Call me Ishmael. Okay?
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. I am an American, Chicago-born. My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. (I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff, and I lived on, flew on in the reflected sky.) ‘Course, whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. (She read stuff to me when I was a kid, like, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo,” and that shit.)
Meanwhile, in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish. He told me, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Why did he talk like that? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Things were so weird that as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Meanwhile, last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again. (For a long time I used to go to bed early.) In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.
I’m all, like, whoa, this is a dream. A screaming comes across the sky. Then there were a lot of girls and shit. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.) Meanwhile, Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”
I’m like, fine. Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. But what can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?
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Tim Samoff
