Bend Sinister

Чужак, спокойно следящий с абстрактного брега за течением местных печалей.

Широкий пустынный бездумный карниз: глазурь на залежавшемся в лавке пирожном.

Продолговатая лужа вставлена в грубый асфальт; как фантастический след ноги, до краев наполненный ртутью; как оставленная лопатой лунка, сквозь которую видно небо внизу. Окруженная, я замечаю, распяленными щупальцами черной влаги, к которой прилипло несколько бурых хмурых умерших листьев. Затонувших, стоит сказать, еще до того, как лужа ссохлась до ее настоящих размеров.

Well, that was all. The various parts of my comparative paradise – the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk – looked with perfect submission into my eyes. I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life has been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style.

The trouble with Krug, thought Krug, was that for long summer years and with enormous success he had delicately taken apart the systems of others ...

How many of us have begun building anew – or thought they were building anew! Then they surveyed their construction. And lo: Heraclitus the Weeping Willow was shimmering by the door and Parmenides the Smoke was coming out of the chimney and Pythagoras (already inside) was drawing the shadows of the window frames on the bright polished floor where the flies played.

To try to map our tomorrows with the help of data supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete nonexistence.

The streets were deserted as usually happens in the gaps of history, in the terrains vagues of time.

As he completed his yawn, he reflected that his body was much too big and healthy for him: had he been all shrivelled up and flaccid and pestered by petty diseases, he might have been more at peace with himself. Baron Munchausen's horse-decorpitation story.