The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino Read Free Book Online

was the point of it? He wishes this, he wishes that, he wishes his old bar hangout was still open, Christ oh Christ what doesn’t he wish? He picks up the book and closes it, places it at the side of his desk, the book, this book by a friend of his, this book that has made his gorge rise, and he smiles at the worn-velvet cliché. “My gawje has rizzed,” he says to the book. This is a book of some two hundred and fifty poems, by a friend of his, not a close friend but a friend nonetheless. And yet the poems have sickened him. He is on the edge of feeling shame: doesn’t he like poetry? Did he ever like it? Is everything he’s ever said or thought about it a lie, accompanied by a pose and a fake biography, pushed this way a little, turned that way a little more, and, overall, a shabby clutch of faded aesthetics. Maybe. Perhaps. It’s too late to care.
    More to the point, really, is the true cause of the nausea not the poems themselves but that they were written by his friend? That’s what he should face: does he despise him? His friend is a great success in the small, almost always weaselly world of poetry, its sweaty ambitions, its minuscule rewards, its grim teaching appointments, its pathetic prizes, its insincere enthusiasms. His friend’s career grew and blossomed by means of—of what? It is this carefully built career that the man won’t look at, won’t face. He picks up the book and riffles the pages. Oh for Christ’s sake, think it, say it. By means of a determined transformation. His friend, an arrogant, selfish, cruel, egocentric yet charming man of sociopathic bent, to put the very best face on it, changed, oh yes, transformed his public presence into one of a subtly nuanced and delicate humility, transformed his entire life and world into the very picture of the sensitive artist, forever grateful and decently but not egregiously or embarrassingly humble before the attentions paid him, oh yes indeed. Thanks, thanks, thanks, he can hear him, thanks, so wonderful to be here, how kind of you all.
    He sits in glum silence, thinking, knowing that the whole truth that he has admitted, if it is truth, is too tawdry to be sad, too banal to be bitter. Why, though, has it taken him so long to realize, to admit that his friend, his caring, concerned friend, warmly open to the earth and all the men and women on its roiling and corrupted surface, is not only a relentlessly self-promoting careerist, but worse, a third-rate poet? The fault is his, but he will not, he will never examine it.

— XXXIV —
    T hey had decided to go on what Basil called an “excursion” into the mountains, such as they imagined them, and so quickly set off. Soon they reached a little town, most of which seemed to be—was, in fact—an old-fashioned amusement park, replete with all manner of rides, many of which, like the Tunnel of Love and the Ferris Wheel, struck the travelers as quaint, and perhaps pointless. They were, however, pleased, although Louise was embarrassed when a jet of air, suddenly released from a hole in the floor over which she was standing unawares, blew her skirt up around her waist. Her blushes pleased a leering clown who was, apparently, “in charge” of the air jet. The mountains seemed to be just outside the town, although it became apparent that the town was deep within the mountains. “Perhaps this is the excursion,” Alex said.
    Later, after a lunch of hot dogs and cotton candy, they agreed to separate so as to “explore” the amusement park and environs, and to meet later in the day by a ride called the Big Lasso, and Basil, Harry, and Anna left. Alex looked around for Louise but she had gone somewhere without so much as a word. At the hour appointed for their rendezvous, Alex obediently stood before the Big Lasso, but nobody showed up, so he spend much of the afternoon watching ferries sail to and from Platinum Carde Island, out in the middle of a startlingly turquoise-colored artificial lake. He felt