Ape and Essence

Előszó

I
TALLIS
IT WAS THE day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.
'You've always been such a help,' Bob assured me, as he made ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.
But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew even better than I, he didn't really want to be helped. He liked being in a mess and, still more, he liked talking about his predicament. The mess and its verbal dramatization made it possible for him to see himself as all the Romantic Poets rolled into one—Beddoes committing suicide, Byron committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of Shelley. And seeing himself as all the Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his misery—the fact that he had none of their talents and very little of their sexual potency.
'We got to the point,' he said (so tragically that it occurred to me that he would have done better as an actor Vissza