. Old people in, say Hamburg, often collide with young Britishes in the street, because they expect the young to step aside for them. Similarly, a high-status stripped will walk stark naked into a stagehand who stands in her way….When you watch a bustling crowd from above it’s amazing that they don’t all bump into each other. I think it’s because we’re all giving status signals, and exchanging subliminal status challenges all the time. The more submissive person steps aside.

Pg. 57–61

It is very important to the City of Houston that we have a complete and accurate count for the 2010 Census. We lose an estimated $1,700 per person per year for everyone not counted. Please be on the lookout for the Census form when it arrives in March, fill it out immediately and mail it back immediately. Please ask your friends and neighbors to do the same. Thank you in advance for your participation.

Annise D. Parker

Mayor

Be Average

A student still looks up-tight, so I say, ‘Are you trying your best?’

‘Of course!’

‘Is that a good strategy?’

‘If I don’t try I won’t get anywhere.’

‘If we saw mountaineers “doing their best” we’d know that they’d moved outside of their area of competence and were fighting for their lives. An admired team of gymnasts at the Olympics saw the gold medal receding, and they “tried” with al their might, and started to fall off the bars.’

‘But how can I achieve anything worthwhile if I don’t struggle for it?’

‘Just be average!’

Consternation.

‘Look at the room!’ I say. ‘Look at the chair! Now “try” to look at the room; “try” to look at the chair. Does it help? I don’t think so. Touch your nose! Now do it again but this time “try” to touch it—did that improve the action? Hypnotists ask you to “try” to open your closed eyes or your interlocked fingers, because the harder you “try” the less ability you have.’

‘But I don’t want to be mediocre!’

‘Trying makes you mediocre. It’s like running up the down-escalator.’

No comprehension.

‘We only try when we don’t trust the forces within us. Each brain organizes a universe out of the electro-agnetic flux—no brain equals no universe—so if we have this magical computer inside our skulls and yet feel that we can’t draw, or compose a tune, or write a story, or improvise, we must be under some prohibition.’

Not a glimmer.

‘Sometimes being average is the best possible strategy.’

Outrage.

‘Anyone can walk a plank, but if it stretched across an abyss, fear might glue us to [the plank, unable to walk]. Our best strategy might be to treat the abyss as something ordinary…and to walk across in our average manner.’

‘You mean if we were content to be average we’d be just as good as when we try harder?’

‘Yes, or better, because “being average” allows automatic processes to take over, and there are parts of the brain that are infinitely more gifted than the social-self. Are there any athletes here?’

A few hands go up.

‘When was your fastest time?’

They tell me.

‘Were you trying your hardest?’

I get answers like, ‘Funny you should ask, because I really had no idea how fast I was going.’

Such answers are almost routine (a world speed-skating champion used almost exactly those words in Calgary recently).

Here’s a quote from Maximum Performance by Laurence E. Moorhouse and Leonard Gross (New York: Pocket Books, 1977):

I took every opportunity I could to interview athletes who had just broken a world’s record…I could predict almost exactly what each of them would say. The scenario went like this.

‘I didn’t feel well that day. I was nauseated and felt weak. As a matter of fact, it crossed my mind to ask the coach to scratch me from the event…I don’t remember any particular moment during the event. It all seemed so easy. At the finish, the way the crowd was cheering told me I had done well, but I had the feeling that if I had only tried a litle harder I could have done much better.’

And yet it’s obvious that ‘forgetting’ to try harder gave them their success. Try to make your arm immovable, absolutely rigid, and it’ll be easy for me to move it—because half of its muscles will be assisting me. Allow only those muscles to operate that are needed to resist the force and it will be a third stronger.

I might tell my students about the weightlifter who broke the world record because he didn’t realize that extra poundage had been added accidentally. Or I might mention the elderly heart patient who lugged one end of a 1,600-pound steel pipe off of a trapped child. Interviewed on TV, he said, ‘Well, I saw what had happened so I lifted it off without thinking.’

The consciousness that we experience as ‘ourselves’ is a defence system against the intrusions of other people (why else would so much of our inner dialogue be concerned with manipulating their opinion of us?), but in life-or-death situations our good angel shoves us aside, slams time into slow-motion and does its damnedest to rescue us. If improvisers were content to be ‘just average’, and to ‘go with the flow’, this good angel could operate even when there wasn’t a dire emergency, and we’d call this ‘being inspired’.…

If ‘trying harder’ meant staying relaxed and happy while you spent more time with a problem, then it could be recommended, but i usually involves treating the mind as if it were constipated and had to have ideas squeezed out of it.

Improvisers who are ‘determined to do their best’ scan the ‘future’ for ‘better’ ideas, and cease to pay any attention to each other.

pg 66–77

The fantastic and amusing terms that Elizabethan huntsmen applied to groupings of different species—a sloth of bears, an exaltation of larks, a trip of goats, a richesse of martens—are familiar today to lovers of quaint words. Every other aspect of aristocratic hunt also afforded a different lexicon for each species of game. For example, a male fallow deer during its first six years of life was known successively as a fawn, pricket, sorel, sore, buck of the first head, and buck, while the corresponding terms for a red deer were calf, brocket, spade, staggart, stag, and hart…The unhappy hunter who used the wrong pronoun to the dogs, called a brocket a pricket, or said “raise” when he meant “rouse” seldom escaped with mere derision. A public spanking with the flat of a hunting knife was the customary penalty for many such misuses of ritual language—for example, uttering the forbidden word “hedgehog” during a deer hunt.

pg 64–65

One day I learnt that one of their chieftains had died. He was placed apart in a grave which was covered over for ten days until clothing for him had been cut out and stitched. If the dead man were poor, a small boat was made, in which the corpse was placed and then burnt. But if he were wealthy, his property and goods were divided into three portions: one for his family, another to meet the cost of his clothing, the third to make nabid (funeral beer) which was drunk on the day when the dead man’s slave was burnt with him…

When one of their chiefs died, his family demanded of his men and women slaves: ‘Which among you wish to die with him?’ Then, one of them would say, ‘I will’, and whoever said that would be forced to undergo it, it was not possible to withdraw. If she wished to do so, it would not be allowed. Those who volunteered were nearly always female slaves.

So it was that when this man died, the slaves were asked: ‘Which among you wishes to die with him?’ One of the female slaves replied: ‘I will’. From that moment she would be under constant guard by two other servants who took care of her to the extent of washing her feet with their own hands. Preparations were made for the dead man, his clothing made etc., while every day the condemned girl would drink and sing, as though in preparation for a joyous event. When the day arrived for the chief and his slave to be burnt, I went to the river where his boat was moored. It had been hoisted up on to the bank. Then there were placed around it something which looked like a great scaffolding of wood…

People began to walk around it speaking in a tongue unknown to me, but the corpse was lying all the time in his grave; they never disturbed it again. They then brought a bier, placed it on the boat, and covered it over with carpets and cushions of dibag (brocaded silk) from Byzantium. Then there arrived an old woman whom they called the ‘Angel of Death’, and she it was who spread the cushions on the bier. She, too, was in charge of the whole ceremony, from the dressing of the cadaver to the execution of the slave.

I noticed that the Angel of Death was a strapping woman, massively built and austere of countenance. When they arrived at the grave the earth was removed from the wooden lid and then the wood itself was taken away. Next the corpse was stripped of the garments in which he had died. I noticed that his body had turned black from the intense cold.

When they had placed the body in the grave, they had also put there beer, fruit and a lute, all things which they now took away. Most surprisingly, the corpse has not changed at all save for the colour of his flesh. They took a pride in their duty of clothing him in drawers, trousers, boots, a tunic and cloak of dibag embellished with gold buttons: the corpse was then given a cap of dibag and sable; then he was carried to a tent set over the boat Nabid, fruits and aromatic herbs were then brought and placed all around his body; they also brought bread, meat and onions which they threw down before him.

That done, they took a dog and, after cutting it in two, they threw the pieces into the ship. Afterwards they brought all his weapons and laid them by his side. Then they took two horses, drove them until they sweated, and then cut them in pieces with swords and threw their flesh into the boat; the same was done with two cows. Next they killed a cock and a hen and threw them in too.

Meanwhile, the slave who had volunteered to be killed went hither and thither, entering each tent in turn, and the master of each household had sexual intercourse with her, saying, ‘Tell your master that I do this thing for the love of him.’ [My bold-facing.]

When Friday afternoon came, they led the slave girl to something they had made which resembled a door frame. Then she mounted onto the palms of men’s hands high enough to look down over the framework, and when they lowered her again she said something in a strange tongue. They lifted her up again and she behaved exactly as before. They lowered her again, then once more raised her up and she repeated what she had done the first and second times. Then they gave her a hen; she cut off its head and threw it away; they took the hen and threw it into the boat.

I asked my interpreter what she had said. He replied: ‘The first time she was lifted up, she said: “look, I see my father and mother!” The second time: “Behold, I see my dead relatives seated around.” The third time, she had said: “Behold! I see my master in Paradise, and Paradise is green and fair, and with him are men and young boys. He is calling me. Let me go to him!”

Then they led her towards the ship. Next she took off two bracelets she was wearing and gave them to the old woman, the Angel of Death, who was going to kill her. She then took off the two finger-rings she was wearing and gave them to the daughters of the Angel of Death.

Then they raised her on to the ship, but they did not let her enter the tent. After that many men came with wooden shields and she was given a beaker of nabid. She sand as she drank it. My interpreter told me then: ‘It is thus that she bids farewell to her friends.’ Then she was given a second cup. She took it and sang for a long time: but the old woman told her to make haste, to drink up and go into the tent where she would find her master. I looked at her at that moment and she seemed completely bewildered. She wanted to enter the tent but only managed to put her head between it and the ship. The old woman took hold of her head and made her enter the tent, following her in.

Then it was that the men began to beat their shields with wooden sticks, to stifle the cries of the slave girl, so that other girls would not take fright and refuse to die with their masters. Six men then entered the tent and all had sexual intercourse with her. Then they made her lie at the side of her dead master. Two held her hands and two her feet, and the Angel of Death wound a noose round her neck ending in a knot at both ends which she placed in the hands of two men, for them to pull. She then advanced with a broad-bladed dagger which she plunged repeatedly between the ribs of the girl while the men strangled her until she was dead.

Then the closest relative of the dead man came. He seized a piece of wood and started a fire. In this fashion was set alight the wood which had been piled under the ship after the dead slave girl had been placed beside her master. Finally, people came with kindling and firewood; each man carried a firebrand which he threw upon the wood-pile, so that the wood was engulfed in flames, then the ship, the tent and the man, the slave and everything in it.

The Mammoth Book of Eye-Witness History, edited by Jon E. Lewis

A Schoolboy’s Day, Sumer, c. 2000 BC

Anonymous

[The Sumerians of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), built the first cities, the first state. They invented writing and the formal education of children.]

Arriving at school in the morning I recited my tablet, ate my lunch, prepared my new tablet, wrote it, finished it, then they assigned me my oral work…When school was dismissed, I went home, entered the house, and found my father sitting there. I told my father of my written work, then recited my tablet to him, and my father was delighted.

p.6

Hunting Crocodiles, Egypt, c. 450 BC

Herodotus

Some of the Egyptians hold the crocodile as sacred, but others do not, and hunt it as an enemy. Those that live in the neighborhourhood of Thebes and the lake of Moeris consider it to be extremely sacred. Each community rears one crocodile which is trained to come to hand; they put glass and gold ornaments on its ears and bracelets on its front feet, giving it special food and divine offerings, and treating it extremely well as long as it lives. On its death it is embalmed and placed in sacred coffins. But the inhabitants of the city of Elephantine do not think of them as sacred, and even eat them…

p. 7

…“But, on my oath, I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred—that hate which is only a hair’s-breath from love, from the maddest love!

I went to the window, put my forehead against the frozen pane, and I remember the ice burnt my forehead like fire. I did not keep her long, don’t be afraid. I turned round, went up to the table, opened the drawer and took out a banknote for five thousand roubles (it was lying in a French dictionary). Then I showed it her in silence, folded it, handed it to her, opened the door into the passage, and, stepping back, made her a deep bow, a most respectful, a most impressive bow, believe me! She shuddered all over, gazed at me for a second, turned horribly pale—white as a sheet, in fact—and all at once, not impetuously but softly, gently, bowed down to my feet—not a boarding-house courtesy, but a Russian bow, with her forehead to the floor. She jumped up and ran away. I was wearing my sword. I drew it and nearly stabbed myself with it on the spot; why, I don’t know. It would have been frightfully stupid, of course. I suppose it was from delight. Can you understand that one might kill oneself from delight? But I didn’t stab myself. I only kissed my sword and put it back in the scabbard—which there was no need to have told you, by the way. And I fancy that in telling you about my inner conflict I have laid it on rather thick to fortify myself. But let it pass, and to hell with all who pry into the human heart!”

Part One, Book III, Section III

“To see the preference given…to a monster who, though he is betrothed and all eyes are fixed on him, can’t restrain his debaucheries—and before the very eyes of his betrothed! And a man like me is preferred, while [Ivan] is rejected. And why? Because a girl wants to sacrifice her life and destiny out of gratitude.”

Part One, Book III, Section III

But [Smerdyakov] had suddenly spoken. The subject was a strange one. Grigory [his guardian] had gone in the morning to make purchases, and had heard from the shopkeeper Lukyanov the story of a Russian soldier which ahd appeared in the newspaper of that day. This soldier had been taken prisoner in some remote part of Asia, and was threatened with an immediate agonizing death if he did not renounce Christianity and follow Islam. He refused to deny his faith, and was tortured, flayed alive, and died, praising and glorifying Christ. Grigory had related the story at table. Fyodor always liked, over the dessert after dinner, to laugh and talk, if only with Grigory [who was his servant]. This afternoon he was in a particularly good-humoured and expansive mood. Sipping his brandy and listening to the story, he observed that they ought to make a saint of a soldier like that, and to take his skin to some monastery. “That would make the people flock, and bring the money in.”

Grigory frowned, seeing that Fyodor was by no means touched, but, as usual, was beginning to scoff. At that moment Smerdyakov, who was standing by the door, smiled. Smerdyakov often waited at table towards the end of dinner, and since Ivan’s arrival in our town he had done so every day.

“What are you grinning at?” asked Fyodor, catching the smile instantly, and knowing that it referred to Grigory.

“Well, my opinion is,” Smerdyakov began suddenly and unexpectedly in a loud voice, “that if that laudable soldier’s exploit was so very great there would have been, to my thinking, no sin in it if he had on such an emergency renounced, so to speak, the name of Christ and his own christening, to save by that same his life, for good deeds, by which, in the course of years to expiate his cowardice.”

“How could it not be a sin? You’re talking nonsense. For that you’ll go straight to hell and be roasted there like mutton,” put in Fyodor.

…“As for mutton, that’s not so, and there’ll be nothing there for this, and there shouldn’t be either, if it’s according to justice,” Smerdyakov maintained stoutly.

“How do you mean ‘according to justice’?” Fyodor cried still more gaily, nudging Alyosha with his knee.

“He’s a rascal, that’s what he is!” burst from Grigory. He looked Smerdyakov wrathfully in the face.

“As for being a rascal, wait a little, Grigory,” answered Smerdyakov with perfect composure. “You’d better consider yourself that, once I am taken prisoner by the enemies of the Christian race, and they demand from me to curse the name of God and to renounce my holy christening, I am fully entitled to act by my own reason, since there would be no sin in it.”

“But you’ve said that before. Don’t waste words. Prove it,” cried Fyodor.

“Soup maker!” muttered Grigory contemptuously.

“As for being a soup maker, wait a bit, too, and consider for yourself, Grigory, without abusing me. For as soon as  I say to those enemies, ‘No, I’m not a Christian, and I curse my true God,’ then at once, by God’s high judgment, I become immediately and specially anathema accursed, and am cut off from the Holy Church, exactly as though I were a heathen, so that at that very instant, not only when I say it aloud, but when I think of saying it, before a quarter of a second has passed, I am cut off. Is that so or not, Grigory?”

He addressed Grigory with obvious satisfaction, though he was really answering Fyodor’s questions, and was well aware of it, and intentionally pretending that Grigory had asked the questions.

…“You’re anathema accursed, as it is,” Grigory suddenly burst out, “and how dare you argue, you rascal, after that, if…”

“Don’t scold him, Grigory, don’t scold him, ” Fyodor cut him short.

“You should wait, Grigory, if only a short time, and listen, for I haven’t finished all I had to say. For at the very moment I become accursed, at that same highest moment, I become exactly like a heathen, and my christening is taken off me and becomes of no avail. Isn’t that so?”

“Make haste and finish my boy,” Fyodor urged him, sipping from his wine-glass with relish.

“And if I’ve ceased to be a Christian, then I told no lie to the enemy when they asked whether I was a Christian or not, seeing I had already been relieved by God himself of my Christianity by reason of the thought alone, before I had time to utter a word to the enemy. And if I have already been discharged, in what manner and with what sort of justice can I be held responsible as a Christian in the oher world for having denied Christ, when, through the very thought alone, before denying Him I had been relieved from my christening? If I’m no longer a Christian, then I can’t renounce Christ, for I’ve nothing then to renounce. Who will hold an unclean Tatar responsible, Grigory, even in heaven, for not having been born a Christian? And who would punish him for that, considering that you can’t take two skins off one ox? For God Almighty Himself, even if He did make the Tatar responsible, when he dies would give him the smallest possible punishment, I imagine (since he must be punished) judging that he is not to blame if he has come into the world an unclean heathen, from heathen parents. The Lord God can’t surely take a Tatar and say he was a Christian? That would mean that the Almighty would tell a real untruth. And can the Lord of Heaven and Earth tell a lie, even in one word?”

Grigory was thunderstruck and looked at the orator, his eyes nearly starting out of his head. Though he did not clearly understand what was said, he had caught something in this rigmarole, and stood, looking like a man who has just hit his head a wall. Fyodor emptied his glass and went off into his shrill laugh.

…“Don’t cry, Grigory, we’ll reduce him to smoke and ashes in a moment. Tell me this, oh, ass; you may be right before your enemies, but you have renounced your faith all the same in your own heart, and you say yourself that in that very hour you became anathema accursed. And if once you’re anathema they won’t pat you on the head for it in hell. What do you say to that, my fine Jesuit?”

“There is no doubt that I have renounced it in my own heart, but there was no special sin in that. Or if there was sin, it was the most ordinary.”

“How’s that the most ordinary?”

“You lie, accursed one!” hissed Grigory.

“Consider yourself, Grigory,” Smerdyakov went on, staid and unruffled, conscious of his triumph, but, as it were, generous to his vanquished foe. “Consider yourself, Grigory; it is said in the Scripture that if you have faith, even as a mustard seed, and bid a mountain move into the sea, it will move without the least delay at your bidding. Well, Grigory, if I’m without faith and you have so great a faith that you are continually swearing at me, you try yourself telling this mountain, not to move into the sea for that’s a long way off, but even to our stinking little river which runs at the bottom of the garden. You’ll see for yourself that it won’t budge, but will remain just where it is however much you shout at it, and will remain just where it is however much you shout at it, and that shows, Grigory, that you haven’t faith in the proper manner, and only abuse others about it. Again, taking into consideration that no one in our day, not only you, but actually no one, from the highest person to the lowest peasant can shove mountains into the sea—except perhaps some one man in the world, or, at most, two, and they most likely are saving their souls in secret somewhere in the Egyptian desert, so you wouldn’t find them—if so it be, if all the rest have no faith, will God curse all the rest? that is, the population of the whole earth, except about two hermits in the desert, and in His well-known mercy will He not forgive one of them? And so I’m persuaded that though I may once have doubted I shall be forgiven if I shed tears of repentance.”

“Your words are worth a gold piece, oh, ass, and I’ll give it to you to-day. But as to the rest you talk nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Let me tell you, stupid, that we here are all of little faith, only from carelessness, because we haven’t time; things are too much for us, and, in the second place, the Lord God has given us so little time, only twenty-four hours in the day, so that one hasn’t even time to get sleep enough, much less to repent of one’s sins. While you have denied your faith to your enemies when you’d nothing else to think about but to show your faith! So I consider, brother, that it constitutes a sin.”

“Constitutes a sin it may, but consider yourself, Grigory, that it only extenuates it, if it does constitute. If I had believed then in very truth, as I ought to have believed, then it really would have been sinful if I had not faced tortures for my faith, and had gone over to the pagan Mohammedan faith. But, of course, it wouldn’t have come to torture then, because I should only have had to say at that instant to the mountain ‘move and crush the tormentor,’ and it would have moved and at that very instant have crushed him like a black-beetle, and I should have walked away as though nothing had happened, praising and glorifying God. But, suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that mountain, ‘Crush these tormentors,’ and it hadn’t crushed them, how could I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour of mortal terror? And apart from that, I should know already that I could not attain to the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven (for since the mountain had no moved at my word, they could not think very much of my faith up aloft, and there could be no very great reward awaiting me in the world to come). So why should I let them flay the skin off me as well, and to no good purpose? For, even though they had flayed my skin half off my back, even then the mountain would not have moved at my word or at my cry. And at such a moment not only doubt might come over one but one might lose one’s reason from fear, so that one would not be able to think at all. And, therefore, how should I be particularly to blame if not seeing my advantage or reward there or here, I should, at least, save my skin. And so trusting fully in the grace of the Lord I should cherish the hope that I might be altogether forgiven.”

Part I, Book III, Section XII

“Love one another, Fathers,” said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could remember afterwards. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here [to the monastery] and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth.…And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have had no reason to come here. When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not morally through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears…”

Part II, Book IV, Section I

“For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque. Remember this especially, young man, since you are being sent into the world by your departing elder.”

Part II, Book IV, Section I

Now Alyosha was impressed by Madame Hohlakov’s blunt and persistent assertion that Katerina Ivanovna was in love with Ivan, and only deceived herself through some sort of pose, from “self-laceration,” and tortured herself by her pretended love for Dmitri from some fancied duty of gratitude. “Yes,” he thought, “perhaps the whole truth lies in those words.” But in that case what was Ivan’s position? Alyosha felt instinctively that a character like Katerina Ivanovna’s must dominate, and she could only dominate some one like Dmitri, and never a man like Ivan. For Dmitri might at last submit to her domination “to his own happiness” (which was what Alyosha would have desired), but Ivan—no, Ivan could not submit to her, and such submission would not give him happiness. Alyosha could not help believing that of IVan. And now all these doubts and reflections flitted through his mind as he entered the drawing-room.

Part II, Book IV, Section V

“I’ve already decided, even if he marries that—creature (she began solemnly), whom I never, never can forgive, even then I will not abandon him. Henceforward I will never, never abandon him!” she cried, breaking into a sort of pale, hysterical ecstasy. “Not that I would run after him continually, get in his way and worry him. Oh, no! I will go away to another town—where you like—but I will watch over him all my life—I will watch over him all my life unceasingly. When he becomes unhappy with that woman, and that is bound to happen quite soon, let him come to me and he will find a friend, a sister.…Only a sister, of course, and so for ever; but he will learn at least that that sister is really his sister, who loves him and has sacrificed all her life to him. I will gain my point.  I will insist on his knowing me and confiding entirely in me, without reserve,” she cried, in a sort of frenzy. “I will be a god to whom he can pray—and that, at least, he owes me for his treachery and for what I suffered yesterday through him. And let him see that all my life I will be true to him and the promise I gave him, in spite of his being untrue and betraying me. I will—I will become nothing but a means for his happiness, or—how shall I say?—an instrument, a machine for his happiness, and that for my whole life…”

Part II, Book IV, Section V

“He is a man of weak and timorous character; he has suffered so much and is very good-natured. I keep wondering why he took offence so suddenly, for I assure you, up to the last minute, he did not know that he was going to trample on the notes [of money]. And I think now that there was a great deal to offend him…and it could not have been otherwise in his position…To begin with, he was sore at having been so glad of the money in my presence and not having concealed it from me. If he had been pleased, but not so much; he if had not shown it: if he had begun affecting scruples and difficulties, as other people do when they take money, he might still endure to take it. But he was too genuinely delighted, and that was mortifying. Ah, Lise, he is a good and truthful man—that’s the worst of the whole business. All the while he talked, his voice was so weak, so broken, he talked so fast, so fast, he kept laughing such a laugh, or perhaps he was crying—yes, I am sure he was crying, he was so delighted—and he talked about his daughters—and about the situation he could get in another town.…And when he had poured out his heart, he felt ashamed at having shown me his inmost soul like that. So he began to hate me at once. He is one of those awfully sensitive poor people. What had made him feel most ashamed was that he had given in too soon and accepted me as a friend, you see. At first he almost flew at me and tried to intimidate me, but as soon as he saw the money he had begun embracing me; he kept tuching me with his hands. This must have been how he came to feel it all so humiliating, and then I made the blunder, a very important one. I suddenly said to him that if he had not money enough to move to another town, we would give it to him, and indeed, I myself would give him as much as he wanted out of my own money. That struck him all at once. Why, he thought, did I put myself forward to help him? You know, Lise, it’s awfully hard for a man who has been injured, when other people look at him as though they were his benefactors.

Part II, Book V, Section I

“Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, wre convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I should want to live and, having once tasted of the cop, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away—where I don’t know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything—every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself I fancy. Some drivelling consumptive moralists—and poets especially—often call that thirst for life base. It’s a feature of the Karamazovs it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my hear that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky—that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth.”

…“Love life more than the meaning of it?”

Part II, Book V, Section III

“But why, why, asks the prosecutor, did not Smerdyakov confess in his last letter? Why did his conscience prompt him to one step and not to both? But, excuse me, conscience implies penitence, and the suicide may not have felt penitence, but only despair.Despair and penitence are two very different things. Despair may be vindictive and irreconcilable, and the suicide, laying his hands on himself, may well have felt redoubled hatred for those whom he envied all his life.

Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a miscarriage of justice! What is there unlikely in all I have put before you just now?…if there is but a shade of possibility, but a shade of probability in my propositions, do not condemn him. And is there only a shade? I swear by all that is sacred, I fully believe in the explanation of the murder I have just put forward. What troubles me and makes me indignant is that of all the mass of facts heaped up by the prosecution against the prisoner, there is not a single one certain and irrefutable. And yet the unhappy man is to be ruined by the accumulation of these facts. Yes, the accumulated effort is awful: the blood, the blood dripping from his fingers, the blood-stained shirt, the dark night resounding with the shout ‘Parricide!’ and the old man falling with a broken head. And then the mass of phrases, statements, gestures, shouts!…this has so much influence, it can so bias the mind; but, gentlemen of the jury, can it bias your minds? Remember, you have been given absolute power to bind and to loose, but the greater the power, the more terrible its responsibility.”

Book X. Section 12

“Gentlemen of the jury, people like my client, who are fierce, unruly, and uncontrolled on the surface, are sometimes, most frequently indeed, exceedingly tender-hearted, only they don’t express it. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh at my idea! The talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly just now at my client loving Schiller—loving the sublime and the beautiful! I should not have laughed at that in his place. Yes, such natures—oh, let me speak in defense of such natures, so often and so cruelly misunderstood—these natures often thirst for tenderness, goodness, and justice, as it were, in contrast to themselves, their unruliness, their ferocity—they thirst for it unconsciously. Passionate and fierce on the surface, they are painfully capable of loving woman, for instant, and with a spiritual and elevated love. Again do not laugh at me, this is very often the case in such natures. But they cannot hide their passions—sometimes very coarse—and that is conspicuous and is noticed, but the inner man is unseen. Their passions are quickly exhausted; but, by the side of a noble and lofty creature that seemingly coarse and rough man seeks a new life, seeks to correct himself, to be better, to become noble and honourable, ‘sublime and beautiful,’ however much the expression has been ridiculed.

Book X. Section 13

…Mitya went on, with a sudden ring in his voice. “If they beat me on the way or out there, I won’t submit to it. I shall kill some one, and shall be shot for it. And this will be going on for twenty years! They speak to me rudely as it is. I’ve been lying here all night, passing judgment on myself. I am not ready! I am not able to resign myself. I wanted to sing a ‘hymn’; but if a guard speaks to me, I have not the strength to bear it. For Grusha I would bear anything…anything except blows…But she won’t be allowed to come there.”

Alyosha smiled gently.

“Listen, brother, once for all,” he said. “This is what I think about it. And you know that I would not tell you a lie. Listen: you are not ready, and such a cross is not for you. What’s more, you don’t need such a martyr’s cross when you are not ready for it. If you had murdered our father, it would grieve me that you should reject your punishment. But you are innocent, and such a cross is too much for you. You wanted to make yourself another man by suffering. I say, only remember that other man always, all your life and wherever you go; and that will be enough for you. Your refusal of that great cross will only serve to make you feel all your life an even greater duty, and that constant feeling will do more to make you a new man, perhaps, than if you went there [to a Siberian labor camp]. For there you would not endure it and would repine, and perhaps at last would say: ‘I am quits.’

Epilogue, Section 2

At that instant Katya appeared in the doorway. For a moment she stood still, gazing at Mitya with a dazed expression. He leapt impulsively to his feet, and a scared look came into his face. He turned pale,  but a timid, pleading smile appeared on his lips at once, and with an irresistible impulse he held out both hands to Katya. Seeing it, she flew impetuously to him. She seized him by the hands, and almost by force made him sit down on the bed. She sat down beside him, and still keeping his hands pressed them violently. Several times they both strove to speak, but stopped short and again gazed speeechless with a strange smile, their eyes fastened on one another. So passed two minutes.

“Have you forgiven me?” Mitya faltered at last, and at the same moment turning to Alyosha, his face working with joy, he cried, “Do you hear what I am asking, do you hear?”

“That’s what I loved you for, that you are generous at heart!” broke from Katya. “My forgiveness is no good to you, nor yours to me; whether you forgive me or not, you will always be a sore place in my heart, and I in yours—so it must be…” She stopped to take breathe. “What have I come for?” she began again with nervous haste: “to embrace your feet, to press your hands like this, till it hurts—you remember how in Moscow I used to squeeze them—to tell you again that you are my god, my joy, to tell you that I love you madly,” she moaned in anguish, and suddenly pressed his hand greedily to her lips. Tears streamed from her eyes. Alyosha stood speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing.

“Love is over, Mitya!” Katya began again, “but the past is painfully dear to me. Know that will always be so. But now let what might have been come true for one minute,” she faltered, with a drawn smile, looking into his face joyfully again. “You love another woman, and I love another man, and yet I shall love you for ever, and you will love; do you know that? Do you hear? Love me, love me all your life!” she cried, with a quiver almost of menace, in her voice.

…So they murmured to one another frantic words, almost meaningless, perhaps not even true, but at that moment it was all true, and they both believed what they said implicitly.

Epilogue, Section 2

They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three hundred paces. It was a still clear day, with a slight frost. The church bells were still ringing. Snegiryov [the grieving father] ran fussing and distracted after the coffin, in his short old summer overcoat, with his head bare and his soft, old, wide-brimmed hat in his hand. He seemed in a state of bewildered anxiety. At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and tried to find a place for himself there. A flower fell on the snow and he rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depeneded on the loss of that flower.

“And the crust of bread, we’ve forgotten the crust!” he cried suddenly in dismay. But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of bread already and that it was in his pocket. He instantly pulled it out and was reassured.

“Illusha told me to, Illusha,” he explained at once to Alyosha. “I was sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: ‘Father, when my grave is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Alyosha, “we must often take some.”

“Every day, every day!” said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the thought.

They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it. The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through the service. It was an old and rather poor church. Many of the ikons were without setting but such churches are the best for praying in. During the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety. At one moment he went up to the coffin to set straight the cover or the wreath, when a candle fell out of the candlestick he rushed to replace it and was a fearful time fumbling over it, then he subsided and stood quietly by the coffin with a look of blank uneasiness and perplexity. After the Epistle he suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the Epistle had not been read properly but did not explain what he meant. During the prayer, “Like the Cherubim,” he joined in the singing but did not go on to the end. Falling on his knees, he pressed his forehead to the stone floor and lay so for a long while.

At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed. The distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul. He seemed suddenly to strink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at first to smother, but at last sobbed aloud.…Gradually he seemed to sink into brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to the grave. It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church, Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it. After the customary rites the grave-diggers lowered the coffin. Snegiryov with his flowers in his hands bent down so low over the open grave that the boys caught hold of his coat in alarm and pulled him back. He did not seem to understand fully what was happening. When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly. Then he was reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited, snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the morsels on the grave.

“Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!” he muttered anxiously.

One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some one to hold for a time. But he would not do this and seemed indeed suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from him altogether. And after looking at the grave and, as it were, satisfying himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and made his way homewards. But his steps became more and more hurried, he almost ran. The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.

“The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma! I was unkind to mamma,” he began exclaiming suddenly. [Because he had refused to let her, a degenerated woman, have any when she asked for them from the hands of her dead son.]

Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold. But he flung the hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, “I won’t have the hat, I won’t have the hat.” Smurov picked it up and carried it after him. All the boys were crying, and Kolya and the boy who discovered about Troy most of all. Though Smurov, with the captain’s hat in his hand, was crying bitterly too, he managed, as he ran, to snatch up a piece of red brick that lay on the snow of the path, to fling it at the flock of sparrows that was flying by. He missed them, of course, and went on crying as he ran. Half way, Snegiryov suddenly stopped, stood still for half a minute, as though struck by something, and suddenly turning back to the church, ran towards the deserted grave. But the boys instantly overtook him and caught hold of him on all sides. Then he fell helpless on the snow as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing, he began crying out, “Illusha, old man, dear old man!” Alyosha and Kolya tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.

“Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude,” muttered Kolya.

“You’ll spoil the flowers,” said Alyosha, “and mamma is expecting them, she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before, Illusha’s little bed is still there…”

“Yes, yes, mamma!” Snegiryov suddenly recollected, “they’ll take away the bed, they’ll take it away,” he added as though alarmed that they really would. He jumped up and ran homewards again. But it was not far off and they all arrived together. Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called to his wife with whome he had so cruelly quarrelled just before:

“Mamma, poor crippled darling, Illusha has sent you these flowers,” he cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen and broken while he was struggling in the snow. But at that instant he saw in the corner, by the little bed, Illusha’s little boots, which the landlady had put tidily side by side. Seeing the old, patched, rusty-looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell on his knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began kissing it greedily, crying,“Illusha, old man, dear old man, where are your little feet?”

“Where have you taken him away? Where have you taken him?” the lunatic cried in a heartrending voice. Nina, too, broke into sobs. Kolya ran out of the room, the boys followed him. At last Alyosha too went out.

“Let them weep,” he said to Kolya, “it’s no use trying to comfort them just now. Let us wait a minute and then go back.”

“No, it’s no use, it’s awful,” Kolya assented. “Do you know, Karamazov,” he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, “I feel dreadfully sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I’d give anything in the world to do it.”

“Ah, so would I,” said Alyosha.

“What do you think, Karamazov, had we better come back here tonight? He’ll be drunk, you know.”

“Perhaps he will. Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina. If we all come together we shall remind them of everything again,” Alyosha suggested.

“The landlady is laying the table for them now—there’ll be a funeral dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it, Karamazov?”

“Of course,” said Alyosha.

“It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such sorrow and then pancakes after it, it all seems so unnatural in our religion.”

“They are going to have salmon, too,” [Kartashov] the boy who had discovered about Troy observed in a loud voice.

“I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn’t care to know wether you exist or not!” Jolya snapped out irritably. The boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.

Meantime they were strolling slowly along the path and suddenly Smurov exclaimed:

“There’s Illusha’s stone, under which they wanted to bury him.”

They all stood still by the big stone. Alyosha looked and the whole picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Illusha weeping and hugging his father, had cried, “Father, father, how he insulted you,” rose at once before his imagination. A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul. With a serious and earnest expression he looked frm one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of Illusha’s school-fellows, and suddenly said to them:

“Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place.”

The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes upon him.

“Boys, we shall soon part. I shall be for some time with my two brothers, of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death’s door. But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall part. Let us make a compact, here at Illusha’s stone that we will never forget Illusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy, a kind-hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father’s honour and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain honour or fall into great misfortune—still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little doves—let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces. My dear children, perhaps you won’t understand what I am saying to you, because I often speak very unintelligibly, but you’ll remember it all the same and will agree with my words sometime. You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men’s tears and at those who say as Kolya did just now, ‘I want to suffer for all men,’ and may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we become—which God forbit—yet, when we recall how we buried Illusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all together, at this stone, the cruellest and mostking of us—if we do become so—will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!’ Let him laugh at himself, that’s no matter, a man often laughs at what’s good and kind. That’s only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you, boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, ‘No, I do wrong to laugh, for that’s not a thing to laugh at.’”

.…“I say this in case we become bad,” Alyosha went on, “but there’s no reason why we should become bad, is there, boys? Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind dear little eyes. Boys, my dear boys, let us all be generous like Illusha, clever, brave and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two! You are all dear to me, boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives? Who, if not Illusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!”

Epilogue, Section 2

The Man With the Knives

Jupp held the knife by the tip of the blade, letting it joggle idly up and down; it was a long, tapering bread knife, obviously razor-sharp. With a sudden flick of the wrist he tossed the knife into the air. Up it went, whirring like a propeller; the shining blade glittered like a golden fish in a sheaf of lingering sunbeams, struck the ceiling, lost its spin, and plunged down straight at Jupp’s head. In a flash Jupp had placed a wooden block on his head; the knife scored into the wood and remained embedded there, gently swaying. Jupp removed the block from his head, withdrew the knife, and flung it with a gesture of annoyance at the door, where it stuck, quivering, in the frame until it gradually stopped vibrating and fell to the floor….

“It makes me sick,” said Jupp quietly. “I’ve been working on the logical assumption that people who’ve paid for their tickets really want to see a show where life and limb are at stake—like at the Roman circuses—they want to be convinced of at least the possibility of bloodshed, know what I mean?”

He picked up the knife and tossed it neatly against the top crossbar of the window, with such force that the panes rattled and threatened to fall out of the crumbling putty. This throw—confident and unerring—took me back to those hours of semidarkness in the past when he had thrown his pocketknife against the dugout post, from bottom to top and down again.

“I’ll do anything,” he went on, “to give the customers a thrill. I’ll even cut off my ears, only it’s hard to find anyone to stick them back on again. Here, I want to show you something.”

He opened the door for me, and we went out into the hallway. A few shreds of wallpaper still clung to the walls where the glue was too stubborn for them to be ripped off and used for lighting the stove. After passing through a moldering bathroom, we emerged onto a kind of terrace, its concrete floor cracked and moss-covered.
Jupp pointed upward.

“The higher the knife goes, of course, the greater the effect. But I need some resistance up there for the thing to strike against and lose momentum so that it can come hurtling down straight at my useless skull. Look!” He pointed up to where the iron girders of a ruined balcony stuck out into the air.

“This is where I used to practice. For a whole year. Watch!” He sent the knife soaring upward. It rose with marvelous symmetry and evenness, seeming to climb as smoothly and effortlessly as a bird; then it struck one of the girders, shot down with breathtaking speed, and crashed into the wooden block. The impact itself must have been terrific. Jupp didn’t bat an eyelid. The knife had buried itself a couple of inches in the wood.

“But that’s fantastic!” I cried. “It’s absolutely sensational, they’ll have to like it—what an act!” Jupp nonchalantly withdrew the knife from the wood, grasped it by the handle, and made a thrust in the air.

“Oh, they like it all right. They pay me twelve marks a night, and between the main acts they let me play around a bit with the knife. But the act’s not elaborate enough. A man, a knife, a block of wood, don’t you see? I ought to have a half-naked girl so I can send the knife spinning a hair’s breadth past her nose. That’d make the crowd go wild. But try and find that kind of a girl!”

He went ahead as we returned to his room. He placed the knife carefully on the table, the wooden block beside it, and rubbed his hands. We sat down on the crate beside the stove and were silent. Taking some bread out of my pocket, I said, “Be my guest.”

“Thanks, I will, but let me make some coffee. Then you can come along and watch my performance.”

He put some more wood in the stove and set the pot over the opening. “It’s infuriating,” he said. “Maybe I look too serious, a bit like a sergeant still, eh?”

“Nonsense, you never were a sergeant. D’you smile when they clap?”

“Of course—and bow too.”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t smile in a cemetery.”

“That’s a great mistake: a cemetery’s the very place to smile.”

“I don’t get it.”   “Because they aren’t dead. They’re none of them dead, see?”

“I see, all right, but I don’t believe it.”

“There’s still  a bit of the lieutenant about you after all. Well, in that case it just takes longer, of course. The point is, I’m only too glad if they enjoy it. They’re burned out inside; I give them a bit of a thrill and get paid for it. Perhaps one of them, just one, will go home and not forget me. ‘That man with the knife, for Christ’s sake,’ maybe that’s what he’ll say because they’re all scared, all the time. They trail their fear behind them like a heavy shadow, and it makes me happy if they can forget abut it and laugh a little. Isn’t that reason enough to smile?”

I said nothing, my eyes on the water, waiting for it to boil. Jupp poured the boiling water onto the coffee in the brown enamel pot, and we took turns drinking from the pot and shared my bread. Outside, the mild dusk began to fall, flowing into the room like soft gray milk.

“What are you doing these days, by the way?” asked Jupp.

“Nothing…just getting by.”

“A hard way to make a living.”

“Right—for this loaf of bread I had to collect a hundred bricks and clean them. Casual labor.”

“Hm…Want to see another of my tricks?”

In response to my nod he stood up, switched on the light, and went over to the wall, where he pushed aside a kind of rug, disclosing the rough outline of a man drawn in charcoal on the reddish color-wash: a strange lump protruded from what was supposed to be the head, probably signifying a hat. On closer inspection I saw that the man had been drawn on a skillfully camouflaged door. I watched expectantly as Jupp proceeded to pull out a handsome little brown leather suitcase from under the miserable affair that served as his bed and put it on the table. Before opening it, he came over and placed four cigarette butts in front of me. “Roll those into two thin ones,” he said.

I moved my seat so that I could watch him as well as get a bit more of the gentle warmth from the stove. While I was carefully pulling the butts apart on the bread paper spread over my knees, Jupp had snapped open the lock of the suitcase and pulled out an odd-looking object: one of those flannel bags consisting of a series of pockets in which our mothers used to keep their table silver. He deftly untied the ribbon and let the bundle unroll across the table to reveal a dozen wood-handled knives, the kind that, in the days when our mothers danced the waltz, were known as “hunting cutlery.”   I divided the tobacco shreds scrupulously in half onto the two cigarette papers and rolled them. “Here,” I said.

“Here,” Jupp said too, and “Thanks,” bringing over the flannel bag for me to look at.

“This is all I managed to salvage from my parent’s belongings. Almost everything was burned or lost in the rubble, and the rest stolen. When I got back from POW camp I was really on my beam ends, didn’t own a thing in the world—until one day a dignified old lady, a friend of my mother’s, tracked me down and brought along this nice suitcase. A few days before my mother was killed in an air raid she had left it with the old lady to be looked after, and it had survived. Funny, isn’t it? But of course we know that when people panic they try to save the strangest things. Never the essential ones. So then at least I was the owner of the contents of this suitcase: the brown enamel pot, twelve forks, twelve knifes and twelve spoons, and the long bread knife. I sold the spoons and forks, living off the proceeds for a year, and practiced with the knifes, thirteen of them. Watch….”

I passed him the spill I had used to light my cigarette. Jupp stuck his cigarette to his lower lip, fastened the ribbon of the flannel bag to a button on the shoulder of his jacket, and let the flannel unroll along his arm like some exotic panoply of war. Then with incredible speed he whisked the knives out of their pockets, and before I could follow his movements he had thrown all twelve like lightning against the dim human outline, which reminded me of those sinister, shambling figures that came lurching at us toward the end of the war from every billboard, every corner, harbingers of defeat and destruction. Two knives were sticking out of the man’s hat, two over each shoulder, and the others, three a side, along the dangling arms….

“Fantastic!” I cried. “Fantastic! But you’ve got your act right there, with a bit of dramatizing.”

“All I need is a man, better still a girl. But I know I’ll never find anyone,” he said with a sigh, plucking the knives out of the door and slipping them carefully back into their pockets. “The girls are too scared and the men want too much money. Can’t blame them, of course; it’s a risky business.”

Once again he flung the knives back at the door in such a way as to split the entire black figure accurately down the middle with dazzling symmetry. The thirteenth knife, the big one, stuck like a deadly arrow just where the man’s heart should have been.
Jupp took a final puff of the thin, tobacco-filled roll of paper and threw the scant remains behind the stove.

“Let’s go,” he said, “it’s time we were off.” He stuck his head out the window, muttered something about “damned rain,” and added: “It’s a few minutes to eight, I’m on at eight-thirty.”   While he was packing the knives away in the suitcase I stood with my face by the open window. Decaying villas seemed to be whimpering softly in the rain, and from behind a wall of swaying poplars came the screech of the streetcar. But nowhere could I see a clock.

“How d’you know what time it is?”

“Instinct—that’s part of my training.”

I gaped at him. First he helped me on with my coat and then put on his windbreaker. My shoulder is slightly paralyzed and I can’t move my arms beyond a certain radius, just far enough to clean bricks. We put on our caps and went out into the dingy corridor, and I was glad to hear at least some voices in the house, laughter, and a subdued murmuring.

“It’s like this,” said Jupp as we went down the stairs. “What I’ve tried to do is trace certain cosmic laws. Watch.” He put the suitcase down on a stair and spread his arms, an Icarus poised for flight in the way the ancient Greeks used to show him. His matter-of-fact expression assumed a strangely cool and dreamlike quality, something between obsession and detachment, something magical, that I found quite spine-chilling. “Like this,” he said softly. “I simply reach out into the atmosphere, I feel my hands getting longer and longer, reaching out into a dimension governed by different laws, snatch them away, part thief, part lover, and carry them off.” He clenched his fists, drawing them close to his body. “Let’s go,” he said, and his expression was its usual matter-of-fact self. I followed him in a daze…

Outside, a chill rain was falling softly and steadily. We turned up our collars and withdrew shivering into ourselves. The mist of twilight was surging through the streets, already tinged with the bluish darkness of night. In several basements among the bombed-out villas a meager light was burning under the towering black weight of a great ruin. The street gradually became a muddy path where to left and right, in the opaque twilight, shacks loomed up in the scrawny gardens like junks afloat in a shallow backwater. We crossed the streetcar tracks, plunged into the maze of narrow streets on the city’s outskirts, where among piles of rubble and garbage a few houses still stand intact in the dirt, until we emerged suddenly into a busy street. The tide of the crowds carried us along for a bit, until we turned a corner into a dark side street where a garish illuminated sign saying “The Seven Mills” was reflected in the glistening asphalt.

The foyer of the vaudeville theater was empty. The performance had already begun, and the buzzing of the audience penetrated the shabby red drapes. With a laugh Jupp pointed to a photograph in a display case, where he was shown in cowboy costume between two coyly smiling dancers whose breasts were hung with sparkling tinsel. Beneath was the caption: “The Man with the Knives.”
“Come on,” said Jupp, and before I grasped what was happening I found myself being dragged through a half-hidden door. We climbed a poorly lit staircase, narrow and winding, the smell of sweat and greasepaint indicating the nearness of the stage. Jupp was ahead—suddenly he halted in a turn of the stairs, put down the suitcase, and, gripping me by the shoulders, asked in a hushed voice, “Are you game?”

I had been expecting this question for so long that when it came its suddenness startled me. I must have looked nonplussed, for after a pause he said, “Well?”

I still hesitated, and suddenly we heard a great roar of laughter that seemed to come pouring out of the narrow passage and engulf us like a tidal wave; it was so overwhelming that I jumped and involuntarily shuddered.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“So am I. Don’t you trust me?”

“Sure I do…but…let’s go,” I said hoarsely, pushing past him and adding, with the courage born of despair, “I’ve nothing to lose.”

We emerged onto a narrow corridor with a number of rough plywood cubicles right and left. A few oddly garbed figures were scurrying about, and through an opening in the flimsy wings I could see a clown on the stage, his enormous mouth wide open; once again the roar of the crowd’s laughter engulfed us, but Jupp pulled me through a door and shut it behind us. I looked around. The cubicle was tiny, practically bare. On the wall was a mirror, Jupp’s cowboy costume hung on the single nail, and on a rickety chair lay an old deck of cards. Jupp moved with nervous haste; he took my wet coat from me, flung the cowboy suit onto the chair, hung up my coat, then his windbreaker. Over the top of the partition I could see an electric clock on a fake red Doric column, showing twenty-five after eight.

“Five minutes,” muttered Jupp, slipping into his costume. “Shall we rehearse it?”

Just then someone knocked on the cubicle door and called, “You’re on!”

Jupp buttoned up his shirt and stuck a ten-gallon hat on his head. With a forced laugh I cried, “D’you expect a condemned man to rehearse his own hanging?”   Jupp snatched up the suitcase and dragged me through the door. Outside stood a bald-headed man watching the clown going through his final motions on the stage. Jupp whispered something to the man that I didn’t catch, the man glanced up with a start, looked at me, looked at Jupp, and shook his head vehemently. And again Jupp whispered something to him.

I couldn’t have cared less. Let them impale me alive. I had a crippled shoulder, I had just finished a thin cigarette, tomorrow I would get three-quarters of a loaf for seventy-five bricks. But tomorrow….The applause almost blew down the wings. The clown, his face tired and contorted, staggered toward us through the opening in the wings, stood there for a few seconds looking morose, and then went back onto the stage, where he smiled graciously and bowed. The orchestra played a fanfare. Jupp was still whispering to the bald-headed man. Three times the clown came back into the wings and three times he went out onto the stage and bowed, smiling.

Then the orchestra struck up a march and, suitcase in hand, Jupp strode smartly out onto the stage. His appearance was greeted with subdued clapping. Weary-eyed I watched Jupp fasten the playing cards onto nails that were already in place and then impale each card with a knife, one by one, precisely in the center. The applause became more animated, but not enthusiastic. Then, to a muffled roll of drums, he performed his trick with the bread knife and the block of wood, and underneath all my indifference I was aware that the act really was a bit thin. Across from me, on the other side of the stage, a few scantily dressed girls stood watching….And suddenly the bald-headed man seized me by the shoulder, dragged me onto the stage, greeted Jupp with a grandiose sweep of the arm and, in the spurious voice of a policeman, said, “Good evening, Herr Borgalevsky.”

“Good evening, Herr Erdmenger,” replied Jupp, likewise in ceremonious tones.

“I’ve brought you a horsethief, a proper scoundrel, Herr Borgalevsky, for you to tickle a bit with your shiny knives before we hang him…a real scoundrel…” I found his voice totally ridiculous, pathetically artificial, like paper flowers or the cheapest kind of greasepaint. I glanced at the audience, and fro that moment on, faced by that glimmering, slavering, hydra-headed monster crouching there in the dark ready to spring, I simply switched off.

I didn’t give a damn, I was dazzled by the glare of the spotlight, and in my threadbare suit and shabby shoes I probably made a pretty convincing horsethief.

“Oh, leave him here with me, Herr Erdmenger. I know how to deal with him.”

“Splendid, let him have it, and don’t spare the knives.”

Jupp took hold of me by the collar while the grinning Erdmenger swaggered off the stage. Someone threw a rope onto the stage, and Jupp proceeded to tie me by the feet to a cardboard column that had a fake door, painted blue, propped up behind it. I was aware of something like an ecstasy of insensibility. To my right I heard the eerie stirring of the tense audience, and I realized Jupp had been right in speaking of its bloodlust. Its thirst quivered on the sickly, stale air, and the orchestra, with its facile drum roll, its muffled lasciviousness, heightened the effect of grisly tragi-comedy in which real blood would flow, stage blood that had been paid for….I stared straight ahead, letting my body sag, the rope being so firmly tied that it held me upright. The drum roll became softer and softer as Jupp calmly pulled his knives out of the playing cards and slipped them back into their pockets, from time to time casting melodramatic glances my way as if to size me up. Then, having packed away all his knives, he turned to the audience and in the same odiously stagy voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am now about to outline this young man with knives, but I wish to demonstrate to you that I do not throw blunt knives.” He produced a piece of string, and with perfect sangfroid removed one knife after another fro its pocket, touched the string with each, cutting it into twelve pieces, and then replaced the knives one by one in their pockets.

While all this was going on I looked far beyond him, far beyond the wings, far beyond the half-naked girls, into another life, it seemed….

The tension in the audience was electrifying. Jupp came over to me, pretended to adjust the rope, and said softly into my ear, “Don’t move a muscle, and trust me….”

This added delay nearly broke the tension, it was threatening to peter out, but he suddenly stretched out his arms, letting his hands flutter like hovering birds, and his face assumed that look of magical concentration that I had marveled at on the stairs. He appeared to be casting a spell over the audience too with this sorcerer’s pose. I seemed to hear a strange, unearthly groan and realized that this was a warning signal for me.

Withdrawing my gaze from limitless horizons, I looked at Jupp, now standing opposite me so that our eyes were on a level; he raised his hand, moving it slowly toward a pocket, and again I realized that this was a signal for me. I stood completely still and closed my eyes….

It was a glorious feeling, lasting maybe two seconds, I’m not sure.

Listening to the swish of the knives and the short sharp hiss of air as they plunged into the fake blue door, I felt as if I were walking along a very narrow plank over a bottomless abyss. I walked with perfect confidence, yet felt all the thrill of danger. I was afraid, yet absolutely certain that I would not fall; I was not counting, yet I opened my eyes at the very moment when the last knife pierced the door beside my right hand….

A storm of applause jerked me bolt upright. I opened my eyes properly to find myself looking into Jupp’s white face: he had rushed over to me and was untying the rope with trembling hands. Then he pulled me into the center of the stage, right up to the very edge. He bowed, and I bowed; as the applause swelled he pointed to me and I to him; then he smiled at me, I smiled at him, and we both bowed smiling to the audience.

Back in the cubicle, not a word was said. Jupp threw the perforated playing cards onto the chair, took my coat off the nail and helped me on with it. Then he hung his cowboy costume back on the nail, pulled on his windbreaker, and we put on our caps. As I opened the door the little bald-headed man rushed up to us shouting, “I’m raising you to forty marks!” He handed Jupp some cash. I realized then that Jupp was my boss, and I smiled; he looked at me too and smiled.

Jupp took my arm, and side by side we walked down the narrow, poorly lit stairs that smelled of stale greasepaint. When we reached the foyer Jupp said with a laugh, “Now let’s go and buy some cigarettes and bread….”

But it was not till an hour later that I realized I now had a proper profession, a profession where all I needed to do was stand still and dream a little. For twelve or twenty seconds. I was the man who has knives thrown at him.…

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either — must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl — one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers — or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.

“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”

“Not really.”

“Your favorite type, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her — the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Strange.”

“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”

“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”

She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and — what I’d really like to do — explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”

Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.

“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”

No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”

No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.

Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves — just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fourteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.