1.
He travelled
to Japan but he didn’t see any geishas. He travelled to Kenya
but he didn’t
see any giraffes. When he opened the book, he was surprised to find
inside it another book. After
a bad night in room 536, the hotel pool swallowed him like a blue
mouth swallowing a tiny
sleeping pill.
2.
It is
hard to rip up a photograph with a face in it. In the tiniest torn-up
piece, the face is
still intact. The face lies smiling up from the bottom of the wastebasket,
and then smiles as it falls
out of the garbage truck onto a lawn, and then smiles as it drifts
slowly across the city back to
your door.
3.
Young
people from the less powerful country came over to study the language
of the
more powerful neighboring country. The questionnaire found that,
within a small margin of error,
such-and-such percentage of women prefer to be on their knees while
performing such-and-such
sexual acts.
4.
She
felt like crying when she read in the paper that déjà
vu was a chemical reaction in the
body and not a magical window into existences previous and future
at all. The oval mirror
hanging by a black ribbon above the mantel reflected part of the
dark sofa and the little light-
bomb of the lamp.
5.
The
Russian exile with blue eyes admitted — not without a certain
pride — that he had
an accent in every language: A Russian accent speaking German, a
German accent speaking
Russian, an indeterminate accent speaking English, and an English
accent when speaking
indeterminately.
6.
The
language liquefaction. Sexy attempts at traction. A smattering of
satisfaction. He
held the word up to the light like a spectacularly faceted chit.
She wondered if it were true what
she had read, that when one speaks a foreign language, one becomes,
briefly, an exemplar of that
foreign tongue.
“What
you say sounds reasonable enough,” said the man, “but
I refuse
to
be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.”
7.
The
silent majority stared hard at the vocal minority. More and more,
there were eyes
closing as velvet curtains descended upon screens. More and more,
there were hands turning on
electric lights in the daytime. More and more, there were cosmopolitans
carefully examining
tropical flowers in the dark.
8.
The
young people from the less powerful country did not stop to admire
the complicated
beauty of their new language’s intricate grammar. They made
neat vocabulary lists in cheap
notebooks, and in their own language made fun of the professor’s
hair, glasses, clothing, shoes,
and laugh.
9.
In Paris
the American girl speaking French began almost imperceptibly to
bat her
eyelashes. In St. Paul the German boy speaking English had the urge
to fill silences almost before
they began. One of the most marvelous memories of her life, she
said, was of having déjà vu of
having had déjà vu.
10.
He travelled
to France but he didn’t see any existentialists. He travelled
to Italy but he
didn’t see dolce far niente. He travelled to China but he
didn’t see any panda bears. He travelled
to California but he didn’t see any surfers. Nevertheless
his shell collection, with every vacation,
grew.