Resistance - Hardcover

Lopez, Barry

 
9781400042203: Resistance
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400042208 ISBN 13: 9781400042203
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Follows the stories of nine individuals who resist the mainstream only to catch the government's attention, from a traveling carpenter who commits an act of violence to a blind Vietnam veteran's coming to terms with the loss of his innocence. 30,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barry Lopez is the author of eight previous works of fiction and six works of nonfiction. His stories and essays appear regularly in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Orion, and the Georgia Review. In addition to the National Book Award, he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science foundations. He lives in western Oregon.

Alan Magee is an artist of international repute whose works reside in many public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Portrait Gallery. He is represented by Forum Gallery in New York and Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1
Apocalypse

I remember the morning the letter came. I left the apartment Mary and I were renting on rue Lepic and strolled in the sunshine up to rue des Abbesses. The old sidewalks were freshly washed, the air was still cool. My regular way was to get a morning paper, a brioche, and black coffee and then sit in the little park by the Métro station and read. Sometimes I would walk up Yvonne-le-Tac to the terraced park below Sacré-Coeur instead, but that morning I had that fistful of mail.

We took the apartment partly because it was right around the corner from the cemetery in Montmartre. Mary was writing an essay about the cemeteries of France for Harper's, a history of how they had been disrupted and desecrated by revolution, by the expansion of cities, and of course by the Church. The Cimetière de Montmartre was palpable, a reassurance to her. Many of its graves had been destroyed in 1789, the bodies treated like so much trash by those who hated royalty and aristocracy, and by the hoodlums who always attach themselves to social change. But Degas is buried there, the composer Berlioz, Nijinsky, and her favorite, Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone.

It was not these ghosts, though, nor the untroubled allées colonnaded by plane trees, that calmed her. It was that the stillness sheltered an aggregation of mute evidence, apparent throughout the city in its small-scale neighborhoods, that our history is finally human. Regimes and ideologies-Tamerlane's Mongol empire, Caligula's Rome, Stalin's Soviet Union-whatever their horrors, whatever afflictions they deliver, pass away. What endures is simple devotion to the question of having been alive. The cemetery comforted her because it was not about death but about transcendent joie de vivre.

One day she returned to the apartment and read me an inscription she'd copied from a gravestone. Ma gracieuse épouse . . . A husband had expressed his love and regard for his wife of fifty-one years in a few bare, unself-conscious sentences. Mary sat with the piece of paper in her hand by the open window, watching patrons in the bistro across the street talking and hailing friends passing on the sidewalk, and turned a shoulder so I could not see her crying.

Her tears, I thought, were over a kind of loss we had talked about in recent weeks, the way the fabric of love scorches, no matter how vigilant we are. The intricate nature of the emotions men and women exchange made the two of us sense our own endangerment when we disagreed; but we had also been speaking of the ephemeral love one can feel toward a complete stranger, for the way they step off a sidewalk or a father hands his daughter her gloves at the door. Bound together in these many ways we are still swept suddenly out of each other's lives, by tides we don't recognize and tides we do. The sensation of loss, the weight of grief, the feeling of being naked to a menace are hard to separate. The fear of an outside force at work makes us reticent in love, and suspicious. We identify enemies.

The instruments of discord show up daily in our lives, of course, demanding our attention. The unscrupulous peer, the woman on the make, the purblind enforcer, the self-anointed official and his cronies, people with a craving for confrontation. We are foolish to give any of them what they ask for, and we betray ourselves and anyone toward whom we have ever felt tender by not sending such people immediately on their way.

The first two pieces of mail I opened that morning were letters from museums, one in Rouen, the other in Orléans. At the time, I was trying to assemble work by European artists which had been shaped by their experience with le Maquis, the French underground, for a show to open at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then to travel around the United States. The communications were about insuring the works the museums were lending. I read each one with relief as, sentence by sentence, they eliminated the risks on my part. I should have known-the consideration.

The rest of the mail was personal-friends and family, some items of business for Mary. The one letter I put off reading sat all the while on the green slats of the bench while I finished perusing the paper. The envelope had the look of something you might be sent by the Internal Revenue Service, carrying news of an irregularity in your filings, a notice of additional tax due, perhaps a penalty. But the letter was from another federal authority, a branch of our government but a few years old though already monolithic. Its special charge was to make the nation safe from attack by a great array of vaguely defined "terrorists," domestic and foreign. This work it pursued with religious fervor and special exemptions from the Department of Justice.

I read the letter twice, concealed it in the half fold of Le Monde, and walked back to the apartment. Mary was in her robe, making breakfast. I handed her the letter and took her place at the stove.

She read it in the chair by the window.

"I will never get used to this hyperbolic crap," she said, folding the letter back up. "Every fascist step they take, you expect people to laugh in their faces, just take their toys away, you know-the guns and the new laws. Do they just not register the suspicion, the resentment in half the streets in the world?"

She turned abruptly to look out the window, as if responding to someone down there on the sidewalk. Incomprehension, exhaustion, fear passed behind her eyes. She let the letter drop to the floor as if it were an advertising circular.

"I can't believe we have to take people like this seriously, Owen."

I put breakfast on the table, refreshed her coffee, and came back with my laptop. I began e-mailing a loose network of people I'd been in regular touch with since the change of administration took place in our country. We communicated through a series of codes and used electronic back doors which delayed exchanges, but by mid-morning I'd confirmed what I had suspected. The letter had gone to everyone.

It came from Inland Security, the group of people we had come to call the Idiots of Light, for the way they are dazzled by their god. Their ranks include people who celebrate the insults of advertising and the deceptions of public relations campaigns as paths to redemption. The letter also originated with the Division of Economic Equality, those in the Department of Commerce we call the Lottery Enforcers, who argue for the calming and salutary effect of regular habits of purchase. And it bore the gold, eagle-talon insignia of the Delta Confederacy, the contingent of citizen groups that reports to the education staff of the Office of Inland Security.

The letter's authors informed us of the nation's persisting need for democratic reform. Each of us was told of widespread irritation with our work, and the government's desire to speak with us.

The authority behind the letter-two crisply printed cream-colored sheets of laid paper with signatures in red ballpoint-made my breath shudder. I sat watching for incoming e-mail. We hadn't anticipated this, not exactly this frontal an approach.

After university I and my friends had scattered abroad-to Brussels, Caracas, Sapporo, Melbourne, Jakarta, any promising corner. Two or three went deep upriver on the Orinoco or out onto the plateaus of Tibet and Ethiopia. We had come to regard the work of writers and artists in our country as too compliant, as failing to expose or indict the escalating nerve of corporate institutions, the increasing connivance of government with business, or the cowardice of those reporting the news. In the 1970s and '80s, we thought of our artists and writers as people gardening their reputations, while the families of our neighborhoods disintegrated into...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400042208
ISBN 13 
9781400042203
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
163
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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