What’s sacred to me? thought Fate. The vague pain I feel at the passing of my mother? An understanding of what can’t be fixed? Or the kind of pang in my stomach I feel when I look at this woman? And why do I feel a pang, if that’s what it is, when she looks at me and not when her friend looks at me? Because her friend is nowhere near as beautiful, thought Fate. Which seems to suggest that what’s sacred to me is beauty, a pretty girl with perfect features. And what if all of a sudden the most beautiful actress in Hollywood appeared in the middle of this big, repulsive restaurant, would I still feel a pang each time my eyes surreptitiously met this girl’s or would the sudden appearance of a superior beauty, a beauty enhanced by recognition, relieve the pang, diminish her beauty to ordinary levels, the beauty of a slightly odd girl out to have a good time on a weekend night with three slightly peculiar men and a woman who basically seems like a hooker?
Mike Magnuson told me I should read Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Mag’s never recommended a book to me before, so I figured he was sincere. I’ve read about critics, and boxing and race, and heard the internal monologue of a crazy man trying to live a normal life, and right now, in the early 400s of the nearly 900-page book, am being somehow simultaneously stunned and growing jaded — what the author hoped to achieve, I think — by the ongoing, detailed litany of the hundreds of women killed in a small Mexican border city. Maybe it’s a masterpiece. I don’t know. Like Fate divining the sacred, I have more questions than answers — though Fate’s questions seem to be his answers.
There’s a passage a couple of hundred pages into the book in which the crazy man wonders at the learned people who “are afraid to take on the great, imperfect torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: They want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no real interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
This is a fight.
