In [i]Splendor[/i], David Zindell wrote:“Such a splendor there is in death,” I said. “Such a grace in accepting—”
“But you’re not accepting anything! You’re throwing your goddamned life away!”
“I’m so tired.”
“So what?”
“I just want things to stop hurting so bad.”
“But pain is the awareness of life, David. You wrote that in
The Broken God.”
“I wrote a lot of things.”
“Pain is the
price of life. Don’t you remember how Danlo says ‘yes’ to the pain of the entire universe?”
I looked up into the deeps of the canyon, where a hawk glided through the air and perhaps scanned the snow for a squirrel or a rabbit to tear apart. I thought I knew all that I ever wanted to know about life.
“I’m not Danlo, and this nightmare I can’t wake up from is no book.”
“Who are you then—really?”
I listened to the water burbling through the iced tube of the stream and to the blood pounding in my ears. I listened to the wind.
“I’m a very tired man who just wants to go to sleep.”
“Jilly needs you.”
“Sometimes, when I drive home from Denver at night, I can hardly keep my eyes—”
“Justine needs you, too.”
“I just want to see my mother again. To tell her that I—”
“Then open your eyes now, David. Open your heart. Tell it to the earth.”
“No,” I whispered, “I just want to die. It’s a good day to die.”
I took a step closer to the Bastille’s wall. I reached out toward a lip of sandstone in order to test my fingers’ strength. The moment I touched the cold rock, it seemed as if I could feel the agony of all the climbers who had fallen to their deaths in this place. Then, like Billy Pilgrim in
Slaughterhouse Five, I seemed to come unstuck in time. I began reliving the moments of my life. I was boy lying very still in my bed as I tried not to disturb the sleep of my new puppy, Bonnie Belle the Beagle, curled up beside me. I climbed the young oak tree again in Ann Arbor Woods, and again I clung to its branches as my friends chopped the tree out from under me. I came unstuck again, and I moved on to the Jersey shore in August. I body–surfed a big wave which broke over me and ground me down into the shards of shells lining the ocean’s hard–packed sand. I gasped for air, drinking in a desperate breath, then gasped again in delight as I found myself back at my little yellow hippie house making love with Melody on the night we conceived Jillian. I gasped in astonishment to see the blood–streaked Justine shooting headfirst out into the world. Then, caught between another big rock and a great abyss, I struggled to breathe as the weight of Gordon dangling below me pulled tight the rope that cut me in two. I gasped at the terrible pain of life as I hung suspended in space.
“This is the best day of my life,” Gordon said for the ten thousandth time.
Then I was a boy again, covered with splotches of itchy red skin from having brushed up against poison ivy out in the woods. My whole body seemed on fire. My mother was young again, and pretty, and she swabbed my back with cool, pink calamine lotion.
“Do you know how much it hurt,” she asked, “for me to push
you out into the world? Do you know how many drugs I had to take?”
The lotion did not really help stop the hideous itching. The tenderness of my mother’s hand, however, distracted me from it and for a few moments made things okay.
“Everything hurt you,” I said to her. “That’s why you murdered yourself, isn’t it?”
My throat tightened with a hard knot of pain at the long, slow, self–murder that my mother’s life had been.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I would have done it sooner, but you were my bright, bright light.”
“I could never save you!”
“No, you couldn’t. But you can save me now by saving yourself.”
I looked into her sad, blue eyes, and then I had to shut mine against the burning pain. I couldn’t bear to watch yet again as the nuclear fireball scorched her tender pink skin into black char. I didn’t want to stand once more in the mortuary touching her cold face, which the undertaker’s art had twisted into someone I could barely recognize as my mother. Where does the light go when the light goes out?
“Daddy,” Justine said to me, “I’m going to have my poem published in
Highlights.”
The flowers are sunny
The whole world is spinning
And we’ll make
A nice pretty pudding.
Then I came unstuck in time again, and we sat around the table in the 14th St. Grill, with Melody, Justine, and Jillian eating pizza while I had roast turkey with gravy. It was a cold and frozen January night outside, but inside, with the fire of the wood–burning pizza oven warming our table, with all the good smells and the soft, golden light, it was the happiest and most perfect night of my life.
“Daddy,” Justine said, looking at her sister smearing her cheeks with a chocolate sundae, “Jillian makes the funniest faces. She’s always trying to make you laugh.”
Then she told me another poem she had written:
We love each other
Father and mother
Sister and brother
We all love each other.
“But you don’t have a brother,” I said to her.
“But I have the most wonderful sister in the world!”
“She
is pretty wonderful.”
“I have the most wonderful father, too.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling, “but every daughter thinks that about her father.”
“Maybe so, but somewhere in the world, one of those daughters has to be right.”
I smiled again, and I found myself sitting in a chair in a steamy auditorium watching both my daughters doing
grands jetés in yet another ballet recital. They seemed to fly through the air. I kept on watching as years leaped forward and my beautiful, good–natured, youngest daughter summoned all her warrior energy and then screamed as she jumped and kicked a board into splinters in order to get her black belt.
“Jilly needs you,” I heard Justine saying, somewhere inside me.
Once, in the wave pool at Water World, Jillian had needed me to be willing to die for her. Now she needed me to live.
“I need you, too.”
Both of them, I knew, needed me to break the long chain of despair that had cursed our family so that my daughters didn’t wind up like their grandmother.
Then I stood once more at the very bottom of the Bastille, with a cold wind whooshing down Eldorado Canyon, and I jammed my hand into a crack to keep from falling down. The hard rock cut at my knuckles. By the time I had climbed up 200 feet, I thought, both my hands would be bloody.
“Do you need me,” I said to Justine, “to be a deadbeat dad who can’t help you get through college? Who can’t even help you come up with the money to go to the dentist?”
“It’s only money,” she said.
“Do you want to watch me become bent and broken and old?”
“But I don’t care about that!”
“What
do you care about?”
“You know,” she said softly. “You know.”
I pressed my forehead to the Bastille’s cold sandstone because I didn’t want anyone to see my face just then. I could not open my eyes.
“It’s a good day to live,” I heard Old Lodge Skins say.
Then I started sobbing because I didn’t want to live, not another day, not another hour—hardly even the half hour or so that it would take me to climb halfway up the Bastille. I did not want to be trapped by life. I did not want to be poor and have to eat crappy food that would destroy my health, nor grow flabby and weak because I didn’t have the energy to work out. I did not want my eyes to lose their sparkle nor suffer my teeth to rot out. I felt tired of feeling ever more tired and clouded with hopelessness. Of growing smaller and smaller, drier and drier, like a shriveling orange peel, ever more blanched of color and deadly dull. How would I go on for years, dreaming my impossible dream of someday owning a house again where my children and grandchildren could come to open their Christmas presents? What would it be like to live without a bright, shining purpose? I couldn’t bear to be so broke and busy from working two or three menial jobs that I would never have the money to travel east again to put flowers on my mother’s grave. Or never to go for walks in the mountains, or to write another poem or a book, or to make love to a woman—or to stand by the ocean in marvel of the world for somehow bringing forth the marvel of me.
“Happy birthday,” my father said to me as he gave me a silver ID bracelet graven with the words:
Don’t Give Up.
I kept on sobbing and smearing tears against the sandstone, and I kept swallowing at the rock of pain in my throat. It hurt so bad that I thought I might be having a heart attack. If only things could have been so easy.
“All right,” I finally said. “All right.”
Like Galadriel in
The Lord of the Rings when her time of glory in Middle Earth had ended, I would accept my diminishment. Like Kane, I would say yes to the fierce, cruel, endless struggle to live in the world, even though that meant I would never shine like one of Galadin in creating a new one.
“All right, Justine,” I said, pulling my face back from the rock. “If that is what you really want.”
I would be just myself, whoever that was. And I would stop trying to force life to be what I wanted it to be, even as I stopped forcing myself. If I could not live for splendor, at least I could let myself really love.
“All right, Jillian.”
I unclenched my fist, working my hand out of the crack. I rubbed my chest, along my breastbone. It felt like something was ripping open inside me. “All right.”
I still couldn’t stop crying. I felt glad that the day remained very cold, with no one near and only a few climbers stuck to the big wall across the canyon.
“All right, Gabriel; all right, Mary; all right, Tina; all right, Susan. All right, Michael, Ari, Brian, and Jane.” I looked down at the flowing stream. “All right, Jamie; all right, Gordon. All right, Mom.”
I pointed off toward the sky to the west. Then I drew in a deep, frigid breath and said, “All right,—God.”
I suddenly felt strange. Something began moving inside me, like water flowing into too small a space. It swelled larger and larger with an unbearable pressure. Something seemed to be happening to me, something that I could not and did want to control.
I started walking up the canyon. I wanted to walk and walk, forever, into the west, where the snow–shagged mountains rose higher and higher and grew ever more beautiful and wild. I felt something waiting for me there. The setting sun colored the sky a kind of yellow that I had never seen before. A waiting yellow, a watching yellow, close enough to warm my face with its radiance, but still almost impossibly far away. I wanted to move closer to it. I felt it calling me, pulling at my eyes, drawing me on.
I crossed a wooden bridge over the frozen creek, then started hiking up a trail through the evergreen trees. My breath came hard and steamed out into the air. My chest hurt. I kept climbing up and up.
Then I moved out of the woods onto a sparkling prominence. A big rock topped it, like a jewel on a king’s crown. Folds of earth gleamed in ripples of light and dark spreading out across the world. A long band of parallel ridgeline below me caught the sun’s glister. Off to my right, down in a draw, the darkness seemed almost black. Everywhere around me, the snow shone a dazzling white, and the green of the fir trees stood out against the clear blue sky.
“Why?” I whispered to the wind. “Tell me why?”
To my right, I could see the world turning in the quick, slipping down of the sun. To my left, toward the mouth of the canyon—toward the Bastille—I gazed at a great rise covered with trees. Moment by moment, the patch of mountain that the sun illumed grew smaller and smaller, shrinking toward the reddening ridgeline. And the sky grew bluer and bluer: an almost impossible deep, deep blue that shimmered off into infinity.
“Why does the world have to be so beautiful?” It was all so beautiful it hurt my eyes, hurt my heart. “Why, why, why?”
The hawk I had seen earlier—or perhaps his mate—still cruised on the chill wind. Birds chittered in the woods below me. I caught a flash of blue as one of them exploded out of the trees just at the edge of my range of vision. Beneath my boots, little brown deer pellets studded the snow. I looked for the tracks of other animals, for the awakening of all my senses reminded me that I had entered lion country.
In back of me, on the big boulder, a mat of greenish–gray lichen covered much of its face. I could hardly believe that. Life, growing on cold, bare rock! Clinging to it so tightly that it would have been hard to chisel it off! In looking at the lichen more closely, I noticed that one tiny patch stood out, a bright lime green. “How?” I whispered. “Why? Why are you here, on this big rock, all alone? What are you doing glistening so prettily?”
“Because I am,” the little patch of life answered back. “I am what I am.”
So was I. I knew this with a tingling certainty that surged through me, from the frozen rime on my face down through my throat and my fluttering belly to my cold, cold feet. I felt the colors of the earth warming my eyes and the heartbeat of the whole world pounding along my blood inside me. I was involved with life! Everything I had ever thought, felt, and done was bound up with the life of the world! Every moment of myself interfused with all that had ever been or would ever be. I
mattered, as everything did. I couldn’t help but have a purpose. Back in the cities along the foothills I might have no place in society, but here among the hawks and the hares and the silent fir trees, I would always have a home.
“I belong here,” I whispered.
I looked out across the gleaming landscape toward the horizon. How could I call myself a loser when I had everything? I was still alive! I had lived a good life, as good as I could make it. I had loved and loved, and then loved some more, the best of women, the finest of friends, the most beautiful children in the world. How could I ever stop loving and loving and loving?
“All right,” I told myself, “it’s time.”
I felt the flutter in my belly move higher up through me like the sudden beating of birds’ wings. The pressure of it seemed to break me open. I couldn’t hold in all the joy, the wild joy, so impossibly, utterly wildly
wild. I wanted to fly, as I had in my dreams, to soar above my beautiful planet. I wanted to fly and fly and fly, higher and higher, and to vanish into the sky where it opened out into an ever–deepening blue.
“All right,” I said, “all right.”
I turned toward the sun. Like a ball of incandescence, it blazed only inches above the southwestern ridgeline of a nearby mountain. It grew ever brighter and more blinding as it fell toward the earth. Who could behold such an eye–burning glory? Who could embrace this vast, eternally exploding hydrogen bomb that gave life to our world? How could anyone ever be free from its terrible, beautiful burning?
“Only,” I thought, “by becoming fire.”
The whole world, then, seemed to catch on fire: the stark mountain faces, the pointed peaks above, the icy stream far below, all on fire. The trees in the forest flared with the most vivid green that I had ever seen, while tiny tongues of flame in every color from yellow to pink leaped along the miles and miles of wind–blown snow. The rocks ran red as if pouring out their own blazing purpose; so did the deadwood on the gleaming ground, and the frozen bushes, and even the hawk still limned against the brilliant sky. Everything in the world was on fire, and would always be on fire, and life most of all. Suddenly, in all the beauty around me, I didn’t feel afraid of life any more. I didn’t feel afraid of myself or
for myself.
Once—it seemed entire eons ago—out on the green, green grass of a baseball field on a summer day, time had nearly stopped and a little white sphere had hung nearly motionless in the sky. Now the whole world stopped completely. The sun blazed like an infinitely deep yellow–white sphere. I felt myself melting into its warm, sweet light. I couldn’t keep myself from melting, from letting go.
Letting go of what? Only myself. David Zindell, who had to be the great writer, the great father, the great everything and anything at all. I suddenly
wanted to let go of all that, to let go of my idea about myself, my safety in myself, all my bounds. I felt like a wide–eyed boy, trusting again. I felt myself relaxing inside, releasing my grip on something that flowed and shimmered inside me, all warm and good and perfectly free.
Then the sun flared into an expanding ball of fire. The explosion I had looked for all my life finally fell upon me in a great blast of light. Or I fell into it: I could not tell the difference. My parka, pants, and other clothes burned right off me in flameless flames. So did my skin and my accumulated years. I seemed to come apart in luminous layers, like rose petals spreading out, like a fireflower opening around its brilliant center. I burned and I burned, and the more I burned, the brighter I became. The colors! Yellow and blue, orange and dazzling crimson, the infinite points of silver and violet and living gold of which I was made. The song had it right all along: I really
was stardust—I really was golden.
Even more, I was starfire and glorre. I vanished into a pure and perfect splendor.
, що искаме превода да бъде достоен за оригинала (а Зиндел на моменти пише екстатично - вижте интервюто по-долу). Затова и не се задоволяваме с един преводач/един вариант, а ще се опитаме да изберем най-сполучливо пресъздаденото. В тая насока - ако някой иска да се включи, добре сте ни дошли. Веднага ще ви пратя сканираните до момента страници от оригиналите, заедно с glossary-то, което сме направили, за да набелязваме удачни хрумвания и да стандартизираме превода на имената в книгата. Принципът на работа е следният: хващате който пасаж искате, и работите върху нея. Когато решите, че сте готови, пращате преведеното на kalin-точка-nenov =@= gmail.com. Има и друг вариант: пращаме ви чернови на преводи с набелязани за редакция пасажи, вие ги променяте по своя преценка и ни ги връщате обратно.
Затова пък има отделно пилоти-математици, отделно кантори - с ударение на първата сричка, кАнтори... А на тия, дето си чешат езиците най-професионално, им се вика сказатели/fabulists.)
