Roth, Philip_The Dying Animal_( by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Philip Roth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0099422697
Published: 2010-10-22T18:30:00+00:00

You feel it and you get a sense of this other-world fauna, something from the sea. As though it were related to the oyster or the octopus or the squid, a creature from miles down and eons back. Normally you see the vagina and you can open it with your hands, but in her case it bloomed open, the cunt on its own emerging from its hiding place. The inner lips get extruded outward, swell outward, and it's very arousing, that slimy, silky swollenness, stimulating to touch and stimulating to see. The secret ecstatically exposed.

Schiele would have given his eyeteeth to paint it. Picasso would have turned it into a guitar.

You can almost come by watching her come. She would turn her eyes away when it was like that for her. Her eyes turned up and you saw only the whites, and that was something to watch as well. All of her was something to watch. Whatever the agitation from the jealousy, whatever the humiliation and the endless uncertainty, I was always proud of making her come.

Sometimes you don't even worry if a woman comes or not: it just happens, the woman seems to take care of it on her own and it's not your responsibility. It's not an issue with other women; the situation is enough, there's enough excitement and it's never in question. But with Consuela, yes, it was definitely a responsibility that was mine, and always, always it was a matter of pride.

I have a ridiculous forty-two-year-old son—ridiculous because he is my son, imprisoned in his marriage because of my escape from mine and the significance that's had for him and the protest against my personal life he's obstinately made of his own. Ridiculousness is the price he pays for having been molded too early into a Telemachus, heroic little defender of the untended mother. Yet, during my three years of off-and-on depression, I was a thousand times more ridiculous than Kenny. What do I mean by ridiculous? What is ridiculousness? Relinquishing one's freedom voluntarily—that is the definition of ridiculousness. If your freedom is taken from you by force, needless to say you're not ridiculous, except to the one who has forcibly taken it. But whoever gives his freedom away, whoever is dying to give it away, enters the realm of the ridiculous that brings the most famous of lonesco's plays to mind and is a source of comedy throughout literature. The one who is free may be mad, stupid, repellent, in misery just because he is free, but he is not ridiculous. He has dimension as a being. I was myself ridiculous enough with Consuela. But during the years I was captive to the monotonous melodrama of the loss of her? My son, shaped by his contempt for my example, determined to be responsible where I was derelict, unable to free himself from anyone, beginning with me—my son may not wish to know any better, but I go about the world insisting that I do, and still the extraneous creeps in.

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