Snow White by Donald Barthelme Read Free Book Online

blague . But of course we may be different, perhaps you do care about it. It’s not unheard
     of. But my main point is that you should bear in mind multiplicity, and forget about
     uniqueness. The earth is broad, and flat, and deep, and high. And remember what Freud
     said.”

THE VALUE THE MIND SETS ON EROTIC NEEDS INSTANTLY SINKS AS SOON AS SATISFACTION BECOMES
     READILY AVAILABLE. SOME OBSTACLE IS NECESSARY TO SWELL THE TIDE OF THE LIBIDO TO ITS
     HEIGHT, AND AT ALL PERIODS OF HISTORY, WHENEVER NATURAL BARRIERS HAVE NOT SUFFICED,
     MEN HAVE ERECTED CONVENTIONAL ONES.

“ Which prince? ” Snow White wondered brushing her teeth. “Which prince will come? Will it be Prince
     Andrey? Prince Igor? Prince Alf? Prince Alphonso? Prince Malcolm? Prince Donalbain?
     Prince Fernando? Prince Siegfried? Prince Philip? Prince Albert? Prince Paul? Prince
     Akihito? Prince Rainier? Prince Porus? Prince Myshkin? Prince Rupert? Prince Pericles?
     Prince Karl? Prince Clarence? Prince George? Prince Hal? Prince John? Prince Mamillius?
     Prince Florizel? Prince Kropotkin? Prince Humphrey? Prince Charlie? Prince Matchabelli?
     Prince Escalus? Prince Valiant? Prince Fortinbras?” Then Snow White pulled herself
     together. “Well it is terrific to be anticipating a prince—to be waiting and knowing
     that what you are waiting for is a prince, packed with grace—but it is still waiting,
     and waiting as a mode of existence is, as Brack has noted, a darksome mode. I would
     rather be doing a hundred other things. But slash me if I will let it, this waiting,
     bring down my lofty feelings of anticipation from the bedroom ceiling where they dance
     overhead like so many French letters filled with lifting gas. I wonder if he will
     have the Hapsburg Lip?”
    PAUL stood before a fence posing. He was on his way to the monastery. But first he
     was posing in front of a fence. The fence was covered with birds. Their problem, in
     many ways a paradigm of our own, was “to fly.” “The engaging and wholly charming way
     I stand in front of this fence here,” Paul said to himself, “will soon persuade someone
     to discover me. Then I will not have to go to the monastery. Then I can be on television
     or something, instead of going to the monastery. Yet there is no denying it, something
     is pulling me toward that monastery located in a remote part of Western Nevada.” Lanky,
     generous-hearted Paul! “If I had been born well prior to 1900, I could have ridden
     with Pershing against Pancho Villa. Alternatively, I could have ridden with Villa
     against the landowners and corrupt government officials of the time. In either case,
     I would have had a horse. How little opportunity there is for young men to have personally
     owned horses in the bottom half of the twentieth century! A wonder that we U.S. youth
     can still fork a saddle at all. . .  Of course there are those ‘horses’ under the
     hoods of Buicks and Pontiacs, the kind so many of my countrymen favor. But those ‘horses’
     are not for me. They take the tan out of my cheeks and the lank out of my arms and
     legs. Tom Lea or Pete Hurd will never paint me standing by thisfence if I am sitting inside an Eldorado, Starfire, Riviera or Mustang, no matter
     how attractively the metal has been bent.”
    SNOW WHITE let down her hair black as ebony from the window. It was Monday. The hair
     flew out of the window. “I could fly a kite with this hair it is so long. The wind
     would carry the kite up into the blue, and there would be the red of the kite against
     the blue of the blue, together with my hair black as ebony, floating there. That seems
     desirable. This motif, the long hair streaming from the high window, is a very ancient
     one I believe, found in many cultures, in various forms. Now I recapitulate it, for
     the astonishment of the vulgar and the refreshment of my venereal life.”
    THE President looked out of his window. He was not very happy. “I worry about Bill,