The Monkey Link by Andrei Bitov Page A

the ghastly proximity of a saucepan, a rose, and a slug in the sink (my landlady’s charming little courtyard in the Crimea, where I am writing this page   …   ) will be suffused with hellish meaning. Nor have the birds flown from this narrative. In Bosch we are sure to meet both bird and fish; the most horrible thing is that the expression he gives the bird’s eye is not frightening, but always so curious and good-natured.
    Almost the main feature of Bosch’s hell is a complete inventory of the household objects and tradesmen’s tools of his time. They look so real, they must have been reproduced exactly. The unclean are building their tower with all the devices, and according to all the rules, of construction technology. The sinners are being heated in saucepans and skillets that must have been used by every housewife. Simply, these everyday objects and implements are many, all at once, in one glance. What scares us in Bosch’s hell is its similarity to life. The Promised Hell   …
    Our vision of paradise is so meager and unattractive as to bring on the puckery taste of boredom: tabernacles   …Having been on the Spit, and having encountered nothing else like it in my life, I think I can envision paradise with greater certainty. That world, too, is indistinguishable from ours, nothing we haven’t seen has been invented there, but much of what we’ve seen has been eliminated. That world is innocent and free, it is passionless, there is neither pain nor hope in it: it has been divested of our relationship to it: it exists, but in our absence, seemingly even in its own absence. Existence in that world is so astonishingly unburdened because we’re not there, and when we are, we’re no longer ourselves, as it were.
    I don’t know why the thought of death comes so easily in this paradise. Perhaps because paradise itself, after all, comes after death. Because death has already happened   …
    From that day on, and every day, I walked away from my blocked typewriter and, just over the threshold, found myself in a place where I had nothing to write and no reason to write, because to see was enough. To see, and to thank fate for giving me eyes and for what my eyes had been given. I took several steps across the sand toward the sea, knowing that beyond the next small dune with its tousled hairdo of sedge I would see the water. This sense of expectation, although satisfied every time, was always just as keen: I walked halfway around the dune, a final, very strong gust of wind in the little gully seemed to hold me back, and suddenly I was standing on the shore and realizing, again, that the whole time, both up in the cabin with my typewriter and while I was walking, the sea had been roaring, and the roar had lured me out to see what was roaring: it was the sea roaring. I took exaggerated deep breaths and inevitably gazed into the distance.
    “Would that I could always gaze like this   …   ” That banal phrase conveys my preoccupation quite accurately: after the phrase came a sigh, and I was no longer gazing at the sea. I was occupied with the question: What sets the limit on enjoyment if there are no obstacles in its path? I didn’t have to hurry anywhere, there was nobody to hurry me. For less than half an hour, less than five minutes—I don’t think it was even a minute, more like half a minute, with the last seconds strained and artificial—I had squinted into the distance. Then I uttered that mental sigh, and all was over   …
    When we turned back, I asked the doctor what he thought about this.
    “Forgive me for changing the subject   …But we’ve walked and walked along the shore, completely absorbed in conversation, we’re absorbed in it even now, and yet for the last five minutes I’ve been wondering when we’d turn back. We’re not hungry or tired, and to all appearances we’re not bored or in a hurry; the shore is practically identical all the way, the terrain won’t change before