The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page B

beauty. He talks a long time, he is carrying on about it. In his enthusiasm for the imaginary building he fails to notice that the people are becoming bored and restless. They are not interested in imaginary buildings and are beginning to wander off. He continues to talk, but the crowd has drifted away and he is alone in the field.
    Attempting to pick a pencil up from the floor I make it roll under the bed.
    Diamond has written eleven novels, in addition to teaching. Eleven long novels, eleven multigenerational sagas , and a volume of literary criticism. The newspaper calls her a literary powerhouse. She is a literary industrial-scale waste producer. Obviously she is using some kind of trick , you can’t write that many novels unless you have a trick. For example, the same novel is being written over and over. That is what most of them do. They find a scheme, a trick really, and then use it over and over.
    People like Diamond, the so-called literary powerhouses, are the number one preventers. Their example, and the malice and envy it stirs up, has been the biggest prevention and barrier of them all, absolutely destroying the aloofness and aesthetic calm I struggled to attain, essentially and repeatedly wiping out the equanimous mental state in which I might have worked with complete indifference. Instead I was forced to abandon that Apollonian indifference, was forced constantly to peer around me, to keep track of what people were saying about me, or what I thought they were saying, to figure out what they were thinking. I constantly had to prick up my ears in order to eavesdrop on what they were saying, and be consumed by rancor on discovering they had not even noticed.
    A state of Apollonian indifference—that is the exact opposite of the one in which Meininger worked at the end. Meininger at the end had turned his creative impulse into an exact response mechanism to the vulgar tastes of his affluent public. He didn’t have to peer around to discover what they were thinking, because he was thinking the same thing.
    “The barrel of a pistol is for me at the moment a source of relatively agreeable thoughts,” Nietzsche wrote in a letter.
    Roy was part schnauzer and had a moustache like Nietzsche’s.
    I once put the barrel in my mouth to see what it felt like.
    Hemingway also.
    When I have the pistol in my hand, I just wave it around.
    There was once a story as big as the world. It had a beginning, middle, and end. Everyone recognized himself as a character in that story, knew his place in the plot. It gave meaning to life, though no one thought of it in that way, as having that role, because no one could get outside of the story and look at it. They couldn’t know that it was just a story.
    “The total character of the world is for all eternity chaos,” Nietzsche also said. A consequence of the failure of that enormous story.
    The world today is everything that is the case. It is the sum of all facts. A story is a counter fact.
    There are no stories in the world.
    The goal, Moll says, is inner peace.
    Some things are becoming clear. It is becoming clear that I have to make a stand, for one. Or take a stand, or both. It is becoming clear that I must make a statement, for two. Lacking a statement, it is impossible to take (or make) a stand. Without a statement people have no idea what you are doing. Your statement is designed to clarify that, shed fresh light on it, situate it in relation to its origins, to what you hope to accomplish by it, and so forth. Without a statement your stand will appear arbitrary and stupid. On the other hand, statements minus stands are the sure marks of a blowhard. For me now to make a statement and then fail to take a stand is out of the question.
    It was easy when all one had to do when making a statement was offend against good taste, when just making a statement provoked a stand. That was possible when there was still good taste, a code of aristocratic honor and after that a code of